I just home last night after five days out as an over-the-road trucker
when my wife,
Joanne, told me that we had gotten a letter from Clayton Waagner saying
he had been
returned to Cincinnati to face a trial on weapons charges.
But first let me tell you a little about Joanne and how she became my
wife. When she was
13 years old and living in the south Pacific nation of New Zealand,
the land of her birth,
I firebombed Planned Parenthood of Cincinnati, and Martin Haskell's
third trimester abortuary.
You may recall that Haskell is the inventor of the partial birth abortion
procedure. The strike
closed his mill for six months. PP was destroyed. Some
time after they relocated I planted
an explosive device there. In the meantime, they had given Joan
Andrews (now Joan Bell)
five years for "aggravated burglary" for her preannounced attempt to
pull the plug out of a vacuum
aspiration machine to keep them from ripping the arms and legs from
baby humans. This occurred in
Pensacola, Florida. I thought to myself, well, if they're going
to treat a woman like Joan Andrews
like that, besides all the babies they kill, I'll just go down there
and blow them up.
So I took a week of vacation from my job with the U.S. Postal Service
and packed my car with
mercury fulminate (for fabricating blasting caps), astrolite (world's
most powerful non-nuclear explosive)
and CTA (a binary explosive sometimes used in covert operations).
I was figuring on "going postal"
on them.
They discovered my plot and had the building under surveillance.
I was given a total of nine and a
half years. When I had been a federal prisoner for about three
years Joanne came to America on a
six month tourist visa. She was 19 at the time. While here,
she befriended some antiabortion movement
people. While at an antiabortion rally before the March for Life
someone handed her the
Prisoners of Christ list. She wrote to a prisoner in the middle
of the list--me. I loved her as soon as
I got that letter, so I wrote right back and asked her to send me a
photo. She immediately sent one,
and when I saw it I loved her even more. We wrote back and forth
and just before I got out,
I asked her to marry me. She took all her money and bought a
one way airline ticket to America, and
we tied the knot. Any day now we are expecting our fifth child
(the second was lost to a miscarriage).
During my many years on the POC list I got mail from 43 states and
5 foreign countries.
To say that the POC list was a source of encouragement and cheer to
me would be a drastic understatement.
So, when Joanne told me, last night, that Clayton was back in Cincinnati
I jumped back in my car
and drove 70 miles back to Cincinnati to visit him for 15 minutes.
I was glad I did. It was time very well
spent, and scripturally spent, too. I love Clayton Waagner.
I want him to live right next door to me
when he gets out. He seemed very cheerful and upbeat, and I hope
he actually was. But I have spent
seven years on the other side of the bars and I can tell you from experience
that when an inmate has you on
the phone or in the visiting room it cheers him up for the moment and
he might want to appear brave so you
don't feel sorry for him.
Who knows how he feels when he returns to his cell? Only the Lord
knows. Still, I think he's actually
taking it pretty well. You may not live within a 70 mile drive,
but maybe you can write to him.
What are we to think of Clay's checkered past, including his mistakes
before his crusade for the preborn?
Nothing. If Clay tells us he's a believer in our Lord and Savior,
Jesus Christ, and that he believes his sins
have been forgiven by the same, I have no reason to doubt him.
And I'm not naive about such things.
Don't think I didn't see cases during my 7 years of other inmates claiming
religious conversions to better
their positions, and don't think I can't discern such phonies.
Furthermore, do you think anyone who
has ever been on the list is without sin? We just happen to KNOW
things about Clay's past, that's all.
What are we to think about Clay's alleged conduct, for example, his
alleged bank robberies, during
his antiabortion crusade? There aren't really any hard questions
concerning the abortion issue,
including the question of the justice of the use of force. There
are two factors which, if you always bear
them in mind, will always answer every abortion question easily.
The first is that a preborn baby is
a human being just like any other, so anything that applies to any
innocent human being applies equally to
this preborn baby. The second factor is that whenever those in
power (note: I have deliberately
refrained from calling them "the government") cooperate with those
who slay the innocent then the crime
goes beyond ordinary murder. It is, as U.S. Attorney General
Jackson said during the
Nuremberg War crimes tribunal, "a war crime and a crime against humanity."
The former Attorney
General used those exact words referring specifically to abortions
performed on Jewish and eastern
European women during Nazi rule. They took those abortionists
out and put ropes around their necks
and strangled them to death.
So preborn babies deserve to be defended by whatever means are justified
to defend anyone else,
including the use of force. Since abortion in America today is
a war crime, an unjust act of war, therefore,
anyone willing to resort to martial means to defend the
preborn, such as a member of the Army of God,
or any covert operative, is justified in resorting to any means which
has been used by any soldier fighting
on the side where justice lies in any past wars. During World
War II Corrie Ten Boom and her family
fraudulently obtained food stamps from the Nazis to feed the Jewish
refugees they had hidden in their attic.
It is easy for us, today, looking back in retrospect, to see
that Corrie's actions were just. But you can be
sure that if any compromising, moderate, lukewarm Christians knew about
it, some would have condemned
Corrie with such admonitions as, "you have to obey the law of the land,"
and "you have to be obedient to
civil authorities--the Bible says so!" Cowards take verses of
scripture like that out of context
to hide behind them and condemn the tenderhearted activist and the
soldier who loves the Lord because
such false condemnation seems to excuse them from sticking their necks
out and risking their lives or
freedom to defend the innocent and to fulfill the justice that
a righteous God demands.
Clayton Waagner allegedly robbed banks as a covert operative fighting
on the side where justice lies.
Do you think General George Washington never appropriated supplies
from the countryside without the
consent of the donor during the Revolutionary War? Do you think
David, king of Israel, never did likewise
as he and his band were fugitives from Saul? And did not God's
people plunder their former captives,
the Egyptians, in the Book of Exodus, and did they not do it at the
Lord's command? Did they not plunder
their enemies again, hundreds of years later, in the Book of Ester?
Like another commentator, I, also,
heard reports that when Clay took someone's car he was very apologetic
and gave them large sums of money as compensation.
Sometimes, during a time of war, especially behind enemy lines, "a
man's gotta do what a man's
gotta do" (with all do respect to Shelley Shannon, in whose case we
must say a woman's gotta do what...etc.).
During my heyday in covert operations I worked for the USPS so I was
able to finance my own missions.
Also, I was somewhat anonymous. The Feds knew it was me that
was doing it, and I knew that they
knew it, but that they couldn't prove it. During the year that
Clay was an escaped fugitive he didn't have
the personal means to finance his missions, and they knew who he was.
About a week ago I received a call asking why I thought Clay wasn't
on the POC list. I told him it
was because Clay wasn't pretty enough. I told Clay about it and
he said he had heard that he would never
be put on it and that it really hurt. I assured him that there
were those of us who appreciated him and loved him
Ironically, unbeknownst to me, he had been put on the list only a few
hours earlier. I plan on visiting him again
as soon as possible and hope to be the one to tell him that MTTU and
the POC has done the right thing.
I want to express my own appreciation for your putting him on the list,
and I hope you'll keep him there,
because a list of antiabortion prisoners of war that doesn't include
him is incomplete and like a baseball hall
of fame that doesn't include Pete Rose. Keep up the good work.
Yours-in Christ, John Brockhoeft, AOG
You can e-mail John Brockhoeft by clicking here.
The Prison Letters of John
Brockhoeft
Hebrews 12:29
For our God is a consuming fire.
Psalm 3:3
But thou, O Lord, art a shield
for me;
my glory, and the lifter up
of mine head.
To contact
e-mail: Glory2Jesus@ArmyofGod.com
Telephone 1-757-204-4454
Or write to: Rev. Donald Spitz
Pro-Life Virginia
P.O. Box 2876
Chesapeake VA 23327
