Randall Terry

Based on Wikipedia: Randall Terry

In October 2024, viewers tuning into Jimmy Kimmel Live and The View witnessed something unprecedented: graphic photographs of aborted fetuses interrupting their regular programming. ABC ran disclaimers before and after, practically apologizing to their audience, but they had no choice. Federal communications law required them to air the ads unedited. The man who had orchestrated this moment of prime-time chaos was Randall Terry, a seventy-year-old activist who had spent four decades perfecting the art of forcing Americans to confront what they would rather ignore.

This was not the work of a fringe figure easily dismissed. Terry was the Constitution Party's presidential nominee, which meant the Federal Communications Commission classified him as a "legally qualified candidate." That designation triggered a rule dating back to 1934: broadcasters cannot censor or edit political advertisements from qualified candidates. Terry had exploited this loophole before, attempting to air similar ads during Super Bowl XLVI in 2012. The networks found ways to refuse that time. By 2024, he had figured out how to make refusal impossible.

The Origins of Operation Rescue

To understand how Randall Terry became one of America's most polarizing activists, you have to go back to 1986, when a twenty-seven-year-old Bible school graduate chained himself to a sink inside an abortion clinic. It was his first arrest. It would not be his last. Over the next four decades, Terry would be arrested more than forty times for various acts of civil disobedience.

In 1987, Terry founded Operation Rescue, an organization that would fundamentally change how anti-abortion activists operated. The group's signature tactic was the blockade. Supporters would physically block the entrances to abortion clinics, preventing patients and staff from entering. These were not symbolic protests. They were attempts to physically shut down medical facilities, and they often succeeded, at least temporarily.

The blockades drew massive media attention. At their peak, Operation Rescue events attracted thousands of participants willing to be arrested. The strategy was borrowed directly from the civil rights movement of the 1960s, a parallel Terry embraced explicitly. Just as lunch counter sit-ins had forced Americans to witness segregation in action, clinic blockades were designed to force confrontation with abortion in the most visceral way possible.

Terry led Operation Rescue until 1991. By then, the legal consequences had begun to mount.

Courtrooms and Bankruptcy

In 1994, the National Organization for Women, commonly known as NOW, brought a class-action lawsuit against several anti-abortion leaders, including Terry. The case, NOW v. Scheidler, reached the Supreme Court. The plaintiffs argued that clinic blockades constituted a form of racketeering, the same legal framework used to prosecute organized crime. They sought compensation for the business losses clinics had suffered.

Terry settled out of court with NOW. Then he promptly filed for bankruptcy to avoid paying.

This maneuver so infuriated Senator Charles Schumer of New York that he proposed an amendment to pending bankruptcy legislation. The amendment would have specifically prevented abortion opponents from using bankruptcy protection to escape court-ordered payments. The amendment did not make it into the final bill, but Terry did not escape entirely unscathed. In 1998, NOW managed to seize more than twenty-five thousand frequent flyer miles from Terry's accounts to help satisfy the judgment.

That same year, Terry was a named defendant in another Supreme Court case, Madsen v. Women's Health Center. The justices ruled that buffer zones around clinics were constitutional, a decision that limited how close protesters could get to clinic entrances. The ruling represented a significant legal setback for the confrontational tactics Terry had pioneered.

End-of-Life Battles

Terry's activism extended beyond abortion clinics to hospital rooms where families faced agonizing decisions about life support. In 1990, he helped organize protests outside the Missouri hospital where Nancy Cruzan lay in a persistent vegetative state. Cruzan's case became a landmark right-to-die case when the Supreme Court ruled that while patients have a constitutional right to refuse medical treatment, states can require clear evidence of the patient's wishes before removing life support.

Fifteen years later, Terry was back in the news for similar reasons. The Terri Schiavo case had become a national flashpoint, pitting her husband, who wanted to remove her feeding tube, against her parents, who wanted to keep her alive. Terry threw himself into the fight, joining protesters outside Schiavo's Florida hospice. The case became so politically charged that Congress passed emergency legislation attempting to intervene, and President George W. Bush flew back from vacation to sign it.

Terry's involvement in the Schiavo case led him to target Florida State Senator James E. King, a Republican who had tried to block legislation that would have kept Schiavo alive. In 2006, Terry ran against King in the Republican primary. His campaign tactics were unconventional, to put it mildly.

Terry paid for forty-three thousand robocalls featuring a professional impersonator of Bill Clinton, the former Democratic president, endorsing King. The calls included disclaimers like "Hello friend, Bill Clinton here—not really!" but the intent was clear: to damage King among Republican voters by associating him with a Democratic president. The gambit failed. King won the primary with more than two-thirds of the vote.

The Murder of George Tiller

On the morning of May 31, 2009, Dr. George Tiller was serving as an usher at his church in Wichita, Kansas, when a man walked up and shot him to death. Tiller was one of the few physicians in America who performed late-term abortions, and he had long been a target of anti-abortion activists. His clinic had been bombed in 1985. He had been shot in both arms in 1993. For years, he had worn a bulletproof vest.

Terry's response was immediate and incendiary. On the same day as the murder, he released a video calling President Obama and pro-choice politicians "child killers." He called Tiller a "mass murderer" who "reaped what he sowed." He expressed regret not that Tiller was dead, but that Tiller had not received "a trial of a jury of his peers and a proper execution."

The backlash was swift. Operation Rescue, the organization Terry had founded but no longer led, released a statement specifically disavowing any connection to him. They criticized his statement that Tiller's murder had "the potential to propel us more quickly to our goal." The Albany Times-Union accused Terry of undermining the credibility of the "generally peaceful" anti-abortion movement.

Terry's comments illustrated a recurring pattern: his willingness to say things that even his allies found too extreme.

Notre Dame and Presidential Politics

In 2009, the University of Notre Dame invited President Barack Obama to deliver the commencement address. Terry objected. Notre Dame is one of the most prominent Catholic universities in America, and Obama supported abortion rights. In Terry's view, this combination was intolerable.

In an interview with the university newspaper, The Observer, Terry promised to turn the commencement into "a circus." On May 1, 2009, he was arrested on the Notre Dame campus for violating a no-trespassing order. He posted a two-hundred-fifty-dollar bond and was released the same day. In a statement released to a Christian news service, Terry compared Notre Dame's invitation to Obama to Judas's betrayal of Jesus Christ.

Terry's presidential ambitions were perhaps his most audacious political moves. In 2012, he ran in the Democratic primaries against incumbent President Obama. This was not a quixotic protest candidacy operating at the margins. Terry appeared on the ballot in Alaska, Missouri, New Hampshire, and Oklahoma. In Oklahoma, he won 18 percent of the vote and carried twelve counties, including the entire panhandle region. He was awarded two delegates.

The campaign's centerpiece was an advertisement featuring graphic photographs of aborted fetuses, which Terry attempted to air during Super Bowl XLVI. The networks refused, citing rules about equal time. The Democratic National Committee released a statement declaring that Terry was not a legitimate candidate and should be forbidden the privileges given to other candidates. The Federal Election Commission disagreed, at least on the technical question of his candidacy.

The 2012 campaign also produced one of the stranger moments in American political history. During a debate, a performance artist named Vermin Supreme—who campaigns wearing a boot on his head and promises free ponies for all Americans—sprinkled glitter over Terry's head while declaring that he was "turning Randall Terry gay."

The 2024 Campaign

Twelve years later, Terry was back, this time as the Constitution Party's nominee for president. The Constitution Party is a minor party that advocates for strict constitutional originalism and policies guided by biblical principles. It has never come close to winning a presidential election, but it appears on enough state ballots to potentially affect outcomes.

This is precisely what made Terry's 2024 campaign interesting to people who had no ideological sympathy for him whatsoever. The New York Times reported in August 2024 that some Democratic Party donors and operatives were quietly assisting Terry's ballot access efforts. Their goal was to promote his campaign among pro-life voters, hoping to siphon votes from Donald Trump and help Democratic nominee Kamala Harris.

Not all Constitution Party state affiliates supported Terry. Nevada and Utah rejected his nomination, instead backing convention opponent Joel Skousen. Terry had made his nomination contingent on Stephen Broden, a pastor from Texas, receiving the vice presidential nomination. The party complied.

The campaign's most visible achievement was those ABC advertisements, the ones that prompted disclaimers and warnings. The ads compared celebrities who supported abortion rights to Nazis. They were designed to be impossible to ignore, and they succeeded.

Beyond Abortion

While abortion has always been Terry's central cause, his activism has expanded over time. In 2013, he appeared on an episode of MTV's True Life and advocated for criminalizing all forms of birth control. "Do we want to make the pill illegal? Yes," he said. "Do we want to make the IUD illegal? Yes. The morning after pill? Yes. The patch? Yes. Anything that's a human pesticide, they all have to be made illegal. A woman has to go to jail if she kills her baby."

This position places Terry far outside the mainstream of even the anti-abortion movement, most of which draws a distinction between contraception and abortion. The Catholic Church, to which Terry converted in 2006, opposes artificial contraception but does not generally advocate for criminal penalties.

Terry produces a television program called Randall Terry: The Voice of Resistance, which airs on The Walk TV network. The show provides a platform for his views on abortion, religion, and politics.

A Complicated Family

Terry was raised in Rochester, New York, the son of public school teachers. He dropped out of high school, hitchhiked around the country, returned home to work various jobs, and eventually attended Elim Bible Institute, graduating in 1981. He later earned degrees from Empire State College and Norwich University.

In the early 1980s, Terry married Cindy Dean, whom he had met in Bible school. In 1985, he encountered a woman who had given birth to her second child in prison and was planning to abort her third pregnancy. Terry persuaded her to continue the pregnancy, and a daughter named Tila was born. In 1987, Cindy and Randall had their own daughter, Faith. In 1988, they took in Tila, then three years old, along with her siblings Jamiel, eight, and Ebony, twelve, as foster children. All three were biracial; their mother was white. Terry adopted the two younger children in 1994.

The family's story did not proceed smoothly. Ebony left home at sixteen in 1991 and was never adopted. She later converted to Islam, a religion Terry has described as composed of "murderers" and "terrorists." Tila was banned from Terry's home after becoming pregnant outside of marriage twice by age eighteen.

The most publicly dramatic family rupture involved Jamiel. In 2004, he publicly announced that he was gay and wrote an article for Out Magazine about growing up as the adopted son of one of America's most prominent anti-gay activists. Terry pre-empted the article's publication by writing his own essay, "My Prodigal Son, the Homosexual," in which he blamed Jamiel's homosexuality on his difficult childhood experiences and claimed that much of the Out article was false.

Jamiel's response cut to what he saw as his father's essential hypocrisy: "My father's first and foremost aim is to protect himself. He talks about how I prostitute the family's name, but he's used the fact that he saved my sister from abortion and rescued me from hardship in his speeches and interviews. What's the difference?"

Divorce and Conversion

In 2000, after nineteen years of marriage, Terry divorced Cindy Dean and married Andrea Sue Kollmorgen, his former church assistant. Kollmorgen was approximately twenty-five years old at the time, roughly half Terry's age.

The timing was awkward, to say the least. In his 1995 book, The Judgment of God, Terry had written: "Families are destroyed as a father vents his mid-life crisis by abandoning his wife for a 'younger, prettier model.'" The press noticed the discrepancy. So did Terry's church. The Landmark Church of Binghamton, New York, where Terry had been a member for fifteen years, expelled him. The church had previously censured him for abandoning his wife and children in preparation for divorce and for what it called a "pattern of repeated and sinful relationships and conversations with both single and married women."

Terry's own parents had divorced years earlier, and according to interviews the Washington Post conducted with family members, he had refused to let his children speak with their grandfather for three years afterward.

After being expelled from the Landmark Church, Terry joined the Charismatic Episcopal Church, a denomination established in 1992 that blends charismatic Protestant worship with liturgical traditions. Then, in 2006, after a period of study that began in 2005, Terry converted to Catholicism. He took the confirmation name David Mark.

The conversion allowed Terry to reframe his first marriage. "There were tragic problems that were inherent to the marriage," he said afterward. "According to Catholic doctrine as it has been taught to me, those problems made it an invalid sacrament." In other words, in the eyes of the Catholic Church, his first marriage had never really happened.

By 2006, Terry and Andrea had three sons, with a fourth on the way. Andrea is also an anti-abortion activist.

The Contradictions

Randall Terry's life is a study in contradictions that his critics find damning and his supporters find irrelevant. He preaches against divorce while divorcing. He advocates for family values while some of his children will not speak to him. He condemns what he considers sexual immorality while being censured by his own church for inappropriate relationships. He promotes adoption while banning his adopted daughter from his home.

Yet none of these contradictions have slowed him down or caused him to moderate his public positions. If anything, they seem to have intensified his certainty. From his first arrest in 1986 to his presidential campaign in 2024, Terry has maintained the same essential message: that abortion is murder, that those who support it are complicit in murder, and that virtually any tactic is justified in stopping it.

This unwavering consistency, or rigidity, depending on your perspective, explains both his enduring influence within the anti-abortion movement and his status as a pariah to many outside it. Terry does not seek consensus or try to make his message palatable. He seeks confrontation. He wants you to look at those photographs on your television screen. He wants you to be disturbed.

Whether that strategy has advanced or damaged his cause is a question that partisans on both sides answer differently. What is undeniable is that Randall Terry has spent forty years ensuring that abortion remains impossible for Americans to ignore, using every legal tool available to force his message into spaces where people would rather not hear it. The ABC advertisements of 2024 were simply the latest iteration of a tactic he perfected outside clinics in the 1980s: make people so uncomfortable that they have to respond.