I should give this a title
You know that fat guy, dressed in black, who goes to Pioneer Square, wears this beret, has a sandwich board on him telling you that everyone in a wide variety of categories is going to go Hell, waves a poster of a giant bloodied fetus? Or maybe you saw him marching at the front of a Gay Pride Parade, or — probably his main location for such things, as per numerous law suits — in front of an Abortion Clinic, where he has been known to take photographs of women exiting or entering for the purpose of posting on the Internet.
Paul deParrie has passed away.
I flick around the Internet, and go his message board, and see that someone has already written this:
Paul’s dead and Jesus spits upon his grave. Good riddance to another foul stench terrorist.
I do not know if he is, um, technically a terrorist or not. He is, as I’ve noted before, a source that the news media will go to if they need a quote condoing violence against Abortion providers, after a quip fromthe mainline anti-abortion (pro-life if you must) organizations who will as quickly as possible condemn it all.
But others, like Paul deParrie editor in chief of Life Advocate Magazine in Portland, Oregon, said: “I think it is wonderful any time an aboriton clinic is closed for whatever reason. If the toilet backs up and closes the place, that is great. I think it is great when babies’ lives are saved through whatever means. I am not going to try to condemn somebody that God won’t condemn.” The bombing was perhaps the most violent act — at least in its potential for destruction since four killings at abortion clinics in 1994.
That’s the New York Times, circa January 1997, and is par for the course for deParrie’s contribution to the national dialouge.
I have gotten to know the man a bit, and have some sort of bizarre relationship with him. deParrie once posted, quite correctly, that I was avoiding him… something I’ve done regularly and did just a couple weeks ago, actually. He called me a snob. This was from a protest he and his friends held on September 11, 2002, across from Pioneer Square with a year-old memorial to 9/11. For that, I shrugged, allowed myself to have a couple conversations with him, and generally avoided him nonetheless. There was this time where they shouted out toward me, with a large group heckling them. I was obliged to yell something back at them, and thus went “Just remember — THERE IS NO GOD!!”, which for whatever reason the crowd found “ballsy”.
Or I could go with, “Obey the Buddha!”, which I did once when his son-in-law, a less frightening sort who seems to share a similar sense of humour as I, pulled the same stunt with me. But he I once had regular weekly conversations with.
Never mind. Paul deParrie is dead. His niece, who has for the past decade vowed to counter-act her uncle’s work by working with Planned Parenthood and assorted pro-choice work, can either keep going by way of eulogizing what he stood for, or do whatever.