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Brave religious protestors fight devil in Oak Ridge

Brave religious protestors fight devil in Oak Ridge

Last updated on: May 2, 2013 at 10:02 am by tmatt

Brave religious protestors fight devil in Oak Ridge 2013-05-02T10:02:42-04:00 tmatt

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My goal is to write a relatively short post about a very, very long Washington Post story, a Style section story that I urge all GetReligion readers to check out.

As the name implies, the massive 14-part feature entitled “The Prophets of Oak Ridge” is a religion story from start to finish, drenched in biblical references, hymns and personal testimonies. This is the story of three anti-nuclear protestors — 83-year-old Sister Megan Gillespie Rice, 64-year-old Michael Robin Walli and 57-year-old Gregory Irwin Boertje-Obed. The story details their successful attempt to embarrass the U.S. government by breaking into the Oak Ridge National Laboratories in East Tennessee.

Now, if you look up the term hagiography in a dictionary, you will find something like this:

ha·gi·og·ra·phy … noun …

1: biography of saints or venerated persons
2: idealizing or idolizing biography

That’s exactly what we are dealing with here, in this feature that runs 9,000-plus words and is illustrated with cartoonish, yet powerfully iconic, drawings and photos.

Frankly, this is fine with me, seeing as how I am someone who has always been sympathetic to the views of the people who are often called “consistent” pro-lifers, the folks who are opposed to the death penalty, as well as to abortion, who worry about tobacco subsidies in the national budget as well as aid to Planned Parenthood. As I have said many times, my own views were changed by the famous Sojourners issue about abortion in 1980 (specifically the Rev. Jesse Jackson’s piece on legalized abortion as a form of institutionalized racism).

So this story was, for me, totally fascinating. Throw in the fact that I have happily lived in East Tennessee, and plan to return to the Volunteer State sooner or later, and this piece rang lots of bells.

So what is my concern about this one? Well, I do have one major question.

More on that later, after a few clips that establish the tone of the piece — right from the start.

Last summer, in the dead of night, three peace activists penetrated the exterior of Y-12 in Tennessee, supposedly one of the most secure nuclear-weapons facilities in the United States. A drifter, an 82-year-old nun and a house painter. They face trial next week on charges that fall under the sabotage section of the U.S. criminal code. And if they had been terrorists armed with explosives, intent on mass destruction? That nightmare scenario underlies the government’s response to the intrusion. This is the story of two competing worldviews, of conscience vs. court, of fantasy vs. reality, of history vs. the future.

And here is an early passage that establishes the angels vs. demons theme that runs through the whole piece.

It was, the house painter would later recall, as if the Almighty were guiding each step, across 1,000 feet of open field and up an embankment.

By 3 a.m. on Saturday, July 28, 2012, two career peace activists, with eight years jail time between them, and an 82-year-old nun had reached the first obstacle in their two-hour, one-mile hike toward one of the country’s most secure nuclear facilities.

A six-foot chain-link boundary fence bordered a gravel patrol road. Strung along the fence were yellow “No Trespassing” placards threatening a $100,000 fine and up to one year in prison.

The house painter gripped a pair of bolt cutters, fixed the jaws around a link and squeezed. He cut links in three lines, then opened the new flap.

No alarm. No patrol cars.

The nun went through first.

After the two men followed her, they closed the fence with twine, crossed the patrol road and began the 40-degree ascent to the dark crest of the ridge. The crime had started, which meant they were one step closer to justice.

One step closer to rattling the Department of Energy.

One step closer to assailing the nation’s storied nuclear identity.

One step closer to changing their lives and the lives of the people on the other side of the slope — including the first man they would meet once they cut through three more fences and entered the kill zone.

Now, I have been on the religion-news beat long enough to have covered more than my share of U.S. Catholic Bishops Conference debates on the morality of nuclear weapons. I have trailed left-wing pro-lifers into the fields of Eastern Colorado right up to the blinking red security systems around nuclear missile silos. I have interviewed priests who heard agonizing confessions in parishes near Los Alamos.

The one thing I know for sure is that this is a very complex topic and there are very intelligent, faithful believers on both sides of the debate.

However, if you want to hear from people on both sides, this is NOT the story for you. Out of 9,000-plus words, this is as close as one is going to get to hearing human, articulate voices on the other side of the issue:

The activists of Transform Now Plowshares are in West Knoxville in early February, at the Tennessee Valley Unitarian Universalist Church, testifying to the congregation after a Sunday service. Church members ask them how they can claim nonviolence when they destroyed property.

“Maybe the triviality of that destruction comes from a truth that is monstrous,” Sister Megan says. “Those very fences are illegal, and guarding lies and secrecy and corruption and great danger to the world.”

White-haired Lillian Mashburn stands, arms crossed, in the back of the church. She’s thinking of her father, who was an infantryman stationed in the Pacific when Oak Ridge’s uranium fell toward Hiroshima.

“He was saved by that bomb,” Mashburn, a church board member, says after the discussion. “They were told when they landed they would be killed as part of the first wave. … There’s a whole generation of people, most of whom would’ve been dead, who were saved.”

What saves Oak Ridge are the dollars that gush from Washington to East Tennessee.

So other than one Unitarian Universalist on the conservative side of the issue, that’s that.

So what is my big question about this gripping piece?

I have hunted and hunted online and I cannot find any coverage of Sister Megan Gillespie Rice that tells me whether any of her many arrests took place — in true Catholic Worker, Dorothy Day fashion — outside facilities that perform abortions. Perhaps I have missed something.

Still, I wonder if the Post take on this story would have been different, would have been as glowingly positive and uncritical, if this nun and her spiritual brothers had been arrested during acts of symbolic, and slightly destructive, civil disobedience at, well, the clinic of one Dr. Kermit Gosnell.

Just saying.

Oak Ridge National Laboratories

peace activists

Sister Megan Gillespie Rice

The Catholic Worker

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