Football season's home games attract tens of thousands of guests to the Notre Dame campus to salute Touchdown Jesus every fall. Now, President Barack Obama with the aid of a coterie Catholic Bishops, is attracting a crowd of a different mindset.
The anti-abortion, anti-birthcontrol gun crazies are apparently going to be out in force in South Bend. For more of the story, read below the fold:
Notre Dame’s unwanted guests arriving weeks in advance for Obama speech
By Wayne Madsen
Online Journal Contributing Writer
May 4, 2009, 00:21
WMR has learned from sources in South Bend, Indiana, that the town and campus have become a magnet for every sort of right-wing opposition group to President Barack Obama, including violence-prone anti-abortionists and pro-gun rights activists.
Obama is scheduled to deliver the commencement address at and receive an honorary degree from Notre Dame on May 17.
Already, an anti-abortion group called the Center for Bio-ethical Reform (CBR) is flying a plane trailing a banner with a photograph of a dead fetus over the Notre Dame campus. CBR has also brought large billboard trucks into South Bend that display photos of dismembered fetuses.
The good news here is that if these fools are circling Notre Dame with their plane and big trucks, they are no harassing the already stressed girls and women and their families seeking reproductive care and the employees and physicians at clinics and offices where this care is available.
The plane circling over the campus has drawn almost unanimous negative responses from students and faculty.
WMR is told by South Bend sources that the anti-abortion convert to Catholicism, Randall Terry, is the actual ringleader of the group of anti-Obama protesters who are gathering by the hour in South Bend.
WMR has also learned that the South Bend Police Department is complaining that it does not have the resources to provide the necessary security for the presidential visit. Although Notre Dame campus security will supplement Secret Service protection, there is a fear among Notre Dame officials that Terry will obtain some difficult-to-obtain commencement tickets and give them to his most radical supporters to stage a disruption during Obama’s speech.
The good news here is that protesting at this event is not going to be looked on kindly by the students and their parents and most of the faculty. Or the Secret Service. These agents are very familiar with the insane lengths that some of the antiabortion and gun nut criminal types will go to to attempt to force their views on others.
Protesters outside of and on the campus will not be permitted to get anywhere close to the president, WMR is told by Notre Dame sources.
Notre Dame faculty sources also worry that Notre Dame President Father John Jenkins, who has incurred the wrath of the anti-abortion camp by inviting Obama to Notre Dame, may be subjected to violence off-campus.
I think that an insane attack on Father Jenkins, one of the many good Catholics, is a legitimate fear. The good Father, unlike the former Hitler Youth Pope and our president, is not surrounded by armed guards. Perhaps he should be for the next few months.
To make matters worse for Notre Dame, it is being reported that there is a case of suspected swine flu on campus. With anti-Obama protesters from different parts of the country in town, that news will come as little relief for those public health officials wishing to prevent a national pandemic.
And with Bishop Terry and all the NRA pigs reported to be coming to the campus, it will be a miracle if swine flu doesn't breakout there!!!
(Blockquoted portion previously published in the Wayne Madsen Report.)
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Wayne Madsen is a Washington, DC-based investigative journalist and nationally-distributed columnist. He is the editor and publisher of the Wayne Madsen Report