The Prick OF PortLand DiES!!!

One of his kind will sprout up from the muck to replace him!!

Paul deParrie: The bearer of bad news
Thursday, May 25, 2006

After delivering one last, uncompromising rant, Paul deParrie dropped dead at a Denny's last weekend at the age of 56. The polite, gracious obituary that marked his passing? No one would have been more appalled than deParrie.

DeParrie didn't care for civility and rarely, if ever, spoke of grace. He loved to dress in black. It fit his mood. Before anyone could embrace the good news of the Gospel, he argued, they needed to feel the teeth of its bulldog edition, that we are all "filthy in God's sight."

DeParrie relished being the bearer of bad news, to dole out what he called "righteous" judgment. "It is a large part of my ministry to remind people of the unpleasant facts of the world we have created," he wrote two years ago.

That's putting it mildly. According to deParrie, Christopher Reeve "died without morals and without God." Janet Jackson was "an overpaid, talentless music slut." Because he divorced his wife, Lance Armstrong was a "selfish and self-absorbed" fraud who "thinks riding a children's toy is more important than caring for his own children."

DeParrie believed sending children to "shark-infested" public schools was akin to a second Children's Crusade, if not worse: "At least the children in 1212 were only enslaved or died physically. Here, their eternal souls are at risk." John F. Kennedy was "a wicked and corrupt man" whose assassination, deParrie mused, may have been God's judgment for the 1963 Supreme Court case that outlawed pro forma prayer in public schools.

And, lest we forget, deParrie concluded ("reluctantly," he once offered) that the killing of abortion providers was "justifiable" homicide.

More than 75 years ago, the irrepressible G.K. Chesterton argued, "I now realize we are trying to fight the whole world, to turn the tide of the whole time we live in, to resist everything that seems irresistible." While deParrie would have appreciated the sentiment, he was as narrow as Chesterton was wide, focused almost exclusively on the battle to end abortion.

The father of six children, deParrie was an unapologetic "one-note samba," his instrument a 5-foot-by-6-foot color photograph of an aborted fetus. He was in the thick of several anti-abortion groups -- including Advocates for Life and the American Coalition of Life Advocates -- that haunted, even terrorized, abortion clinics and providers in the '80s and '90s.

According to the Southern Poverty Law Center, deParrie provided Neal Horsley with the physician dossiers that Horsley used to generate the infamous "Nuremberg Files" Web site, which Planned Parenthood President Gloria Feidt characterized as a "list of abortion doctors marked for death."

Why the Nuremberg Files? "We don't want to make the mistakes that allowed so many Nazis to escape justice after World War II," deParrie said. "We intend to have extensive files on each of them (abortion providers), which will permit prosecutors to easily identify the criminal perpetrators and bring the appropriate judgment against them."

The Bible and hours of prayer, deParrie added, informed him that the killing of abortionists was appropriate.

Such views generated a $109 million judgment against the American Coalition of Life Advocates and a stalking order against deParrie, both of which were eventually overturned.

In the process, however, deParrie's ability to hinder access to an abortion clinic effectively blocked. He spent the final years of his life haranguing evangelical churches for their apathy on abortion and cuffing Right to Life. ("Protecting the babies is not their goal, protecting their 'movement' is.")

He and I communicated once or twice a year. Now and then, I wondered if he'd mellowed. It's the question I'd ask should we meet again, though deParrie would be the first to tell me, as the bearer of bad news, that our paths are never going to cross.

Steve Duin: 503-221-8597; 1320 S.W. Broadway, Portland, OR 97201  steveduin@news.oregonian.com www.oregonlive.com/weblogs/papertrail

Yes, "prick", is perhaps inappropriately vulgar."Plague...of Portland" may have been more on the mark for all the misery this one person was able to cyincally perpetrate undeservedly on many people and important serving organizations. Yet, his efforts do provide a testimony to the power and importance of free speech. The provisions of freedom of speech alowed him to hang himself through the articulation of his own sick ideas that he was permitted to voice openly through those provisions.

In the final analysis, considering the pain, and even death it might be argued he contributed to, he was just an idiot who overlooked, or disregarded his opportunity to contribute something truly compassionate and constructive to the world and the creatures that inhabit it. As a metaphor, potentially revealing the nature of the faith he championed, the effect is sobering.

"...Lance Armstrong was a "selfish and self-absorbed" fraud who "thinks riding a children's toy is more important than caring for his own children."

A bicycle is less a children's toy than the most efficient transportation device ever invented, in terms of energy input vs. distance travelled. It is a vehicle. I guess deParrie was a slave to motorized transportation, as well as a slave to out-of-context religious dogma.

This thread really got me thinking. I support the right of a woman to choose whether or not to persue an abortion. However, the thought of it is very frightening - it is supremely disturbing that we live in a world where women and families are forced into such choices. This is why douchebags such as this Paul character seem so ridiculous; they don't understand that it is capitalist society which has led to the rise and regular use of abortion.

Working class people simply cannot afford to have families. Particularly women, who generally have a tougher time finding employment and generally make less money then their male counterparts.

Also at play here is our lack of rights about governing our own bodies; indeed a big part of the pro-abortion movement is centered around this (Embodied by the slogan, "My body, My choice". And I agree; I feel that we should have complete control over our own bodies, limited only in so much as that are choices can adversely affect others (for example, freely getting wasted then deciding to drive to Canada, putting countless people in danger. We should be responsible for our freedoms, when we finally win them).

That right does not exist in modern society. And it will not exist until society has been radically changed (i.e. not based on capital and the exploitation of the majority of humanity). Nor will abortion disappear no matter how much the religious protest it. And we should _want_ abortion to disappear, no matter how much you are for a woman's right to choose; women and families should not be forced into a situation where they have to choose whether or not they eat or whether or not the child growing inside of them lives!

I understand that there are some other, non-economically related abortions (rape, incest). It is however, clear that the overwhelming majority is from financial constraints. So if we remove those financial constraints, there should be a drastic reduction in the amount of abortions performed because the main need for it has been removed. It would no longer be a question of finances.

I hope these thoughts make sense.