Planned Parenthood Shooter Robert Dear's Backstory: A Dispiriting Yarn of Sex and Religion

An illuminating long piece of journalism is the frontpager that appeared in yesterday's paper by Richard Fausset, "For Robert Dear, Religion and Rage Before Planned Parenthood Attack," about the shooter who attacked a Colorado Springs Planned Parenthood clinic on Black Friday.

The song that popped into my head as I finished up the last few paragraphs was Grand Funk Railroad's "We're an American Band":

Which is to say that Fausset's journalistic reconstruction of Robert L. Dear, Jr.s life, based on court records, interviews with ex-wives and neighbors, and Internet postings, tells a tale of a very American man: a serial adulterer and wife beater who never quite assimilated to the 9-to-5 but who found license for his misogyny and misanthropy in evangelical Christianity.

The opening four paragraphs lured me into Fausset's telling of Dear's story:

CHARLESTON, S.C. — The man she had married professed to be deeply religious. But after more than seven years with Robert L. Dear Jr., Barbara Micheau had come to see life with him as a kind of hell on earth.

By January 1993, she had had enough. In a sworn affidavit as part of her divorce case, Ms. Micheau described Mr. Dear as a serial philanderer and a problem gambler, a man who kicked her, beat her head against the floor and fathered two children with other women while they were together. He found excuses for his transgressions, she said, in his idiosyncratic views on Christian eschatology and the nature of salvation. 

“He claims to be a Christian and is extremely evangelistic, but does not follow the Bible in his actions,” Ms. Micheau said in the court document. “He says that as long as he believes he will be saved, he can do whatever he pleases. He is obsessed with the world coming to an end.”

On Friday, according to officials, Mr. Dear entered a Planned Parenthood clinic in Colorado Springs, killing three people and wounding nine others with a semiautomatic rifle. The attack, which ended with his surrender to the police after a harrowing nationally televised standoff in the snow-dusted Western city, was a brutally violent and very public chapter in a life story whose details are not fully known.

The life-story details Fausset recounts are all-too familiar, and they primarily hinge on Dear's sexual relations with women. What American man can deny that this provides the main chapter headings to his life's book? What makes Dear's folio different from most but not at all unique is the overlay of Born Again Perfectionism, or as an ex-wife testified: "He says that as long as he believes he will be saved, he can do whatever he pleases. He is obsessed with the world coming to an end."

That quote reminded me of a book, Spencer Klaw's Without Sin: The Life and Death of the Oneida Community, about John Humphrey Noyes' Oneida Community. Noyes was part of the communal Utopian freak-out of the 1840s in the United States. He believed in Perfectionism, the idea that it was possible to live without sin here on Earth right now, not just in Heaven or some later date of the Second Coming of Jesus Christ. Noyes founded several communities that were distinguished by an odd stew of free love, semen retention and eugenics. Teenage boys were encouraged to copulate with post-menopausal women, while the randy old goats of Oneida got first crack at the pubescent girls.

I bring this up because the Dear's backstory conjures up the intimate connection between sex and religious fundamentalism. (Noyes believed his Perfectionism was based on a true reading of the Gospel.) Note also that a main draw for foreign jihadists to the caliphate in Iraq and Syria is the promise of wives; put another way, sex.

Fausset approaches the conclusion of the dispiriting Dear yarn as follows:

Online, Mr. Dear appeared to lead a different sort of life. Though to his neighbors he was a recluse, he posted frequently to a web forum dedicated to cannabis and joined an adult dating site called SexyAds in the fall of 2005 and the winter of 2006. 

On SexyAds, a poster using his email address and photo said he was looking for a discreet relationship and was interested in spanking. On the cannabis forum, he said he was looking for women to “party,” and rarely wrote about using the drug.

Instead, he was far more likely to write brief and emphatic messages about Jesus Christ — usually in caps lock, the online equivalent of yelling — or to post sparsely worded solicitations for female companionship in North and South Carolina. “savannah sexy women wanted. i love to party, tall, aries, male,” he wrote in August 2005.

He argued with users of the site who disagreed with his religious posts, deriding them as “slaves” and “demons” who would suffer at the end of the world. On Oct. 7, 2005, he wrote, “Every knee shall bow an every tongue will confess that JESUS IS LORD.”

Around seven years ago, Mr. Dear began dating a woman named Stephanie Bragg. For reasons that remain unclear, they moved last year to Hartsel, Colo., a hamlet perched about 65 miles west of Colorado Springs. Ringed by mountains, Hartsel calls itself the Heart of Colorado.

But Mr. Dear, it seemed, did not want to be at the heart of anything. He plunked a white trailer marked with a small cross onto five acres of empty scrub land he had bought for $6,000 and lived in near isolation with Ms. Bragg, rarely saying a word or waving hello to his new neighbors.

What a woeful, tired, very American tale it is.

Gray Lady Bangs the Drum on Institutional Racism/Police Accountability

On the one hand, we have The New York Times daily laying the foundation of the New Cold War; while on the other, the "newspaper of record" nearly as often shines a light on institutional racism, the criminal justice system and the lack of police accountability. It is a strange age we live in. A Cold War is being resuscitated sans the specter of international communism at the the same time one of the main tenets of the 1960s New Left -- black liberation -- is making a comeback.

Make no mistake, the Gray Lady is advocating for black justice. She didn't need to run a story (Carol Cole-Frowe and Richard Fausset, "Jarring Image of Police’s Use of Force at Texas Pool Party") about the police storming a pool party in a Dallas suburb, but she did. And it is decent story to boot, drawing attention to the racial divide in the city where the incident took place:

McKinney, with around 150,000 people, is a fast-growing, mostly middle-class suburb with deep racial and economic divisions. In 2009, according to an article in The Atlantic, the city settled a lawsuit in which it was accused of hindering the construction of affordable housing in the western part of the city, which is more white and more affluent.

The pool party took place on the west side, in a neighborhood that residents said is usually marked by friendly relations among black, white, Hispanic and Asian residents.

Of course the video speaks for itself. You would be hard pressed to find a better depiction of domination: an armed cracker in a dark uniform manhandling a black girl in a colorful bathing suit. It as if white fascistic America's pornographic daydream was caught on a cell-phone camera.

And the McKinney pool party story is not even the best black justice report featured in today's paper. Michael Schmidt and Matt Apuzzo have an excellent piece, "Cleveland Leaders Bypass Prosecutors to Seek Charge in Tamir Rice Case," on how an obscure Ohio law is being used to attempt a bypass of the grand-jury system so that the murder of Tamir Rice might receive a public trial:

Ohio is one of a handful of states that allow residents to request an arrest without approval from the police or prosecutors. It is difficult to know how the case will play out because there is little precedent for a citizen to request an arrest in such a contentious, high-profile case. 

Mr. Madison [lawyer for the Tamir Rice family] said that he knew of no instance in which an Ohio judge had ordered the arrest of a police officer based on a citizen complaint, but that most previous complaints had been frivolous. 

Shooting deaths by officers over the past year have prompted the most significant national discussion on policing since the 1991 beating of Rodney King in Los Angeles. The debate has highlighted, among other things, the differences in how prosecutors handle cases involving investigations of police officers. 

In a typical murder case, prosecutors often present only their best evidence to a grand jury in order to get an indictment. Arguments that a shooting was justified are typically not made until much later, at trial. 

In cases involving police officers, prosecutors are more likely to let grand jurors hear conflicting testimony or see evidence favorable to the officer. Critics say that has established two standards for bringing charges: a high one for police officers, and a much lower one for everyone else. 

A task force appointed by President Obama recommended in March that all cases involving the use of force by police officers be handled by independent prosecutors to “demonstrate the transparency to the public that can lead to mutual trust between community and law enforcement.” In the Cleveland case, however, Cuyahoga County prosecutors will decide whether to bring charges. Those prosecutors work regularly with Cleveland police officers, a closeness that activists have said is a conflict of interest.

By going directly to a judge, community leaders are trying to circumvent that process. Ohio law allows anyone with “knowledge of the facts” to file a court affidavit and ask a judge to issue an arrest warrant. If approved, the arrest would be followed by a public hearing, and community members said that was preferable to allowing prosecutors to make the decision in secret.

“Here we are taking some control of the process as citizens,” Mr. Madison said. “We are going to participate without even changing the law.”

Tamir was fatally shot in November while he played in a park. A 911 caller had reported that the boy was waving a gun that was “probably fake.” When officers arrived, they pulled their car into the park, next to the boy. Within two seconds, an officer, Timothy Loehmann, shot Tamir in the abdomen. The boy’s gun, it turned out, was a toy replica of a Colt pistol and fired plastic pellets.

The shooting raised questions about whether the officers followed procedures and whether they had time to warn Tamir three times to put down the gun, as they said they had done. Lawyers for the city have defended the shooting, saying the officers mistook the toy for a real gun. 

The Rev. Jawanza K. Colvin, who signed affidavits seeking charges of murder and manslaughter, said: “We have the video, and having witnessed it, you can see that it took two seconds for the officers to shoot a 12-year-old boy who showed no malicious intent or aggressive behavior. There is certainly reasonable suspicion that a crime was committed.” 

The planned filing comes as Cleveland tries to move past what the Justice Department recently said was a pattern of police abuse and unconstitutional behavior. The city agreed to put in place new training and civilian oversight to head off a civil rights lawsuit.

It is hard for me to imagine a Cleveland judge issuing an arrest warrant for Timothy Loehmann. The judicial system exists to protect the status quo, and the status quo allows law enforcement to operate with impunity. This impunity embraces the regular murder of black people.

For some reason, the NYT has taken up the cause of the #Black Lives Matter movement, an amazingly progressive thing to do and something that doesn't square with the paper's crude, backward parroting of USG propaganda when it comes to foreign affairs. But why?

Are the editors privy to some secret government study that foretells of a crackdown by the police state and they're, in the finest tradition of public service, trying to get out front and build a movement of civic resistance? Doubtful to impossible. Something is happening here, some form of mass awakening that is broader and simultaneously more cynical than what happened in the 1960s/early 1970s and the Gray Lady is just trying to keep up.