ustxtxb_obs_1985_12_06_50_00016-00000_000.pdf

The director of the Texas Coalition for Life, Bill Price, told the Dallas Morning News, “The Legislature was seeking to ensure that the health of Texas citizens was not jeopardized any further by the existence of unsanitary, understaffed and poorly equipped abortion facilities, whose only guiding light is the green glow of the bottom line.” While Price complains about the health standards of these facilities, his organization has consistently fought to cut off all sources of public funding for facilities providing abortions. “The bottom line,” says TARAL director Fridrich, “is that, as far as women’s health and safety are concerned, the `Right-to-Lifers’ have no credibility.” 1/ The Texas Women’s Political Caucus recently presented Good Guy awards to 24 Texas men who “have been in a position to make positive changes for the women of Texas,” said Harryette Ehrhardt, chairwoman of the group. In a phone conversation with the Observer, Ehrhardt offered an informal list of Bad Guy awards for men who have stood firm against the rights of women. Sen. Phil Gramm wins this year’s Top Dog Bad Guy award for his battle against all forms of social spending, except military spending. The three Republican candidates for the office of governor, Bill Clements, Kent Hance, and Tom Loeffler, tied for second place for their anti-choice stands, and their currying favor with the Phyllis Schlafly set. Bill Price, director of the Texas Coalition for Life, receives a Bad Guy award for his tireless campaign against reproductive rights, stating that “any anti-abortion activist who has not gone to jail is not doing his duty.” Bum Bright, the owner of the Dallas Cowboys, receives an honorable mention Bad Guy award for his efforts to keep women out of the Texas A&M band. The Bad Guy Group award goes to the Pearson Foundation, headed by Robert J. Pearson, for creating fake abortion clinics to harass women seeking help. Honorable mention in this category goes to the Southern Baptist Convention for removing a distinguished member from the Missionary Board because his wife had outstripped him by becoming a Methodist minister. H.P. Hodge, the city attorney of Wichita Falls, receives a Bad Guy award for consistent failure, over the past ten years, to hire women for the police department. He still maintains that he can’t find women to fill the positions. The Fifth Circuit Court was contending for this award for failing repeatedly to uphold standards of affirmative action. A Special Recognition Bad Guy award, topping off this year’s presentation, goes to T. Boone Pickens, for writing a letter to the Texas Women’s Political Caucus, addressed “Dear Sir.” BOOKS AND THE CULTURE /T WAS the middle of the 1950s in Montgomery, Alabama, and a civil rights movement like nothing the country had ever seen before was stirring all around us. If my friend and classmate, Lucy Durr, knew things the rest of us didn’t, she never said so. She and I were fellow travelers in a high school clique concerned mainly with school and boys until Lucy ran for class office and came to. school one morning to find the words “Communist,” “Red,” “Nigger-lover,” scrawled across her homemade campaign posters. Our teachers hushed it up. Lucy withdrew from the race and never spoke of it again. What, we wondered, could words like those possibly have to do with Lucy Durr? Her parents, who had been close to the Roosevelt administration in Washington during the ’30s and ’40s, had come back home to Montgomery in 1951 under a cloud of accusations Judith Paterson is a writer living in Washington, D.C. they favored labor unions and “integration.” Some said they were Communists, but few believed it. We didn’t know what the phrase “civil rights” meant in 1954 when a seamstress named Rosa Parks refused OUTSIDE THE MAGIC CIRCLE: The Autobiography of Virginia Foster Durr Edited by Hollinger F. Barnard with a foreword by Studs Terkel University of Alabama Press, 1985 $24.50 to give her seat to a white man on a segregated bus and triggered a year-long bus boycott. We did know the generations-old rule of silence. Our parents talked about it soto voce. The boycott went on for weeks before local papers covered the story. That same silence surrounded the radicalism that Clifford and Virginia shared with a tiny handful of other white Alabamians. That the Durrs belonged to “old Alabama families” made their defection all the more “reprehensible.” NOW IN HER eighties, Virginia Foster Durr confronts the mysteries of those times in an exhilaratingly honest and well-told autobiography. Outside the Magic Circle tells of a privileged, deep-South upbringing that could hardly have been more traditional until her father, minister of a leading Birmingham Presbyterian congregation, refused to interpret the Bible literally and lost his church. Amid financial catastrophe and despair, Anne and Sterling Johnson Foster managed to keep up appearances and educate their two daughters, sending Josephine, the belle of the family, to Sweet Briar and Virginia to Wellesley. True to her upbringing, Virginia refused to eat meals with a black classmate, explaining to the director of the house in which she lived, “my father would have a fit.” Threatened with expulsion, she capitulated, realizing finally that her distress came more from fear of her father than from eating at the table with a black person. After two years at Wellesley, Virginia Foster returned to Birmingham, made her debut, took a job \(to the humiliation Dun, a scholarly, high-minded young lawyer from Montgomery who was Virginia Durr’s Good Fight By Judith Paterson 16 DECEMBER 6, 1985