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Open Eyes on Air

Those Awful Shredded Baby Posters at Scripps Encinitas

By Allyson Smith

Pro-abortion KOGO radio talk show host Lynn Harper had an unusual encounter with pro-lifers in January.

On Saturday, January 19, Jim McGuinn and other members of Oceanside's Open Eyes ministry conducted their monthly prayer and picket of Scripps Hospital in Encinitas. Planned Parenthood of San Diego and Riverside Counties performs abortions in a building behind the hospital.

"We were out there in front of the hospital until about 12:30," said McGuinn, a medical catheter technician, in a January 31 telephone interview, "then we all left and went home. I was home for only about an hour when I got called back to work in the Scripps cardiac catheter lab for a patient with an acute myocardial infarction (heart attack), so a doctor called us in to perform a procedure to open up a blocked artery.

"We finished the procedure on the man, then after it was over we met his son and daughter and wife and chit-chatted while waiting for him to go back to his room. The wife, Lynn Harper, said she was a talk show radio host. I said, 'What's your show about?' and she said she had a cable TV show about controversial medical issues.

"I said, 'I have a medical controversy.' She said, 'You do?' I said, 'Yeah -- abortion.'

"We exchanged phone numbers, and I didn't think anything was going to come of it, but the next day she called me at home live from her show and asked if I wanted to be on. I had never been on a radio show before. I sat here and prayed with my wife." Harper gave McGuinn 15 minutes of airtime to talk about the posters.

"Lynn told the story a little bit over the air," said McGuinn, "and then had me on, and she just started in about those God-awful signs of shredded and torn babies. I said that those signs are awful and that we're out there showing people what abortion is. It's not just a term or a word or a concept. I'm not going to argue with anyone that they're not ugly pictures; they are ugly pictures. It's an ugly act. I compared it to the Germans a bit with the lies about the concentration camps."

While McGuinn was on the air, Harper checked the chat room at her website, LynnHarper.com, and found her webmaster, Randy Hall, complaining about her giving McGuinn airtime. Because of Hall's complaints and the lack of time, Harper invited McGuinn and Hall to be on her show in the studio the following week. McGuinn asked if he could bring a few people with him; Harper agreed.

The next Sunday, January 27, Hall, McGuinn, and four other members of Open Eyes Ministry appeared for two hours on Harper's show. Accompanying McGuinn to the studio were attorney Glen Biondi, evangelist Howard Putnam, and a married couple, Michael and Patti Asher.

Harper opened the segment by describing the circumstances through which she had met McGuinn: "Bill, my beloved husband, had a procedure done that occasioned him ... to go to the emergency hospital in Encinitas, Scripps actually, and we drove down there into the emergency parking lot. My son Joe and I were driving, and we went through this line. It looked like a picket line at first -- you know, you've seen them -- they are carrying those placards with the chopped up, bloody fetuses. I said to Joe, 'God! Can you imagine? Look at the place they picked to do this!'

"So anyway," continued Harper, "we go into the emergency hospital, and the great Dr. Shahin Keramati (the doctor who operated on Harper's husband) and his amazingly able team, Beverly from the cath lab, and what I understand is one of the finest cath technicians in the city, Jim McGuinn -- this is what I was told by Dr. Keramati.

"After the procedure, Bill was fine, and I'm very grateful to all of them, hugging and kisses all around, and Jim and I had a conversation, and Jim said 'I'd like to be on the show or maybe you should talk to me.' I said, 'What would you talk about?' and Jim said 'Abortion.' And I said, 'Oh, abortion! Speaking of which, I just came through this big line of people with placards.'

"Then Jim said something that blew me away. He looked right at me and he said, 'Yes, I was one of them.'

"Pregnant silence! Here on the one hand is the man who helped save my husband's life; on the other hand, one of those guys that I think has absolutely no mental smarts whatsoever to be able to cause pain to certain people who really don't deserve it, is [what went] through my mind. And then I said, 'Jim, definitely we have to do [a show].'"

After introducing McGuinn, Harper invited him to give his background. "I was a person before I became a born-again Christian that believed that just about anything was okay, that [anything ] that anybody wanted to do, they were free and fine to do that." McGuinn, a married father of three sons, described his past life as a drug and alcohol abuser and his coming to Christ five years ago.

Harper interjected to the audience, "It's important that I describe what Jim McGuinn looks like ... because this is not a troll sitting here. You've got this great-looking guy who had a hot life, and all this kind of stuff. You don't look like those Jehovah's Witnesses who walk around, the nerdy guys and all that. So what happened? How did it happen, Jim?"

During the show, Open Eyes member Steve Shine called in and answered Harper's accusation that children are traumatized by the posters by saying that his son, who joins Open Eyes protests, can understand the evil depicted in the pictures. Shine grilled Hall, who at the time was running as the Libertarian candidate for District 77, on the concept of due process of law.

A 17-year-old from Vista High School talked about the influence of pro-abortion sentiment in his school. He told Harper, "I was exposed to those signs when I was in junior high. I remember I had never been really taught much about what abortion was. I knew the term; I knew that it meant to end a pregnancy. I was told it was to take the tissue and remove it, and I felt fine with that ... and I remember pulling out of the school in the bus, and there was a man who drives the van with all the signs, and he was holding a sign that was graphic, and a girl next to me went, 'Oh my gosh, I can't believe that! Something within my mind said, 'There's something so right about him holding that' I was polarized in that moment. I said, 'I could not argue [with that].... This is wrong.'"

Recording artist Michael Murphy, who sang the 70s hit "Wildfire," was Harper's guest after Open Eyes. McGuinn said "Murphy arrived in the studio with his daughters. Then Howard asked him, 'Are you a Christian?' He said he was, so Howard said, 'Then let's pray for Lynn. Lynn, is it okay if we pray for you?' She said, 'Yes,' so Howard led a prayer for her. At the end we all gave her a hug, and she was very nice."

McGuinn concluded, "We all got so blessed by it, and I really believe that what God was doing was personally interacting with Lynn Harper through us being there."

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