An Oklahoma City police officer last week pulled over a truck displaying a sign that read “Abort Obama, not the unborn,” confiscated the sign, and reported the driver to Secret Service.
The police officer said he had interpreted driver Hal “Chip” Harrison’s sign as a threat to President Obama’s life.
“I pulled over, knowing I hadn’t done anything wrong,” Harrison said in a recent phone interview with the McClatchy-Tribune. The officer informed him that the sign was the reason he had stopped Harrison.
“It’s not meant to be a threat, it’s a statement about abortion,” said Harrison, who is pro-life. “I asked the officer, ‘Do you know what abort means?’ He said, ‘Yeah, it means to kill.’ I said, ‘No, it means to remove or terminate.’”
The policeman then confiscated the sign and informed Harrison he would be subject to an investigation as a possible threat to the president.
“I thought, ‘this is something from Nazi Germany, not in Oklahoma,’” Harrison told the Associated Press (AP).
Some time later, Harrison says he received a call from the Secret Service saying they were at his house to “make sure I wasn’t a part of any hate groups.” Harrison came home and allowed the agents to walk through the house. The agents reportedly questioned Harrison for about half an hour before leaving, convinced that there was no threat.
Captain Steve McCool of the Oklahoma City Police Dept. told an Enid, OK news service that the officer should not have confiscated the sign, and another local captain acknowledged that it was outside the officer’s jurisdiction to have done so.
Harrison is not sure whether he will file a complaint. “I am trying to pursue it, because I’ve always been kind of a loudmouth,” Harrison said. “If I can find a lawyer who will take the case, I probably would.”
Adrian Andrews, head of the Secret Service’s Oklahoma City field office, told the AP that the “Abort Obama” language would “get our attention every time.”
“We’d rather be safe than sorry,” he added.
Filed under: Abortion, Abortion, Obama, Oklahoma, secret service
