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John Burt always said that he was on the side of life. On the side of saving the unborn. And if he couldn't save the unborn, then he could protect the young. That's why he ran Our Father's House for troubled girls in Milton and wouldn't take a dime from the government for it.
Without government money, he could run things the way he wanted. Tough love it. Use a paddle on his charges if they needed it. And pray with them, morning, noon and night.
If investigators are right, he put God to pretty sick use. He wasn't saving girls. He was using them.
He faces five counts of sexual misconduct involving one 15-year-old who was staying at Our Father's House. Santa Rosa County sheriff's deputies picked him up early Tuesday about 150 miles east of his home. He'd been on the run for nearly a week, ever since, as his family put it, he fell on top of one of his girls on the kitchen floor at Our Father's House. Not exactly the way you say your prayers, don't you know.
Burt said he's innocent, but investigators say they expect more charges as more teenagers who stayed in Our Father's House come forward. Even the association of Christian schools with which Our Father's House is affiliated is cooperating with the investigation.
At the same time, however, Ed MacClellan, executive director of the Florida Association of Christian Child Caring Agencies, said the charges against Burt "are out of character with his public persona."
I'm not so sure.
Burt's persona had a lot to do with being a dangerous bully. Burt, 65, has long been a national figure on the fringe side of the pro-life movement.
And he helped turned Pensacola into ground zero of the abortion wars in the 1980s and 1990s, when three clinics were bombed and two doctors and one bodyguard were shot and killed.
Burt was the emphatic cheerleader for the antiabortion extremists, although he was never charged in the bombings and killings. He did not back down until the doctors were killed, and pro-lifers who were truly for life said enough was enough. He retreated and turned his attention to Our Father's House.
The years passed. Jerry Henderson, spokesman for the Santa Rosa Sheriff's Office, said there have been other allegations of sexual abuse against Burt, but none produced enough evidence to build a case.
There is enough irony here to fill several Gothic Southern novels, in which the main character is a former Ku Klux Klansman who, if that's not enough, gets pulled down by his private appetites.
This could make John Burt a figure of pity, ridicule even, except then you look at who he was squeezing. Vulnerable women. They were vulnerable going into those clinics, vulnerable when they went into his school. They were perfect targets, and he knew it. And they were afraid.
Fear runs like a river through the story of John Burt's impact on those women.
The Sheriff's Office says it's been hard to make a case against him in the past because girls were afraid to come forward. Now that Burt has been arrested, sheriff's spokesman Jerry Henderson said, it's hoped victims will be less frightened to speak.
Over the years, Linda Taggart, director of one of the abortion clinics where Burt demonstrates, would get calls from girls who said Burt molested them when they stayed at his school. The callers were always anonymous. There was nothing Taggart could do but refer the callers to the police.
Taggart said she wasn't surprised, then, when she heard Burt was arrested. But his arrest won't change much for her. When you run an abortion clinic in Pensacola, the fear never leaves - even when the town's loudest antiabortionist is in jail.
- You can reach Mary Jo Melone at mjmelone@sptimes.com or 813 226-3402.