Anti-War protest yips on page one

TimesWatch reports that Friday's Page One gives huge play to reporter Damien Cave's "Growing Problem for Military Recruiters: Parents," which lays out the tactics anti-war parents are using against recruiters in high schools: "Rachel Rogers, a single mother of four in upstate New York, did not worry about the presence of National Guard recruiters at her son's high school until she learned that they taught students how to throw hand grenades, using baseballs as stand-ins. For the last month she has been insisting that administrators limit recruiters' access to children." ("Children" that are in some cases old enough to vote.)

His next concerned parent: "Meanwhile, Amy Hagopian, co-chairwoman of the Parent-Teacher-Student Association at Garfield High School in Seattle, has been fighting against a four-year-old federal law that requires public schools to give military recruiters the same access to students as college recruiters get, or lose federal funding. She also recently took a few hours off work to stand beside recruiters at Garfield High and display pictures of injured American soldiers from Iraq. 'We want to show the military that they are not welcome by the P.T.S.A. in this building,' she said."

Hagopian is a notorious anti-war activist who did more than "stand beside recruiters" at the high school. She tried to drive them out, telling Sgt. Melisa Porter, "Do you realize you aren't welcome here?" and telling a reporter for the Socialist Worker (who just happens to be her son) that military recruiting stations "are great targets for the antiwar movement; this could really be a new frontier of the antiwar movement."

Deeper into the story, Cave partially addresses Hagopian activism but doesn't provide the full flavor: "Many of the mothers and fathers most adamant about recruitment do have a history of opposition to Vietnam. Amy Hagopian, 49, a professor of public health at the University of Washington, and her husband, Stephen Ludwig, 57, a carpenter, said that they and many parents who contest recruiting at Garfield High in Seattle have a history of antiwar sentiment and see their efforts as an extension of their pacifism."

Cave writes: "Two years into the war in Iraq, as the Army and Marines struggle to refill their ranks, parents have become boulders of opposition that recruiters cannot move. Mothers and fathers around the country said they were terrified that their children would have to be killed -- or kill -- in a war that many see as unnecessary and without end."