It could be tempting to think of Todd Stave as a classic “unlikely hero” because he seems like a pretty regular guy; a D.C. entrepreneur who was just going about his business. But when you factor in his calm temperament, his legacy and his ability to take a stand and draw support he turns out to be a very likely hero indeed; the right person at the right time with the right idea.

Stave is the founder of Voice of Choice, described on the website as a “calm, measured response to anti-abortion activists who engage in misguided, raging protest tactics that are often ill-informed and only serve to victimize women, pro-choice professionals, law-abiding businesses and unaligned bystanders.” The group evolved because anti-abortion protesters decided to harass Stave by protesting outside of his 11 year-old daughter’s middle school … and enough was too much.

Stave is the landlord of a Germantown, MD abortion clinic which was once operated by Stave’s father, writes Petula Dvorak of the Washington Post. The clinic was once firebombed. protesters harassed Stave’s family at their home.

“I’ve been a member of this fight since Roe v. Wade, since I was 5 years-old,” he told Dvorak.

The clinic is now leased to Dr. LeRoy Carhart, who performs late term abortions, and Stave is pretty remarkably cool-headed about the protesters who maintain vigils outside the clinic, “quietly praying or holding vigil, with signs, rosaries, statues of Mary and posters of mangled fetuses.”

“Totally appropriate. It’s their right,” he told Dvorak, and that outside the clinic “is probably the most appropriate place for them to express their views.”

But they showed up at his daughter’s school with signs displaying his name, contact information and again, the fetus pictures, an act which Montgomery County Schools spokeswoman Lesli Maxwell called “fairly despicable,” in the Washington Post.

We wholeheartedly agree.

That was where Stave drew the line. When the protesters started calling his home he took down the numbers they were coming from and asked his supporters, who were looking to help, to call those people back. From Dvorak’s story:

“In a very calm, very respectful voice, they said that the Stave family thanks you for your prayers,” he said. “They cannot terminate the lease, and they do not want to. They support women’s rights.”

The circle of friends and supporters widened until there were more than a thousand people boomeranging those calls right back to the people who had made them. “The family of a protester who called Stave’s home could get up to 5,000 calls in return,” Dvorak writes.

Out of this huge response Stave formed Voice of Choice. “We don’t question anyone’s right to express opinions and ideals; we challenge their bullying tactics and their contempt,” the website says.

In an interview with Rachel Maddow, Stave said the turnaround tactic is working well. People who were getting calls asked to be taken off the call list. Evidently they don’t like having their actions mirrored back at them.

Stave said 80% of those people won’t do it anymore. “Once they realize there’s going to be a reaction to their action they’re not going to do it anymore.”

Unfortunately, you can still use some tactics in relative anonymity. When Stave went out of town recently to accept a National Abortion and Reproductive Rights Action League (NARAL) award, his neighborhood was leafleted with fliers depicting Stave in a Nazi uniform, comparing him to Heinrich Himmler and showing piles of dead Holocaust victims and aborted fetuses, says Washington Jewish Week.

Stave, according to the paper,“plans to make a similar, large sign of one of the woman protesters and carry it at her home “and see how she likes it,” he said, adding, “That’s calm, measured response. We simply respond.”

Being calm and measured can be difficult the face of a movement that has spawned the shooting of doctors, especially considering a bomb went off at a Planned Parenthood Clinic just this week. That’s exactly why Stave’s approach of cool-headed mirroring and strong organization is being so quickly embraced. When all around you are acting crazy, someone who is calm and measured provides the hope that sanity may prevail after all.

And so Todd Stave is a very likely hero, indeed. The world could use so many more like him.