The Reynolds Family, the Nuclear Age and a Brave Wooden Boat
Note: This is the text of Jessica’s talk at the June 17, 2017 Ban the Bomb March in Los Angeles.
Jessica Renshaw
I want to tell you a story—a true, personal story. (To save time, I’ll just tell you I’m 73!)
I was one year old when nuclear bombs were dropped on Hiroshima and Nagasaki. Six years later our family moved to Hiroshima. My father, Dr. Earle Reynolds, was a scientist. The Atomic Energy Commission sent him to study the effects of radiation on children exposed to the bomb.
For 3 years, Dad studied 4,800 children. In his spare time he built a 50-foot yacht named Phoenix of Hiroshima. In 1954 Dad submitted his findings on the dangers of radiation to the Atomic Energy Commission. Then our family sailed the Phoenix around the world. Three young yachtsmen from Hiroshima went with us. This was only 9 years after our countries had been at war with each other.
We sailed around the world for 3-1/2 years. Two of our Japanese crew flew back to Hiroshima but Niichi Mikami stayed with us. When we reached Honolulu in 1958, we were looking forward to sailing home to Hiroshima.
But the United States was testing nuclear weapons in the Pacific. Our government had just issued an injunction forbidding American citizens to enter that zone. It covered 390,000 square miles of ocean. We had to sail through that area to get back to Japan.
The same Atomic Energy Commission which had hired Dad to find out the dangers of radiation was in charge of testing nuclear weapons. My dad had written up his findings that radiation causes cancer and is not healthy for human beings. He knew that added radiation from each nuclear test was poisoning the world’s air and seas for decades to come. But the Atomic Energy Commission had suppressed Dad’s findings so they could assure the American public that nuclear tests are safe.
My father the scientist became my father the activist and our pleasure cruise became one of protest. In 1958 I was 14, my brother Ted was 20. Our family and Niichi Mikami chose to sail the Phoenix into the test zone as a protest against nuclear testing. Dad was arrested, tried and convicted of trespass. Our government would later blackball him so he never got a job in his field again.
In 1961 we sailed to Nakhodka, USSR to protest Soviet nuclear testing—a normal American father, mother, 23-year old son, 17-year old daughter, a yachtsman friend and two cats. By this time we had letters and telegrams from hundreds of survivors of Hiroshima and Nagasaki, appealing for a nuclear ban. We had a good talk about peace with the captain of the Soviet Coast Guard boat which stopped us. But he refused to take the appeals. He turned us away.
Back in Japan, we felt we had made no difference. My mother, Barbara Reynolds, felt a responsibility to get the appeals to the leaders of the world. On Christmas Day, 1961, she sat in the Hiroshima Peace Park, at the foot of the monument dedicated to the children killed by the atomic bomb. She fasted and prayed there all day, appealing to the God she did not yet know personally — for wisdom to know what to do with all the appeals of the hibakusha, the bomb survivors.
The answer came: the hibakusha themselves must take these appeals to the world! With the city’s blessing, my mother accompanied two survivors on a Peace Pilgrimage to the leaders of the nuclear nations and to the United Nations. Then she accompanied 25 of them, from both Hiroshima and Nagasaki, on a World Peace Study Mission. When my mother died, the grateful hibakusha erected a monument to her in the Peace Park—their Ground Zero.
The Phoenix of Hiroshima, the brave wooden boat that took us into the Pacific test zone and to the USSR, is now at the bottom of the Sacramento River. Many people are trying to raise and restore her as a historic artifact, a piece of history. That website is phoenixofhiroshima.org.
Now, finally, we have hope. The United Nations is considering a ban on nuclear weapons. The children my dad studied when I was a child myself are in their 70s, 80s and 90s. They are coming to the UN with an appeal signed by nearly 3,000,000 people expressing their own unique, single, heartfelt message: Don’t let what happened to us happen again anywhere to anybody!
Let us stand in solidarity with the hibakusha: No more Hiroshima! No more Nagasaki!
Editor’s Note: When Jessica Renshaw first contacted us, she said:
“My life . . . has been devoted to two major causes: pro-life and anti-nuke . . .
I have two pro-life books out: GIANNA: Aborted and Lived to Tell About It and a novel, Compelling Interests. I have one anti-nuclear book out, To Russia with Love, about a protest voyage by yacht our family made in 1961, and have just published another one, The Reynolds Family, the Nuclear Age, and a Brave Wooden Boat.
I felt such relief, like two parts of me merged and were made whole, when I found your website! My causes really are just two consistent aspects of my concern.”
Rehumanize International at the New York City June 17 March
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For more of our blog posts on nuclear weapons, see:
Nukes and the Pro-Life Christian: A Conservative Takes a Second Look at the Morality of Nuclear Weapons (Karen Swallow Prior)
Rejecting Mass Murder: Looking Back on Hiroshima and Nagasaki
Nuclear Disarmament as a Social Justice Issue
“An Inferno That Even the Mind of Dante Could Not Envision”: Martin Luther King on Nuclear Weapons
A Global Effort to Protect Life: The UN Treaty Banning Nuclear Weapons
“The Affairs of a Handful of Natives”: Nuclear Testing and Racism
Lethal from the Start: Uranium Mining’s Danger to the Most Vulnerable
Would Nonviolence Work on the Nazis?
by Rachel MacNair
While it took time to realize the extent of the Nazis’ brutality, the night of November 9-10, 1938, gave intense warning that Jews were in great danger. Hundreds of synagogues and thousands of businesses were attacked with sledgehammers. Several dozen Jews were killed, in what became known as Kristallnacht, the Night of Broken Glass. People around the world were shocked.
Beyond words of outrage, one obviously necessary action to protect people and to protest most strongly was for countries to take in Jewish immigrants. U.S. President Franklin Roosevelt asked Congress to allow those already in the U.S. on visas to stay; it would be inhuman to return them. But he didn’t ask for the quota to be raised to allow more in.
Members of the Heldenmuth family board the SS St. Louis in Hamburg harbor
In May of 1939, the transatlantic liner St. Louis with 937 mostly Jewish passengers set sail from Hamburg with permission to land in Cuba. The permission was revoked, and all but 28 were denied entry. They begged for entry into the United States as they passed Miami and were denied. Most were sent back to Nazi Germany.
After Kristallnacht, Brazil actually added an immigration requirement of a baptismal certificate dated before 1933, a Christian document no Jew would have.
The question of whether nonviolence works with people as vicious as the Nazis runs up against this basic point: at the beginning, when the problem was clear enough and the numbers of people killed were in the dozens rather than the millions, the nonviolent approach needed was simple, clear, and insufficiently tried.
But while it’s all very well to point out that things should be nipped in the bud, what can be done when things have in fact gotten out of hand?
When the Nazis took over Denmark, Danes organized a Freedom Council. Though there was some sabotage, the Council found through experience that massive nonviolence worked better. When staging strikes brought more bloody action from the Germans, workers would go to work but then leave early, claiming the curfew made them need to tend to their gardens.
The most dramatic and clearly successful part of the Danes’ resistance to the Nazis was the rescue of Danish Jews. The Nazis arranged to start arrests at 10 PM on Friday night, October 1, knowing that Jews were likely to all be home for Rosh Hashanah. But the Danes got a warning that this was the plan. They sent word around so quickly that all the Jews went into hiding in hospitals, people’s homes, and other places.
So a German order on October 2 said all non-Jews must turn Jews in. Organizers decided to send the Jews across the lake to Sweden, which the Nazis had not yet reached. During the night about 7,200 people, almost all the Jews of Denmark, were smuggled onto anything that would float.
They all made is safely to the Swedish shore. Then came word that the Swedish king, being afraid of the Nazis, was refusing to give them asylum. But Niels Bohr, winner of the 1922 Nobel Prize for physics, had Jewish ancestry on his mother’s side and had escaped to Sweden already. He sent word to the king that if the refugees were turned in to the Nazis, he would turn himself in with them. The king immediately allowed the refugees in.
The Bulgarian king and parliament, on the other hand, went along with the Nazis and proposed a “Law in Defense of the Nation” that would basically outlaw Jews. The Bulgarian Orthodox Church and many Bulgarians flooded them with letters not to pass it, but they did anyway. The plan was to begin by deporting 20,000 Jews. But on May 24, 1943, there was a huge demonstration. It began with a rally at a synagogue in Sofia and turned into a large march. The march was broken up by clashes with the police. But government officials were alarmed, and the deportations never happened. The cattle cars remained empty. The saving of Bulgarian Jews was a massive nonviolent action by the Bulgarian people.
Nonviolence in defense of Jews also occurred in the very heart of the Nazi empire: “Rosenstrasse” was the name of the street in Berlin where this remarkably effective protest happened. The Gestapo picked up Jewish men in Berlin who had non-Jewish wives. The wives demonstrated outside their husbands’ prison and demanded their release. They were persistent.
Gestapo headquarters were close by. A machine gun could have wiped the women out. They never fired. Instead, the government negotiated and let the men go. This wasn’t a trick; most were found to be still alive at the end of the war. (This protest is dramatized in the movie Rosenstrasse).
Left: from the movie. Right: Part of the memorial “Block der Frauen” by Ingeborg Hunzinger
These are a few examples; many more could be cited – we haven’t even started on the trouble that the Nazi leader Quisling had in Norway. And of course thousands more Jews were saved by brave souls through an underground railroad.
But the consistent-life mind will naturally be curious about more than war and genocide. How did it build up into such a monstrosity?
Jurist Karl Binding and psychiatrist Alfred Hoche published a book in 1920 called Life Unworthy to be Lived, which helped set the ball rolling. Euthanasia of disabled people was rampant in the hospitals of Germany before the concentration camps were set up, and eugenics that kept the “undesirable” people from reproducing had advanced to widespread abortion by the time the principle was extended to the idea that being Jewish (or Roma/Gypsy, or homosexual, or a member of another group viewed as inferior in Nazi ideology) constituted a disability to which the same “medical treatment” of death should apply.
For years now, the Nazis have served as a lesson about opposing violence: protecting the innocent and vulnerable – unborn and recently born children, people with disabilities, targeted minority groups of any kind – is not only inherently worthwhile, but is crucial to preventing escalation. Genocides don’t come full-blown. They start out small and grow. To stop large horrific slaughters, we most oppose the killing of any human being. If the most vulnerable are protected, then the rest of us are safer too.
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For posts on similar topics, see:
The Darkest Hour: “Glorifying” War?
Self-Defeating Violence: The Case of the First World War
Finding Common Ground on and Learning from World War II
The Civil War Conundrum, 150 Years Later
What Do Men Have to Say on Abortion?
by Rachel MacNair
Every once in a while the charge comes up that since men can’t get pregnant, they shouldn’t have any say on public policy on abortion.
This is a rather odd position, inasmuch as no pregnancy every occurred without male participation somehow. And the behavior men have in response to their own start at fatherhood can have a huge impact on how the mother sees it.
Nevertheless, the idea is prevalent that abortion is a “woman’s rights” issue and therefore only women should be active on it.
One response consistent lifers have made is an analogy: women aren’t drafted, but still have a right to a say on public policy regarding conscription.
But when I’ve dealt with this question in public speeches, I’ve found this short answer to be remarkably effective: “My experience is that when men get all worked up over the fate of little tiny babies, it improves their character.”
That generally brings a chuckle, and no further argument.
But I’d like to turn the argument around. I propose that it’s the so-called “pro-choice” men that actually need to have trepidations about asserting their viewpoint. Because they’re the ones that have to assure us they really do mean that they see abortion as a “woman’s right,” and not as a remarkably self-centered, male-centered way of saying they’re entitled to have women as sex objects that can be vacuumed out and re-used.
I have a set of limericks I wrote on this, years ago. This one was based on an actual remark overheard in a male state legislator’s office in New York:
Oh, how grateful we are to the Court
Giving women the right to abort
If abortion weren’t lawful
Just imagine how awful –
For the men, who must pay child support.
And this one was based on the knowledge that the Playboy Foundation was a major contributor to abortion supporting organizations, the meaning of which seemed to slip right past the people in those organizations:
To keep legal abortion secure
Contributions from Playboy were sure
Then it happened one day
One receiver said – hey!
We’re not certain their motives are pure!
And then we have this one based on a photo I saw. The wording of the sign was different, of course, since I was making mine fit a limerick, but the meaning was the same:
“Keep your laws off my body – no ban!
This is my body – I make the plan!”
Said the sign, plain to see
Please explain it to me
Why the person who held it’s – a man?
(or please answer this quiz:
Why is her body his?)
More recently, we have the following tweet from an outfit that seriously ought to have known better: “The Daily Show” which used to be Jon Stewart’s show and is now Trevor Noah’s. It’s a comedy show that uses the daily news as its subject matter and has a clear liberal bent. The tweet did raise quite an on-line ruckus. It was in response the Supreme Court of the United States (SCOTUS) decision in the summer of 2016 knocking down the abortion clinic health regulations in Texas (note the number of likes on the bottom line after the heart):
The male-centered, irresponsible, and incredibly callous approach in this tweet startled a lot of abortion defenders.
But they were startled only because they have blinders on, with their “women’s rights” rhetoric. The only thing unusual about that tweet was that someone actually said explicitly in public what’s more commonly a private attitude.
Men who are willing to work hard to help out with babies – especially those they helped create, but also other people’s – these aren’t the men who need to worry about saying what they think about abortion. Men whose callousness towards those babies might also be similar to the callousness toward women they have sex with – those are the men who need to be careful about what they say on the topic.
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For more of our blog posts on men and abortion, see:
No Combat Experience, No Opinion: Parallels in Pro-bombing and Pro-choice Rhetoric
“The Daily Show” Doesn’t Do Its Homework
Activists Reminisce: An Oral History of Prolifers for Survival
Excerpt from Chapter 12, Consistently Opposing Killing
Note: This comes from a conference call done for a chapter in the anthology, Consistently Opposing Killing: From Abortion to Assisted Suicide, the Death Penalty, and War, published by Praeger.
Juli is Julianne Wiley (also known as Juli Loesch); Rachel is Rachel MacNair. Mary Rider was also on the call.
The last meeting of Prolifers for Survival was the first meeting of the Seamless Garment Network; we have since changed our name to the Consistent Life Network. The excerpt starts with the beginning of Prolifers for Survival.
Juli: As I remember, the Three Mile Island nuclear accident happened in March, 1979. In May they did a huge anti-nuclear march and we went to that. We had talked with or had a beer with people in the peace movement we knew were prolife, and got about nine of us to hand out about 50,000 leaflets.
Mary Meehan: It was a good beginning, and people were friendly.
Juli Loesch / Julianne Wiley, in 1980s
Juli: It was great. It was a beautiful day, and a couple of the pro-abortion peaceniks came up and sort of listlessly told us that we weren’t allowed to leaflet. We remarked that we hadn’t seen the newspaper that morning, and hadn’t realized that the Bill of Rights had been rescinded. They sort of said, “oh, you assholes,” and walked listlessly away. That was 1979, and was the anti-nuclear power movement mostly.
But then Reagan became president in 1980, and the Left switched into an anti-nuclear weapons movement again. I felt energized by that, because to me nuclear weapons and abortion were perfect bookends, symmetrical images of each other. They both involved a frank commitment to targeting innocent targets, and they both depended on the calculated willingness to destroy them deliberately. Looking at it from a reasonable definition of murder – the deliberate killing of innocent persons – it was to me not debatable. I mean, it was not like nuclear power which had calculable risks that could be compared against other risks. Or even conventional war, which can have degrees of limitation, which makes a just war preferable to an unjust peace. The two issues struck me as being so absolute they set up a kind of a north and south pole, a whole magnetic force that drew in a lot of other issues because of the clarity of those two.
Rachel: But the Mobilization for Survival of Boston didn’t see it that way. I remember when Prolifers for Survival tried to join the Mobilization for Survival. The Boston Chapter sent out a letter, very exercised about the prospect. Do you remember that?
Juli: Oh yes, they offered to dismantle the entire Mobilization for Survival if we contaminated them by our membership. They were willing to destroy their movement rather than allowing in this tiny prolife entity. Evidently they thought pro “choice” was more important than survival of the planet.
Rachel: I remember at the time thinking the Communist Party has front groups that are members of this coalition. The whole point of having a coalition is that you set aside disagreements on other things to focus on the one thing.
Juli: Exactly. I would have been willing to march beside hot and cold running Trots [Trotskyites] to stop the nuclear arms race. But that kind of latitude was not permitted.
Mary Meehan
Mary Meehan: Well, there was a debate at the Mobe [Mobilization for Survival] convention in Pittsburgh, remember that? Later they let me write a little piece against their taking a position on abortion at all, and someone else wrote one saying they should. I think we did at least get some people to take another look at it. I guess they never accepted PS as a member. Or did they?
Juli: Oh, no.
[Co-editor Stephen Zunes notes: There were then over 200 member organizations, which makes the upset about PS’s application all the more ludicrous. Also, my recollection – I was on the national staff of Mobe at the time and was PS’s strongest advocate among them – was that Juli withdrew their application rather than split the organization, so the application was neither formally accepted or rejected.]
Rachel: I remember a memorable line from the Boston letter: all prolifers are “racist, classist, misogynist, anti-choice reactionaries.” We set it to music and put it on T-shirts: “Another Racist, Classist, Misogynist, Anti-choice Reactionary for Peace.”
Juli: Yes. The sad thing is when that faction of the Left sinks its fangs into the peace movement, they sink their fangs and claws and suck the life out of it. They take the peace camp and the peace T-shirts and peace sandals and put them on. So you think you have a peace movement, and what you really have is a raving Left movement that’s dressed itself up to look like a peace movement. Because the people who have really thought long and hard about the spiritual, psychological, and social requirements of nonviolence are repelled by them, and yet those are the people who ought to be the peace movement.
Mary Meehan: I saw the anti-war march in Washington last weekend, and I saw some of the same hard-edge stuff that’s always bothered me. But I also saw some very deeply committed, and probably decades-long-committed, peace people.
Rachel MacNair, in the 1980s
Rachel: What hops to my mind is how many peace movement people wouldn’t consider the prolife movement because of how turned off they were by people like Jerry Falwell, Jesse Helms, and George Bush.
Juli: Oh sure. Most people, myself included, when you look at a complicated problem, start off by seeing where your friends are. Because you trust them. There’s nothing wrong with that. Your friends are honorable and intelligent people, and you consult them to see what they believe in. But that turns into a camp or culture of the Right or a camp and culture of the Left, not based on real thinking or real dialog – just a desire to move with your particular herd. Us against them, which arouses the most pleasurable, pervasive, and vile passions.
Rachel: And is exactly what the peace movement knows better than to do.
Juli: Yes. It was wonderful to have an organization like Prolifers for Survival for a while that tried to respect both of those cultural camps, and understand them, and listen to them, and to act winsomely – is that a word?
Mary Meehan: It is, a good one.
Juli: To act winsomely towards both sides to talk about serious issues that concern all of us in our hearts and souls.
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See the list of all our blog posts, put in categories.
For more of our blog posts on Actions and Adventures, see:
The Adventures of Organizing as a Consistent Lifer
Violence Bolstered by Professional Contradictions
Mourning After & Hoping for the Future, We Call for a Consistent Life Texas!
My Day at the Democratic National Convention
Adventures as a Delegate to the Democratic Party Convention
Progressive Prolifers at the Progressive Magazine 100th Anniversary Celebration
A Pro-Life Feminist Critique of the “Rape and Incest Exception”
Editor’s note: On May 29, 2024, the author found that the link to Shauna Prewitt’s article as a PDF no longer worked, and so this post is slight revised to link to the issue of the law journal that has the article; getting the article itself now involves a charge.
by Rachel MacNair
Pregnancies resulting from the horror of a rape or incest are often proposed as cases where there should be an exception to allow or fund abortion even when it’s not allowed or funded for other pregnancies. I’ll propose several reasons why this is a bad idea.
We Oppose Abortion as Violence, Not as a Result of Sex
Ruth Graham, a pro-choice Slate writer, recently discussed the “rape exception”:
“An exception to a rule often illuminates the rule’s essence. Take the rape exception to abortion restrictions. If abortion is what opponents say it is—the killing of a human being—then it’s not clear why the circumstances of conception should affect its legality. But if abortion restrictions are also about punishing women for sexual behavior, then a rape exception makes perfect sense: If it’s not her ‘fault’ she got pregnant, it’s only fair that she should be exempt from punishment.”
The way I’ve always put this point is: we don’t oppose abortion because we have a hang-up about what kind of sex the woman had. And of course we absolutely don’t regard having a baby as “punishment.”
Aimee Murphy
Aimee Murphy, co-founder of Rehumanize International, offers her personal experience: “I shared . . . my story of how I became pro-life; how I was raped at 16 and months later thought I was pregnant – by my rapist, no less. How my rapist had threatened to kill me if I didn’t have an abortion. How I had realized that I couldn’t be like my rapist and use violence against those who were inconvenient or smaller than I and how I rejected abortion as an option.”
The question that needs to be asked of those who favor a rape exception, or who think that the pro-life position they normally oppose becomes especially extreme if there isn’t even a rape exception, is:
Rebecca Kiessling
Are you willing to look a woman straight in the eye and tell her, “I know you were conceived in a rape, and therefore, your life has less value than other people’s lives”? If so, one woman to do that to is Rebecca Kiessling, an attorney and international speaker. She’s good at straightening people out on this point quickly.
Legislation is a separate question. We might well put up with a “rape and incest” exception if needed for passage of a pro-life law. It’s better to get something imperfect passed than to get nothing at all. But that’s legislative strategy, where compromises are expected. It’s not principle.
On principle, we want to make abortion unthinkable, no matter what the legal status is.
Adding to the Trauma
Asserting that it’s somehow obvious that there should be an exception for rape is saying that pregnancy through rape is so horrendous that it’s worth killing an innocent child in order to avoid it. That’s outrageous pressure for an abortion. What the mother needs is support and care and a listening ear. She certainly doesn’t need any more stigma.
In some cases, people will even assume she’s lying about having been raped – surely she would have aborted if her story was true. Women already have enough trouble being believed.
Raped women have already been through one traumatic experience. The trauma of having a doctor reach up inside and tear her baby to shreds is not one she should be expected to face. Those who push a rape “exception” think they’re turning back the clock. But once a baby is there, her mother should not be pushed into another trauma.
What sounds especially strange to the pro-life feminist ear is when people assert that she shouldn’t have to bear the rapist’s child. How blatantly patriarchal! It’s her baby. Isn’t she entitled to be regarded as the mother of her own child?
In reality, Shauna Prewitt in in her Georgetown Law Journal article found that at least half, and in many studies the majority, of women with a pregnancy resulting from rape choose not to abort the baby. Many of these babies are placed for adoption, but a large portion of women do choose to raise them.
Laws have considered abortion and adoption, but are often woefully lagging for those mothers who do raise their own children, especially on the crucial matter of visitation and custody rules. Shauna Prewitt became an attorney after she was startled to find the man who raped her trying to get joint custody rights to her daughter. She wrote an excellent Georgetown Law Journal article on the limited legal protections for women who become mothers through rape.
Shauna Prewitt
Women do get to give birth to and raise their own children, so the fact that many US states, and probably many other countries, haven’t thought through how to protect them may be one of the consequences of just assuming that of course they wish to abort.
As for incest, where people are generally thinking of minor girls sexually abused by a father or brother, most people who propose this as an exception haven’t thought through this most basic question: who do you think might be the one to bring the young woman in for the abortion? Abortion clinics can help cover up the crime.
Adding to the Rape
Much of the argument over the rape exception presumes that the idea of women getting impregnated through rape is a fact to start with, not to be questioned. I’d be a lot more comfortable if those arguing would at least preface their remarks by pointing out that rape is an outrage, and shouldn’t be tolerated, whether pregnancy happens or not. Rape prevention measures aimed at men are the very first way to address the problem.
But there also seems to be an assumption that only a given amount of rape exists, independent of what we say about abortion.
Consider: what is the message that a “rape exception” might give to potential rapists?
To give an illustration, here’s the story of a student nurse (Dr. F did do abortions at a different facility):
“It was my job to assist the doctors. I scrubbed with Dr. F. While scrubbing at the sink, Dr. F. kidded me about my size. He said that birth control pills would put some weight on me. He asked me if I was on them. I didn’t need to be. He then said he would give me a prescription. . .
“[Later that day] Just as I was leaving the lounge, Dr. F. was, as it appeared, on his way to the doctors’ lounge. He said, “come here,” and started walking down the hall. I said, “I’m not going in there.” He then said, “that’s not where we’re going.” I then asked, “where are we going?’ Then he said, “you never ask a doctor where he’s going.” Then he grabbed my arm and pulled me down the stairs. . . . Still holding on to me, he took me down the hall on the left as you leave the stairs. He pulled me into a dark room on the left. . . .
“Thinking I could reason with him, I begged him to let me go. . . . I kept pulling away and he kept tightening his grip on my arms. Then he said, “we’ve got to work out something.” I said, “no!” He seemed to really be mad and I pulled away to head for the door and he jerked my arm. . . . He raped me. He then backed away from me and as I stood there crying, he said, “I knew there wouldn’t be another time or place.”
(Affidavit, The State of South Carolina vs. J. F., Case No. 30159.)
For men of that mindset (and we have no idea how many there are), abortion is available as a service to them. They’re entitled to sex with any woman they want. After all, all the woman has to do if pregnant is “exercise a constitutional right,” which doesn’t seem so bad. So her consent to the sex is beside the point.
Pedophiles and incest perpetrators often take the same attitude. Sex traffickers regularly take women in for abortions to make them re-usable (for documentations, see Chapter 3 of Peace Psychology Perspectives on Abortion). With these long-term forms of abuse, the abortion clinic helps the perpetrators and can be regarded as an accomplice to the crime.
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For more of our posts on on rape, see:
How Abortion is Useful for Rape Culture
The Message of “Never Rarely Sometimes Always”: Abortion Gets Sexual Predators Off the Hook
Self-Defeating Violence: The Case of the First World War
by John Whitehead
John Whitehead speaks to a visitor at our March for Life Expo table
The United States recently reached the 100th anniversary of American entry into the First World War. Although American businesses had provided arms and money to the Allied nations (which included Britain, France and Russia) in their war against Germany and the other Central Powers, US President Woodrow Wilson had sought to avoid sending American troops to fight in the war. American support to the Allies led to an escalating series of confrontations between the United States and Germany, however, in the winter and spring of 1917. Wilson eventually called for a declaration of war, which the US Congress gave to him on April 6.
Portraying the conflict against Germany and alongside the Allies as a struggle between autocracy and democracy, Wilson justified the US war effort by saying “The world must be made safe for democracy.” However, far from matching Wilson’s words —or the idea of “a war to end war” that became associated with the First World War—the war was an object lesson in how violence can lead to still more violence.
Although the United States and the other Allies eventually won a military victory over Germany, the costs were staggering, even for the victors. Some 9 million people died during the war years of 1914-1918. This included roughly 116,000 Americans—more than the number of Americans killed in the wars in Korea and Vietnam combined.
Also, on the American home front, the war had consequences that made a mockery of Wilson’s claims to be fighting for democracy. After the Declaration of War, Wilson engaged in what one commentator called “war against the Constitution.” Dissenters against the war and conscription for it were charged with espionage or sedition, and many served prison terms. Wilson even asked the Congress to set up detention camps to quarantine “alien enemies.” Such repression was consistent with other Wilson policies: an extreme racist, he encouraged re-segregation of the previously integrated federal Civil Service. (The pattern of opposing democracy at home while claiming to be fighting for democracy abroad repeatedly shows up in American history.)
Propaganda posters from the First World War. These works are in the public domain in the United States because they were published before January 1, 1923.
Moreover, neither democracy nor peace followed the end of the First World War in Europe. Roughly 15 years after the war was over, defeated Germany became a dictatorship under Adolf Hitler. He would start the still-deadlier Second World War.
Historians and other analysts of the world wars have debated why the first was followed by the second. In particular, the question of whether the Allies’ treatment of Germany after the First World War helped cause Hitler’s rise has been answered in varying ways. What’s hard to dispute, however, is that Nazism’s rise and the Second World War wouldn’t have occurred without Allied victory in the previous war.
What would have happened if there had been a German victory in the First World War? Certainly there were good reasons to dread such an outcome since the German regime of the early 20th century could be repressive and cruel. Nevertheless, its rule in Europe would scarcely be comparable to the Nazis’ rule in the 1930s and 1940s.
As the historian Niall Ferguson noted, in a post-World War I Europe where Germany had been victorious, “Adolf Hitler could have eked out a life as a mediocre postcard painter and a fulfilled old soldier in a German-dominated Central Europe about which he could have found little to complain” (The Pity of War: Explaining World War I, p. 460). By declaring war on Germany in 1917 and ultimately sacrificing so many lives to defeat it, the United States was paradoxically helping to make possible a far worse future—one that better warranted the extreme rhetoric Wilson had invoked at the time.
This historical interpretation should not of course be used to justify or endorse the German war effort in the First World War. The only outcome people should have strived for during 1914-1918 would have been for everyone to come to their senses and stop the war and all the governmental cruelties on both sides that went with it.
The point is not that either side in the First World War was preferable to the other, but that the war ultimately made possible a more catastrophic situation than the one the victors had fought the war to prevent.
Although the link between the First and Second World Wars is one of the more dramatic examples of violence bringing about the outcome it was supposed to prevent, it’s hardly the only one. During the American War in Vietnam, the US war effort against North Vietnam led the United States to bomb and send troops into then-neutral neighboring Cambodia. Although intended to hinder the North Vietnamese (and allow the United States to disengage from the conflict), these actions instead contributed to conflict and civil war in Cambodia.
The ultimate result was the murderous Khmer Rouge coming to power in Cambodia. Over 1 million Cambodians were deliberately killed under their rule. One escalation of violence led to another.
American policy toward Iraq may be another example of this same principle. Consistent Life Network endorser Stephen Zunes has argued, in the book Consistently Opposing Killing, that the American-led bombing campaign against Iraq in the 1991 Persian Gulf War and the years of economic sanctions on Iraq that followed had a devastating effect on the Iraqi middle and skilled working classes. These were precisely the parts of Iraqi society that could have led a nonviolent resistance movement to Saddam Hussein’s regime.
Instead, the United States and other nations’ policies impoverished these classes or forced them to emigrate, while making Iraqis more economically dependent on Hussein’s regime. Hussein continued to rule in Iraq, and this perhaps made the eventual American-Iraqi war of 2003 more likely.
The tendency of violence to lead to the opposite of what it was supposed to accomplish isn’t limited to the violence of war. While some might excuse the violence of abortion on the idea that it would allow women with unwanted pregnancies to avoid falling into or remaining in poverty, abortion might have the opposite effect. Consistent Life Network Vice-President Rachel MacNair has argued that the negative psychological and relationship effects of abortion may make it harder for women to escape from poverty. Moreover, Pro-lifers for Survival founder Julianne Wiley has argued that access to abortion allows men to behave as if babies are born not because of anything men did but solely because of the woman’s decision not to have an abortion. As a result, men become self-righteous about thinking they don’t really even owe child support, a rather minimal way of being responsible, thus leaving new mothers in the lurch financially.
Similarly, one way to justify the death penalty is the idea that it saves lives by deterring criminals from committing murder. The vast majority of criminologists who study this issue don’t believe it has that effect. In fact, it may be the opposite: potential murderers may see the executions as an example to follow. This is one explanation for why the murder rate in US states with the death penalty is higher than the murder rate in states without it.
To be sure, that violence is sometimes counterproductive should not be the only reason for opposing it. Even if an act of violence did accomplish what it was intended to do, that wouldn’t necessarily justify such an act. Many sound arguments can be made against war, abortion, executions, and other forms of violence, and advocates for peace and life shouldn’t rely on just one.
Nevertheless, the ways in which violence can perversely compound the problems it’s meant to solve is a significant testimonial against resorting to violence in response to problems.
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See the list of all our blog posts, put in categories.
For more of our blog posts reflecting on the dynamics of violence, see:
Guns and Abortion: Extremists Resemble Each Other
When “Choice” Itself Hurts the Quality of Life
For more of our blog posts on war policy, see:
Rejecting Mass Murder: Looking Back on Hiroshima and Nagasaki
Three Reasons for Opposing the US Bombing of Syria
Removing Health Care Access is an Act of Violence
by Lisa Stiller
Editor’s note: Many pro-lifers are celebrating the fact that a measure ending Medicaid payments to Planned Parenthood is included in the American Health Care Act (AHCA) that was passed by the US House of Representatives on Thursday, May 4. Planned Parenthood does a huge number of abortions and is a major advocate for them, so noncooperation by removing taxpayer dollars has always had our support. We’ve written about the goal of taxpayer defunding, recently and a while ago. But one of our Board members asks: can it be done better, without being associated with a bill like the AHCA?
Lisa Stiller
I have many concerns about the AHCA.
The bill in its original form would have taken health care access from approximately 14 million people by 2018 and from 24 million people by 2026, according to Congressional Budget Office (CBO) estimates. Votes were taken before new estimates for the updated legislation were done.
The revised legislation gained support from some of the “moderate” Republicans who thought the bill in its original form would have done too much damage to their constituents. Adding $8 billion to a pot to help people with pre-existing conditions pay those sky high premiums won them over. But the total of $23 billion is still a totally inadequate amount of money for the purpose, and past experience with “high-risk pools” is that they don’t have a good track record.
As an advocate for the Consistent Life Ethic, I believe in the dignity of all life, and that all life should be protected, from conception to natural death. I do not believe in acts of violence towards anyone. I believe that poverty, because its presence brings a much higher chance of a shortened life span and erodes the dignity of life, is really a form of violence, and a life issue.
People who lack access to affordable, quality health care have a much higher incidence of death as a result. Barriers to preventative care due to expense; poor diet, housing, and education; and lack of resources for low income people in many areas all contribute to higher rates of death among the poor, a disproportionate number of whom are minorities and women.
Jimmy Kimmel with Billy in a photo shared on Twitter by his wife, Molly McNearney
Even people not suffering poverty can have life-threatening conditions and die without decent health-care coverage. The very affluent late-night talk show host and comedian Jimmy Kimmel revealed recently how his son Billy, born April 21, 2017, had a heart condition that needed immediate expensive surgery. Kimmel acknowledged that although he could afford the care, he realized that most others would have greatly struggled. Kimmel ended his heart-felt story with a plea for health care funding, saying, “No parent should ever have to decide if they can afford to save their child’s life. It just shouldn’t happen.”
The Republican legislation also calls for about a 25% cut in Medicaid funding over the next ten years and cuts the subsidies to low and moderate income families which helped them to pay premiums. Instead, it ties subsidies to age, which might benefit some younger people but would send premiums skyrocketing for those who are older.
According to the Kaiser Family Foundation (08/12/2016), the Affordable Care Act reduced uninsured rates among the nation’s low income population by 11-12% between 2013 and 2015. About 20 million people gained access to health care, many as a result of Medicaid expansion.
Access to affordable health care addresses poverty, saves lives, and improves the quality of lives of tens of millions of people and every community. Removing health care access from 24 million people is an act of violence. It will result in higher unnecessary death rates, and it will contribute to more low-income Americans once again having to choose between health care, housing, food, and utilities.
Therefore, because of its impact on alleviating the effects of poverty, I am deeply concerned about the effect of the current legislation on low and moderate income Americans.
Furthermore, the present administration believes itself to be “pro-life.” Trump and most of the Republicans campaigning for Congress billed themselves as the people who would save millions of babies from abortion.
Yet the new health care bill allows states to eliminate the essential benefits protected by the ACA – including maternity care!
The Guttmacher Institute, Planned Parenthood’s own research arm, claims that almost 75 percent of abortions occur because women feel they do not have the resources to care for a child. That would include prenatal care and care for the child after birth (medical, day care, housing, and job training/education expenses).
I believe that “pro-life” is much more than simply opposing abortion. The very reason to use the term “pro-life” instead of just “anti-abortion” is because it means supporting pregnant women and children and families, and advocating for those things that help families overcome poverty such as health care, child care, decent housing, and access to education. Being prolife continues after the child is born.
The current ACHA bill allows states to remove care for babies before they’re born, and cut access to care for families, including children. I do not believe that is pro-life.
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For more of our blog posts on public policy, see:
Why the Hyde Amendment Helps Low-Income Women
Noncooperation with Planned Parenthood
Our Experience with Overturning Terrible Court Decisions
See the list of all our blog posts, put in categories.
Unconnecting a Dot?
by Carol Crossed and Rachel MacNair
Note: a draft of this post was sent to staffers at Campaign Nonviolence for feedback, and they thanked us and offered no comments.
Rachel MacNair & CNV Outreach Coordinator John Dear when he spoke in Kansas City April 2, 2014
Campaign Nonviolence (CNV) has been a wonderful project, run by the organization Pace e Bene. The Consistent Life Network (CLN), also known as Consistent Life, became an endorser early on, as did several of our member groups. As with us, CNV has a connect-the-dots goal of showing how different kinds of violence are connected – in their case: war, racism, poverty, and environmental destruction.
We’ve been promoting their annual CNV Action Week every September since they began it in 2014. Many of our members have participated. Some of our over 200 member groups have added, over these three years, a few actions to CNV’s list of actions that happen around the world that week. This year, their goal for September 16-24 is over 1,000 “marches, vigils, rallies and more for a culture of peace and nonviolence.”
Taking Us Down
Yet a problem has arisen All of a sudden, in 2016, the actions we added were removed from the web list.
On a teleconference call CNV had with supporters, Lisa Stiller asked them why this was. The answer on the phone call: The staff didn’t have time. On to the next question.
This being unsatisfactory, we tried to have a face-to-face meeting or, failing that, a phone call to get clarification. The call finally took place April 12, 2017, between three CNV staff members and Carol Crossed.
Carol Crossed’s Report on the April 12 Phone Call with CNV Staff
Carol Crossed
Ryan Hall (Executive Director) introduced the participants John Dear (Outreach Coordinator) and Ken Butigan (Strategist/Consultant). I (Carol) indicated Rachel MacNair may join the call. Ryan said they wanted to only hear from me, but that if Rachel joined in, she could stay on the call.
To the statement that war, racism, climate change and poverty were the focus of CNV actions, I asked why actions that dealt with issues such as immigration, capital punishment, or gun control were not removed, but actions related to abortion were. Ryan indicated that this call was about listening to my concerns, and thanked me for my comments.
I asked for honesty and transparency. Isn’t the disagreement less about narrowing their focus, and more about abortion? Ryan indicated that their Board agreed to limit their actions, that they could not do everything. Some issues were divisive.
I asked if they eliminated other actions, besides abortion, from their site. They indicated they weren’t sure.
I related an experience at a CNV Conference in New Mexico. Rachel MacNair publicly addressed a panel in 2015, indicating abortion’s connection to violence. She got a round of applause. Both John Dear and James Lawson privately thanked her for her comments.
I suggested that abortion is both a question about violence and a question about strategy. John said he did understand abortion to be a violence. Both Ryan and Ken indicated agreement.
I asked if then their decision was based on strategy. They all agreed that it was. Some issues were divisive.
I asked if they think abortion is more divisive than it is uniting? They thought some issues were divisive, yes. What other issues did they consider “divisive”? John said he gets questions about how transgender rights should be at the center of nonviolence.
I commented about abortion being a positive strategy, one to broaden the movement. For example, Jim Wallis says that abortion is a threshold issue because it opens a door. It allows others to come in, allowing those who oppose taking the lives of innocent human beings to connect with the killing of millions of noncombatants in war.
In the Catholic Peace Fellowship newsletter, Michael Baxter writes that when we do violence to those in our families, especially the unborn, we make it easier to approve of and to engage in the violence of war.
Isn’t the best way to draw folks in who disagree with us on broadening violence to have those pro-life folks do the speaking themselves in their own actions, I asked? Should we not encourage them, showcase them, promote them? By doing this we model receptivity though our own vulnerability.
Ryan thanked me for the comments, saying that those are my strategies, Consistent Life’s strategies. CNV has other strategies.
I said that broadening, welcoming, connecting, being vulnerable, were the universal strategies of nonviolence. That John teaches this in his many books, and Ken’s wonderful TED talk and his workbook on Nonviolence that I read some years ago.
I suggested by not allowing actions on abortion, CNV is marginalizing others, making them step aside, refusing them entry into the [nonviolent] clique. If CNV focuses on the four issues only, they push out many other people. It’s a strategy of smallness.
Ryan said they had already made those decisions, thanked me for the call and reiterated their desire to listen to my concerns. I asked them if they would take into consideration my concerns and review their decision. Ryan said they would talk among themselves.
Questions
Question #1. About CNV’s claim of limited staff time: didn’t removing actions listed by CLN take more time than simply allowing them to remain? Was there something time-consuming about having those listings up, such as perhaps dealing with objections, that they haven’t told us about?
Question #2. CNV addresses the “epidemic of violence” along with their four issues. Since the CNV staff members Carol spoke with agree that abortion is violence, why doesn’t massive feticide fall under an “epidemic of violence”?
Question #3. If a narrow focus is the reason, why didn’t CNV take down the other 50+ actions that don’t fit within their issue limitation?
Question #4. If their reasoning is to avoid divisive issues, why do they not state so as clear policy? The statement in small letters at the bottom of one page, if you hunt for it, is: “Please keep in mind that Campaign Nonviolence reserves the right to remove any action at any time that we feel violates our vision or policies. We expect actions to follow nonviolent guidelines and to focus on efforts that connect the dots between issues related to war, poverty, racism, and environmental destruction.” A very sensible statement, and it gives notice that an action that only focuses on any given single issue doesn’t fit. But if we relate abortion to war, poverty and racism – and we do this all the time – then aren’t we’re following the guideline of “issues related to war, poverty, racism”? Haven’t we still been invited to participate, and then uninvited without notice?
Question #5. Are CNV’s values being pressured by potential or real advocates of abortion availability – supporters and funders?
Question #6. In the conference call, why was “listening” a one-way interaction, and dialog not encouraged? Why did three CNV male staff members feel threatened by a second woman / Board member of Consistent Life participating on the call?
Question #7. Is CNV encouraging the extreme polarized social climate today, by not inspiring a more integrated and diverse nonviolent movement? In other words, are they not contributing to the divisiveness they are trying to avoid?
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See the list of all our blog posts, put in categories.
Three Reasons for Opposing the US Bombing of Syria
by John Whitehead
John Whitehead
The United States’ intervention in the Syrian civil war took a new turn on April 7, when American ships launched a missile strike on the Syrian government’s Al Shayrat air base. This attack on Bashar al-Assad’s regime marked a shift in US policy—previous American military actions in Syria over roughly the past two-and-a-half years had focused on various anti-government insurgent groups such as ISIS. US President Donald Trump apparently ordered the strike as a response to the Assad regime’s alleged use of chemical weapons on April 4 against Syrians in an insurgent-held part of the country. While the Assad regime’s repression of its own people deserves unequivocal condemnation, the recent American military strike was nevertheless wrong, for three reasons. Attacking Assad’s regime is 1) unlikely to help the Syrian people; 2) not in American interests; and 3) of dubious legality under US and international law.
Before elaborating on these three points, I want to emphasize that revulsion at Assad’s regime and its policies is justified and opposition to the recent US military action should not obscure the essential malevolence of that regime. While a full investigation into the April 4 chemical attack remains to be made, numerous other incidents over the past six years of civil war have demonstrated the Syrian government’s brutality. The regime has targeted civilians by methods that include bombing and denying food and other necessities; it has carried out mass executions and torture, including sexual assault; (which can impose pregnancies and therefore increase the danger of abortion and infanticide); and, whatever the truth of the April 4 incident, it has used chemical weapons in the past. Opponents of US military action should not gloss over any of this.
Even the worst human rights violations by a regime do not excuse an imprudent response. The April 7 strike was a profoundly imprudent response, for the following reasons:
1) Attacking the Assad regime is unlikely to help the Syrian people.
A single missile strike on a single air base is clearly not going to prevent the Assad regime from waging war on its own people (planes were reportedly taking off from the air base within days after the attack). The strike at best served as warning to the Assad regime not to carry out any further chemical weapons attacks, lest it invite further retaliation. Bashar al-Assad is unlikely to stop efforts to win the civil war and crush the various insurgent groups that oppose him, however, even in the face of American threats.
What Assad presumably sees at stake in the civil war is his regime’s survival and even his own personal survival. As recent history has shown, dictators who are overthrown do not live long. If Assad wishes to avoid the fate of Saddam Hussein and Muammar Qaddafi, he will likely continue to use the methods at his disposal, including chemical weapons or similarly brutal means, to stay in power.
Stopping Assad from brutalizing the Syrian people would likely require not threats or symbolic missile strikes but significant military action either to overthrow his regime or at least to weaken it sufficiently that he cannot exert significant influence on much of the country. American military action could accomplish such a goal, but the question then arises of what kind of regime would replace Assad’s. As recent history has also shown, overthrowing an oppressive regime is comparatively easy but creating a stable, more humane government in the aftermath of regime change is far more difficult. Afghanistan, Iraq, and Libya all provide examples of how violence and chaos can follow an oppressive government’s violent overthrow.
The prospect of regime change in Syria is particularly daunting given the nature of the insurgent groups fighting against Assad. Anti-government groups, which include ISIS and the Fatah al-Sham Front (once associated with al Qaeda), are no more respectful of human rights than the current Syrian government. During the Syrian civil war, insurgent groups have also carried out atrocities such as attacking civilians, torture, and even using chemical weapons. To replace rule by Assad with rule by one of these groups or—what is a more likely result of regime change—to reduce Syria to a state of permanent anarchy in which such groups fight for power is not going to help the Syrian people.
From Wikimedia: Syrian refugees around the world, March 11, 2017, by Puskechina
2) Attacking the Assad regime is not in American interests.
While realpolitik calculations of national interest should not be the only consideration in responding to conflicts such as the Syrian civil war, these kinds of calculations should be considered. The Assad regime, for all its repression of its own people, does not pose a threat to American citizens. An insurgent group such as ISIS, which has inspired various terrorist attacks that have killed Americans, does pose a threat, however. To overthrow the Assad regime and allow these groups to operate without the restraints imposed by opposition from a hostile regime is no more in the American people’s interests than the Syrian people’s.
Moreover, American actions against the Assad regime entail opposition to the regime’s chief sponsor, Russia. While the April 7 airfield attack was apparently executed so as to avoid killing any Russian personnel who might be assisting the Syrian military, the attack escalated the already high tensions between Russia and the United States. Taking further military action against the Syrian government would likely worsen relations further, especially as future attacks might well kill Russian troops and bring the American and Russian militaries into direct conflict. High tensions, let alone open military conflict, between the nations with the largest nuclear arsenals in the world is not in the interests of the United States or of humanity.
3) Attacking the Assad regime is of dubious legality under American and international law.
The legal sanction for President Trump bombing Syria is tenuous at best. The US Congress has not declared war on Syria or otherwise authorized military action in that country. While the US president has some authority, under the 1973 War Powers Act, to use military power without congressional approval, this authority exists only in case of “a national emergency created by attack upon the United States, its territories or possessions, or its armed forces.” The Syrian civil war clearly does not qualify as such a situation.
Such legal considerations were largely ignored by the Obama administration in some of its uses of military force, including the ongoing military operations in Syria. Nevertheless, the Syrian campaign had at least a semblance of legal justification: President Obama argued that the 2001 Authorization of Military Force in response to the September 11th attacks by al Qaeda gave him the authority to fight against ISIS, an al Qaeda offshoot, in Syria. Even this legal justification, strained as it was, does not apply to the April 7 missile attacks, however, which targeted the Syrian government, not any al Qaeda-connected terrorist group.
The missile strikes were also unjustified under international law. An American attack on Syria in response to the Syrian government abusing its own people cannot be justified, under Article 51 of the United Nations Charter, as self-defense. The United States was in no way acting in direct defense against an attack. Moreover, the missile attack was not authorized by the UN Security Council, so it cannot claim the sanction of international law in that way either.
In the absence of legal justifications, the American attack on Syria must be considered another regrettable example of a nation using military force unilaterally, without restraint by international norms and institutions. Within the United States, it must also be considered another example of a chief executive unilaterally using force without constitutional or other legal restraints. These are not patterns of international behavior that promote a more peaceful world.
To repeat, none of these problems with the recent American bombing excuse or lessen the monstrous behavior of Bashar al-Assad and his regime. However, the understandable horror that the Assad regime inspires should not lead anyone to support a misguided policy. For the reasons given above, I would argue that American military attacks on the Assad regime are misguided. Any attempts by the Trump administration to conduct further attacks such as that on April 7 should be opposed.
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Also by John Whitehead:
Rejecting Mass Murder: Looking Back on Hiroshima and Nagasaki
See the list of all our blog posts, put in categories.
Intolerance Knows No Partisan Boundaries
by Lisa Stiller
Lisa Stiller
As a CL board member who has been working to promote CL representation at conferences and festivals—and the vast majority of the time loving it!—I have sometimes been amazed and discouraged at the amount of intolerance found on both the Left and Right.
In the spring of 2015, I applied to have CL represented in the Activist Area (social justice groups) at the Clearwater Festival, held each year about 30 miles north of New York City. In May I received a phone call from one of their staff letting me know that our application had been rejected. The reason: We are faith-based, and they do not accept faith-based organizations.
I told them we are secular, but the response was that our Web site indicated that most of our member groups were faith-based, despite the fact that our home page clearly indicates we are not tied to any faith. So I asked why the Fellowship of Reconciliation is always present at their festival, noting that their Web site clearly points to their faith roots. Simple answer: No, they are not faith-based! Even if that were true, I also noticed at the festival this year that the Unitarians and a faith-based retreat center were given tables.
I was also told that Clearwater selects organizations that are in line with their “values.” “We are a pro-peace organization,” I responded. I did not get much of a response to that. Clearly, our opposition to abortion was the issue, but my disappointment was that they could not, or would not, say this!
This is not the first time this has happened. Our applications to have a table and program ads at the Women’s International League for Peace and Freedom 100th-anniversay conference in the Hague was turned down. Although the conference organizers didn’t state the reason for the rejection, we point out that the organization has spoken against restrictions on abortion, calling it a sexual and reproductive rights. However, two of our board members attended the meeting to leaflet and advocate on behalf of the CL message. We will not be deterred.
We have been turned down multiple times for workshops at other traditionally progressive events as well, but we are usually at least “allowed” a table at such events. We take advantage of these opportunities to engage attendees in conversation, get sign-ups for our newsletter, and recruit people who would like to help us organize at the local level.
Bill Samuel & Lisa Stiller
The past few years have surprisingly taught me that the Right has no monopoly on intolerance. Any pro-choice Lefty who tries to tell you they are open minded while cursing you out for your support for unborn lives needs a gentle challenge.
And every so-called tolerant social justice organization that does not tolerate and does not want to at least open up the floor to a presentation that presents a view that holds all life sacred may deserve to have their claim to support social justice challenged.
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See the list of all our blog posts, put in categories.
For more of our blog posts on Actions and Adventures, see:
The Adventures of Organizing as a Consistent Lifer
Violence Bolstered by Professional Contradictions
Mourning After & Hoping for the Future, We Call for a Consistent Life Texas!
My Day at the Democratic National Convention
Adventures as a Delegate to the Democratic Party Convention