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Earlier, we posted a message from Warren Wilson, a student at Liberty, along with a response written by CBR Florida Director Mike Schrimsher.  Here is my response:

Dear Mr. Wilson,

If you are committed enough to want to end abortion, and I don’t doubt that you are, you owe it to yourself to study the history of social reform. If you look at the work of other reformers (William Wilberforce, Thomas Clarkson, the American abolitionists, Lewis Hine, and Martin Luther King, Jr., to name a few), you will discover that they all used graphic images to help people relate to the humanity of the victims of injustice and the horror of the crime itself. I would challenge you to name one injustice that was ever eradicated by covering it up.

Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. brought about dramatic changes in our society, even ending segregation in less than 10 years. Was he wrong when he said this?:

We bring [injustice] out in the open, where it can be seen and dealt with. Like a boil that can never be cured so long as it is covered up but must be opened with an its ugliness to the natural medicines of air and light, injustice must be exposed, with all the tension its exposure creates, to the light of human conscience and the air of national opinion before it can be cured.

Dr. King also said, “America will never reject racism until America sees racism.”

Was Dr. King wrong? Other civil rights leaders thought so. They criticized him for making people uncomfortable about injustice. But he knew that unless people became uncomfortable with respect to the status quo, there would be no pressure for change. They told him some of the same things you and other Liberty students are telling us. They told him that he was making it harder for them, that he was undoing all the good that they had done, that he was making them look bad by association, that he was an outsider who should not come to Birmingham. But he went to Birmingham, anyway. He was arrested, and he wrote his famous Letter from a Birmingham Jail. I hope you will read it. If you are going to invest yourself in the work of social reform, you ought to read the works of others who have done it before you.

Because some in the civil rights movement would not expose injustice, Dr. King called them “civil rights moderates” and said that they were more dangerous to the cause of civil rights than the Ku Klux Klan.

You said that we were neither winsome nor loving. But how is it loving to cover up the truth so that people don’t know how evil abortion really is? How is it loving to allow people to sin out of ignorance, when showing them the truth can lead them to obey God’s commands? When Christians see the horror of abortion, they are more likely to obey God’s command not to kill their own children (Mark 10:19). Furthermore, they are more motivated to protect and defend the defenseless (Proverbs 24:11-12). And finally, they more fully understand their duty as Christian leaders to teach other believers to do the same (Matthew 28:20).

You call out materials “extremist, hateful propaganda.” Can you give me one example of an extreme or hateful statement in any of our materials?

You mentioned that our people heckled you and your friends, that we yelled, condemned, and shoved posters in your face. I find that very hard to believe. All of our staff and volunteers sign an agreement that they will never shout at people and that they may offer literature but never pressure people to take it. If any of our people violated our very strict rules, then please provide me with additional details (who, what, where, etc.), so that I can put a stop to it.

[Note: since this e-mail was sent, we have determined that one CBR volunteer may have said something like, “I thought this was a Christian university.”  This comment would have been a violation of our rules, but hardly the yelling, condemnation, shoving pictures in faces, etc. that was described in Mr. Wilson’s e-mail. — FAB]

After you have read Dr. King’s Letter from a Birmingham Jail, please read my letter to Liberty University (which you can link to from www.ProLifeOnCampus.com). I look forward to hearing from you.

Fletcher

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Tags: abortion pictures, CBR, Center for Bio-Ethical Reform, GAP, Genocide Awareness Project, Liberty University

This entry was posted on Thursday, September 15th, 2011 at 2:31 pm and is filed under Pro Life. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.