We are so grateful that we live in a country that respects freedom of speech.  Not so in some other places.  Like Canada!

We salute the pro-life students at the University of Calgary for their courageous stand against the heavy hand of censorship.   Story here.  It’s been widely covered in the popular press locally.  You can Google for the latest news.

Here is a press release issued by the Canadian Centre for Bio-Ethical Reform:

CALGARY. April 19th, 2010 – The University of Calgary has notified eight of its own students that they are being charged with non-academic misconduct, with a possibility of expulsion, for having set up a pro-life display on campus earlier this month.
Campus Pro-Life (CPL) Club President Leah Hallman stated, “We understand the severity of the charges, but our consciences could not contemplate silence, therefore we must stand by our convictions to fight for the lives of unborn children.”
The group’s Genocide Awareness Project (GAP) display has been held on the University of Calgary grounds without incident eight times since 2006. The GAP display compares abortion to past historical atrocities, such as the Rwandan genocide and the Holocaust in Nazi Germany.
“They failed to convince the crown that we were trespassing on our own campus last year so now they want to charge us with ‘non-academic misconduct’ for exercising our right to express our views,” said Peter Csillag, CPL’s Vice-president. “We condemn and will challenge these charges, as we have with all previous attempts at censoring and intimidating us.”
In 2009, the University charged six students with trespassing in relation to the display, but the crown prosecutor stayed these charges prior to a trial scheduled for November of 2009. The University has threatened participating students with non-academic misconduct charges on the occasion of each display, but this is the first time they are following through with their threat.
“Quite frankly, I can’t help but feel like we’re living parts of the novel One Day In The Life of Ivan Denisovich,” stated Vice-president Cameron Wilson, “it feels almost surreal that we still have to fight this battle on our own campus.”
Campus Pro-Life will be holding a press conference at 10:00am on Monday, April 19th, 2010 outside of the MacKimmie Library Building on the University of Calgary campus to make a formal statement and answer questions pertaining to new developments.

I just got this note from Kristen Giesler, the president of Students for Life at the University of North Carolina at Charlotte, the group that recently hosted GAP on that campus.

The most poignant thing about my recent GAP experience at UNC-Charlotte is how every facet of the event exceeded my expectations and was nothing like I imagined.  Assuredly, I did not anticipate having an unfettered debate with a history professor.  Said professor was a prime example of how ideology and emotion prevent logical thinking.  He threw at me the usual litany of pro-abortion fodder.  After giving him a logical (non-aggressive and non-emotional) response to every argument, the professor found himself talking in circles and moving on to ponder the logic of life.  This, just by itself, elated my spirits; but fate had a further dainty in store for me.  Just a few weeks later, we were again displaying abortion photos on the UNCC campus, and who should approach me but this same professor!  Unlike our first meeting, his demeanor had changed.  He wasn’t angry anymore.  More importantly, he no longer tried to defend the pro-abortion position.  I do not believe his heart has changed yet, but it was obvious that the seeds of life are growing in his heart and mind; change is inevitable!

I got an e-mail from a friend of mine.  I’ll call him Josh, because … well … that’s his real name.  Anyway, Josh was preparing for a presentation and he wanted to confirm that abortions exceeded live births in Washington, DC.  Josh is a great guy, but he needed me to tell him why abortion statistics, even if correctly remembered and dutifully repeated, do nothing to change anybody’s mind.  Here’s my reply:

Thanks for being in touch.  This answer to your question is that I don’t know. I just don’t latch onto that kind of data because I’m not really sure it matters. If you were able to get somebody to learn that fact (the ratio of abortions to births inside the DC city limits is greater than 1.0), I doubt it would change anybody’s behavior very much. You’d get a few nods from people in the room, but that’s about it. When we get all worked up about explaining the sheer numbers of abortions (1.2 million a year, 3300 a day, 1 of every 3 or 4, etc), we start to sound like anti-tax/anti-deficit activists who talk about stacking dollar bills to the moon and back. That stuff gets nods from people who are already care, but it doesn’t change their level of participation and it makes everyone else’s eyes glaze over.

Think about it this way. If “only” 5 million Jews had been killed in the death camps, would it have been any less horrifying? For the million who didn’t die, I suppose it would be. But for most of us, the fact that death camps existed pegs our horror meter already, and the statistic (whether 6 million or 5 million or 7 million) makes no difference in our response to it.

The problem with most people’s response to abortion is not that they are insufficiently horrified about millions of abortion. The problem is that most people are insufficiently horrified about every single abortion. In the minds of most people, abortion is a nominal evil, or the lesser of evils, or a necessary evil, or an evil that is so entrenched in society that nothing can be done about it anyway. Many Christians think it’s just another “cause” or “mission activity” among many, all of which cry out for their attention.  Until this changes, we have no hope of winning.

To give you an idea of how the lack of horror about abortion affects our response to it, consider the budgeting of money, staff time, and volunteer time at almost every “pro-life” church.  They spend vastly more resources on professional music presentations every Sunday (led by paid staff), church-run sports programs (organized by paid staff), etc., than they spend on stopping the killing of our own children.  They might send a couple of thousand dollars (out of a multi-million dollar budget) to a Pregnancy Resourc Center (PRC)—money well-spent, to be sure—but not much else.  People who attend those churches are having abortions in astonishing numbers.  And why are the members so complicit and/or complacent?  Because nobody has ever shown them the truth of abortion.  So they rationalize their way over to the clinic and hope the memory of it goes away.  Or they just do nothing.  They give a little money to a PRC and think nothing more about it.  What would happen if these “pro-life” churches started acting like they believe abortion really is killing a baby?  What if they were horrified?  What if they assembled as many people to pray in front of the abortion clinics every week as they assemble for choir practice?  (What if they held their choir practice at the clinic? … Now there’s an idea.)  They will never do this until they are sufficiently horrified about every single abortion that takes place.  Pictures are more important than statistics.

I can tell you that if the average “pro-life” church were as dedicated to stopping abortion as they are to promoting their church choir, this would have been over long ago.  That is why it is so important to force Christians and others to look at a picture of a single abortion. When people get a grasp of how horrifying each single abortion truly is, only then will the statistics start to mean anything.

Would Jesus Show a Bloody Picture?

A crowd gathers during class change at UNC Charlotte.

Every day’s a great day when you’re doing God’s work.  We took our ProLifeOnCampus display to UNC Charlotte (UNCC) earlier this month.  A grandmother taking classes at UNCC asked our White House volunteer Kathy Hardin for some extra brochures.  (Kathy is from White House in 10EC, not DC, for all you people in Rio Linda.)  She said her granddaughter had gotten pregnant and considered abortion but the grandmother told her not to do it if she expected any help from her.   The granddaughter is now 5 months along and keeps asking if she did the wrong thing by keeping the baby.  The grandmother said, “I want some pictures to show her what the wrong thing is!”  The next day the grandmother came back and asked for more brochures to show to the teens at her church, because she said everyone else pretends like none of them ever have abortions.  She said she wished she could bring everyone to see the pictures.

The Truth Truck passes the student center as Caleb displays a "Choice" sing and Abigail hands out pro-life literature. It's a triple whammy!

While the GAP display was set up at the Belk Tower in the middle of campus, our Truth Trucks, “Choice” signs, and educational brochure helped us project pro-life power (the power of the pictures) far beyond the display itself.  Both days during lunchtime, the Students for Life and the Hardin children (Caleb and Abigail) took four “Choice” signs and a hundreds of our “How can you compare abortion to genocide?” brochures down to the UNCC Student Center.  At the same time, our Truth Truck was circling the campus.  One student walked out of the Student Center, saw the signs and the trucks and the brochures and exclaimed, with a mixture of disgust and admiration, “They’re everywhere!”  Which is exactly where we want to be, by God’s grace and with your help.

Please help, because this is a tough economy and some have lost their jobs.  If you still have yours, would you give for yourself and for another?  Thank you so much.

Jana Tutkova, founder of CBR Slovakia, traveled to North Carolina to help this student learn how abortion denies rights of personhood.

We recently returned from taking our ProLifeOnCampus display in North Carolina.  We were invited to Western Carolina University (WCU) by the WCU College Republicans.  There’s currently no pro-life group on campus, but we’ll be working to start one.

Knoxville volunteer Debbie Picarello was able to share the love of Christ with many post-abortive women.  She also spoke with many nominally pro-life Christian students who became committed pro-lifers after being shocked and awed by our huge abortion photos.  They had never seen abortion in their pro-life churches, which explains why 1 in 5 women who abort their babies identifies herself as a “born-again” or “evangelical” Christian.

We also spoke with a number of pro-life students who are now interested in starting a new pro-life student group on campus.  Such groups can have a huge impact on public opinion among their fellow students.

Western Carolina is a major university, but it’s in a rural part of Western North Carolina.  We found few pro-lifers who were able to help us defray the costs of this visit.  Please consider a special gift of $50, $100, or $500 to help defray the costs of this campus visit.  Thanks.

ProLifeOnCampus at the University of Tennessee

I told you it was working.  Here’s yet more evidence.

Dr. Jon Shields of Claremont McKenna College, writing for The Witherspoon Institute, cites our campus outreach project (GAP) as an important causative factor in changing attitudes about abortion among Americans 18 to 29 years old. Click here for his column.

In his column, Dr. Shields cites an essay by political scientists Clyde Wilcox and Patrick Carr in Congressional Quarterly’s Understanding Public Opinion, in which they report that American 18-29 year-olds are not only “less pro-choice than any other age group,”  but “also markedly less pro-choice than [the 18-29 year-olds] in any previous decade.”

Citing these findings, Dr. Shields attributed the growing pro-life consensus among young Americans partly to

“an innovative and massive pro-life campaign on college campuses that has been organized by groups such as Justice for All and the Center for Bio-Ethical Reform.  Collectively both groups have visited well over 100 campuses (many more than once) and drawn large crowds thanks to huge displays of aborted embryos that they set up on university quads.  As I have found in my own research, such images clearly shock many of the students who pass by and draw many others into philosophical conversations with pro-life activists.  These efforts excite precisely the sort of tension between our common cultural belief in the special worth of human organisms and approval of permissive abortion laws.”

It’s working!  If you want us to do more of it, please click here to help me as generously as you can.  Only 20 people can send me and my team to a major college campus every year if they support us as faithfully as they support cable TV.  Please click here to help me and my team visit one more school where babies and moms really need us! 

More information:

• Barak Obama, Abortion, and the Democrats
• Shifting Attitudes on Abortion
• Generational Differences on Abortion Narrow
• Support for Abortion Slips

ProLifeOnCampus at University of Arizona

Here we are at the University of Arizona.  Check out the editorial in the student paper.  They don’t like us — surprise, surprise, surprise — but there is opportunity for you to comment on the editorial.

More trips to major universities are planned for this Spring, but we need your help.  If you want to win hearts, change minds, and save lives on campus, please consider a special gift of $50, $150, $1000, or more.  Click here to invest in this life-saving project.  Please consider stretching yourself a bit, because another baby’s life is at stake.

Chuck Colson exposes Planned Parenthood ties to the Girl Scouts in this online article.

There is nothing too depraved for Planned Parenthood.  Their sex guide for girls, Healthy, Happy, and Hot, teaches “there is no right way or wrong way to have sex.  Just have fun, explore and be yourself.”

It also tells girls that “some people have sex when they have been drinking alcohol or using drugs. This is your choice.”  Clearly, nothing is off limits—even for children below the age of consent.

You should also go to one of their websites, www.takecaredownthere.org, and see for yourself what Planned Parenthood encourages teens to do with each other.  Check out the video clip “I didn’t spew.”  It’s pretty gross.

This should be enough to convince any Christian parent to seek an alternative.  To help us combat Planned Parenthoods demonic agenda, please click here.

I’m starting a list of lessons learned.  Please suggest your own via comment.

1. There’s no such thing as a “pro-life” Democrat.  The pro-life side is in conflict with the Democrat side; the Democrat side wins almost every time.  One example is Lincoln Davis, who campaigned for pro-abort Harold Ford in 2008 and was listed as “undecided” on ObamaCare in the days leading up to the vote.
2. There are very few Democrats left in DC.  There are plenty of Democrats out in the country, but very few still in Congress.  The Democratic Party has now morphed into a party led by Alinsky-ites.  People like Harry Truman, John Kennedy, Scoop Jackson, etc., would not recognize the Party they have become.  If you don’t know who Saul Alinsky is, you need to educate yourself.  Read his book, Rules for Radicals.  Alinsky was an atheist who rejected any objective standard for right and wrong.  Any means for achieving the “greater good for the most people,” whatever they deem that to be, is acceptable.  His moral authority is none other than Vladimir Lenin, killer of millions.  (See chapter 2 of Rules for Radicals)
3. Dems were lying all along when they claimed to have the votes to defeat ObamaCare.  The final tally shows they didn’t have the votes until Stupak and 4 or 5 others caved.  For Alinsky-ites, lying is a tactic.  One lie is to always portray their plans as being a “done deal” as a way of disheartening their enemies.  We weren’t fooled by this, but Mr. Stupak was.
4. The coming months will demonstrate that no matter how much the Alinsky-ites (and liberals generally) get, it’s never enough.  They want more.  Harry Reid has already announced their intentions to finalize the destruction of private health care and replace it with a government system.  If you oppose them, you hate poor people, you hate minorities, you hate immigrants, etc.  They will never be satisfied until they control every aspect of American life, especially who gets what.  The best way to manipulate people’s voting behavior is to control what they get to earn, keep, and buy.  (For example, “Those evil Republicans want to take away your Social Security, your medical care, etc.)  The irony is that they want to take away your health care with a single payer system that allows them to give back to you whatever they think you should have.
5. You can never compromise with Alinsky-ites.  They are not interested in compromise.  They are interested in re-making America (a really bad place, in their minds) into their vision of what America should be.  They must be defeated.
6. We have allowed our young people to grow up ignorant of the American traditions of freedom and capitalism.  These are inseparable, because you don’t have freedom if the government controls your economic life.  Freedom means more than choosing which TV to buy.  Our generation grew up under creeping socialism and saw the results of it in the 1970s (high inflation, high interest rates, high unemployment).  We also saw how Ronald Reagan restored the principles of limited government in the 1980s, setting off a 28-yr period of unprecedented economic growth and prosperity.  Our children, nieces, and nephews didn’t see all of that.  They don’t learn about the Reagan Revolution in government schools.  People have asked me, “What can we do now?”  My answer: give your sons, daughters, nieces, and nephews a history lesson.
7. If you doubt the serious mess we are in, take a look at Europe.  High taxes suppress economic activity, with the predictable result of chronic unemployment.  Europeans have very little confidence in the future, as evidenced by their fertility rate (less than 2 per woman, well under the break-even rate).  The exception is the population of Muslims in these countries, who are having children at a rate of more than 8 per couple.  They are not assimilating into Western culture; they are maintaining their Islamic culture.  When their numbers are sufficient to control elections and institute Sharia Law, what will that do for human rights?  What about women’s rights?  Demographic experts have estimated that Germans will be a minority in their own country in 5o years.
8. Alinsky-ites have a problem with declining numbers among the voting population in the US.  Liberals they tend to have fewer children than conservatives.  Their most dependable voting group is African Americans, but the population of African Americans is actually on the decline.  (Many Planned Parenthood abortion centers are located in African American neighborhoods.)  Their solution to this problem is to grant amnesty to millions of illegal aliens and promise them a wide range of free goodies out of the public treasury in exchange for their political allegiance.  They will decry any attempt to stop this plan as motivated by hate (e.g., hate against people of color).
9. This ain’t over yet.  Never give up.  The biggest lie they have is the lie that they own us and we can’t do anything about it.  Never give up.
10. Your comments?

Check out this analysis by Michael Barone.

To summarize his major points, a fairly large number of Democrats (especially the thirty-seven who opposed ObamaCare in November) represent districts in which the bill is unpopular to wildly unpopular.  Forty-five of their districts went for John McCain.  Mr. Obama and Mrs. Pelosi are whipping these congress-people to go to the wall for ObamaCare but their constituents are pounding them to pull the plug on ObamaCare. 

We don’t have to get the “undecided” Members to announce their opposition to ObamaCare, we just have to keep them from pledging to support ObamaCare.  And in that pursuit we have the tactical advantage of trying to get these guys to do what comes naturally to them:  The cowardly thing!  Nothing at all!  They just want this to go away without having to vote “no” and getting punished by Mr. Obama and Mrs. Pelosi, or “yes” and losing their seats.  If enough of them stick together and refuse to commit, vote counter Rep. Jim Clyburn (the Dem Whip in the House) can’t tell Mrs. Pelosi that she is now within the six or so vote deficit that would embolden her to bring the bill to the floor and then water-board the weakest half-dozen resisters till they caved.  Mrs. Pelosi thinks she can brow-beat five of these guys into submission with the question called and the vote board open but she knows she can’t brow-beat twenty-five.  And she doesn’t want to risk a very humiliating, televised (C-SPAN) defeat.  That is why Mr. Clyburn (who, remember, is the guy actually counting these votes) says the vote could slip till after Easter. 

 Every day we can keep the “undeclared” from “declaring” worsens the odds for Mrs. Pelosi because there is limit to how long even she and Mr. Obama can tie up the entire mechanism of government on this bill. Our trucks and planes clearly foster indecision and as an obscure Air Force Colonel once observed, “He triumphs who merely escapes defeat till his adversary runs out of gas – or becomes progressively more spooked by the scary mid-term elections which are coming nearer by the day.”  Delay is our friend.  It should be the real focus of our prayer.

Please keep praying.  Try fasting  too.  And please keep calling, e-mailing, facebooking, and twittering (see posting below).

In a previous post, I gave you a list of 30 US Congressmen to call (list repeated below).  Some of you have experienced difficulties getting through.  Some strategies:

• Call the local offices, not just the DC offices.
• Call them after hours, when fewer people are trying to call, and leave a clear message on the answering machine.
• Contact them by e-mail, if you can.
• Contact them through their facebook pages.  This has the added advantage of not being screened out because you live in another district.
• Contact them through Twitter.  Send them a “tweet.”  This has the added advantage of not being screened out because you live in another district.

Here’s the list again:

• Terre Haute, Indiana
• Terre Haute, Indiana
• South Bend, Indiana
• Indianapolis, Indiana
• Evansville, Indiana

We can’t do this by ourselves.  Your gift of $300 will buy a tank of truck fuel, enough to drive two full days.  Click here to help.

Praying and fasting wouldn’t hurt either.  The bill before the House would set back the pro-life movement for decades.

Goverment health care would deliver a lower quality of health care to your family at a much higher cost to you.  What a concept.  Make no mistake — the purpose of this bill is to destroy the system we have, so that people will later cry out for the Government to come back in and “fix” it.  Read Alinsky’s book and other writings of his disciples (Barak Obama being one of them).  Look at how TennCare pushed a lot of people out of private insurance onto the public dole.  Now the government can’t sustain it, leaving people worse off than they were.

Example Blue Dog Truck Sign

Fox News has reported that another US Congressman targeted by CBR’s Blue Dog Campaign has announced that he will not vote for the current version of ObamaCare.  Rep. Joe Donnelly (D-IN) announced that he “would not vote for it” because it funds abortion.  This report came just hours after CBR announced the next phase of it’s campaign urging voters in selected districts to call their representatives and oppose taxpayer-funded abortion.  Rep. Donnelly was one of those targeted.

This is the fourth such announcement by Blue Dogs in the House which have been targeted by CBR’s ongoing campaign.

The campaign features a fleet of billboard trucks bearing large abortion photos to remind voters that abortion is not health care and consequently should not be taxpayer-funded, either directly or indirectly.  The “truth trucks” will continue to operate until the final vote on ObamaCare is taken.  Click here to see the press release.

CBR can do this only through the generous support of people like you.  Click here to help.  Your gift of $100 would buy fuel for a single day of driving.  $600 would buy fuel for a week!

With Rep. Donnelly’s announcement, this next phase of CBR’s campaign will now focus on these representatives:

• Rep. Brad Ellsworth (D-IN)
• Rep. Baron Hill (D-IN)
• Rep. John Boccieri (D-OH)
• Rep. Bart Gordon (D-TN)
• Rep. Dennis Cardoza (D-CA)
• Rep. Chris Carney (D-PA)
• Rep. Tom Periello (D-VA)

President Obama wants to pass this thing next week. Please help today, because every day counts.

Sharing the healing and hope.

Last night I attended the first fundraising banquet for Deeper Still, a post-abortion healing ministry based here in Knoxville.  Karen Ellison and her team are doing a great job over at Deeper Still.  I first became aware of their ministry when former client and now team member Debbie Picarello volunteered to help with our campus outreach ministry at the University of  Tennessee (UTK).  Debbie is a poster child for what they are doing at Deeper Still.  After experiencing the healing that comes from confession and forgiveness, she is taking that same healing to others.  At UTK, Debbie wore a sign on her shirt that said “I’ve had an abortion; ask me about it!”  Her witness helped us reach post-abortive and other students at UTK in ways we never could have otherwise.  In the following weeks, Debbie took the same message to the students at the University of California at Berkeley.  Hope and  healing are an important part of what we are doing at CBR through our campus outreach project.