Nearly every attendee saw one of our photos and was offered an explanation of why we displayed abortion photos at the Passion Conference.

Picture this:  20,000 Christian young people, all gathered under one roof.  Worshiping, praying and hearing the Word from Louie Gigglio, John Piper, Francis Chan, and others.  This is the Passion Conference, an annual gathering in Atlanta.

Passion challenges young people to raise awareness of modern-day slavery, an evil that beggars the imagination.  For weeks after the conference, attendees use social media, bracelets, and bumper stickers to “shine a light” on slavery.

But there is a victim whose voice has not been heard at Passion.  It is the voice of preborn children.  Here is the irony: It is unlikely that any Passion attendee will ever be tempted to buy a slave, but many of them will certainly be tempted to kill their own children (or know someone who will be).  According to the Guttmacher Institute, 1 in 5 abortions are performed on evangelical or born-again Christians.

What could happen if these young people were as fired up to “shine a light” on the killing of preborn people as they are about the enslavement of born people?  While most of them can do little to actually free human slaves, they can do much to stop the killing of preborn children in their own churches and communities.

With this vision in mind, CBR staff conducted an all-day outreach on the sidewalks near Philips Arena, where Passion 2014 took place.  Displaying “Choice” signs at nearly every entrance to Philips Arena, nearly all of the 20,000 attendees would see our signs during the day.  We gave out nearly 4,000 of our new “Why This? Why Here?” brochure, which exhorts Christians to take a stand.

How did Passion attendees respond?  See “Passion Part 2” to find out!

Members of Operation Outcry and Georgia Right to Life helped CBR reach thousands of Christian students at Passion 2014.

Submitted by: Lincoln Brandenburg, CBR Georgia Project Director

At Northern Kentucky University, showing abortion photos created more informed dialogue than anything else we could have done.

When you suit up for pro-life work, what would you rather do, feel good or make an impact?

Unfortunately, many of us have adopted a form of “strategic relativism,” in which any strategy or tactic used to fight abortion is just as good as any other.  People say things like, “You fight abortion your way and I’ll fight it my way.”

The inevitable result is that many of us (perhaps most) are engaged in activities that aren’t particularly effective at winning hearts, changing minds, or saving lives, nearly as much as they are good at making pro-lifers feel good about doing them.

While it’s true that our movement has multiple components, just as the body has many parts (I Corinthians 12:12-31), this principle does not mean all strategies/tactics are equally valuable or effective.  In business, construction, child rearing, war, and every other field of human endeavor, there are some methods that simply work better than others.  We would be mad to choose whatever feels good, when experience and logic demand we employ tactics that actually work better.

Don’t be a strategic relativist!  The babies deserve your best.

But that’s not all.  The people who give time and treasure to your work also deserve your best.  They give sacrificially.  Shouldn’t they count on you to invest wisely?

And finally, think of yourself.  If you are investing yourself in this work, don’t you want to maximize your own personal return on investment?  Let’s put it this way: if you had a 401K, would you settle for a 2% annual return when another investment was paying a guaranteed 25%?

Abortion pictures are an indispensable tactic because they force large numbers of people (literally, everyone in sight) to learn and reflect on the two most important facts: (1) the preborn child is a living human being, and (2) abortion is an act of violence that destroys a living baby.  Abortion pictures prevent honest people from denying these facts.

Pro-lifers love to talk about creating dialogue.  The record is clear: when you show thousands of passersby exactly what abortion is and does, you create more dialogue (and more informed dialogue) than anything else you can do.

Note:  FAB is indebted to CBR Maryland for inspiring and contributing to this article.  The good folks at CBR Maryland are definitely making an impact!

Above: Mark Wolf (Ohio) speaks to one student as CBR volunteer Julie Thomas (Georgia) looks on. Julie is wearing a t-shirt that says “I regret my abortion. Ask me about it.”
Below: Mark speaks with Alex Godbey, the president of Students for Life at EKU. Alex is already a great leader for the pro-life movement.

“Do you believe in welfare for women who become pregnant?”

Olivia, a student at Eastern Kentucky University (EKU) asked this question of CBR volunteer Mark Wolf.  Usually, questions like this are simply attempts to change the subject.  They don’t want to talk about the decapitation and dismemberment of little human beings, so they bring up every conceivable societal problem known to man.  If pro-lifers can’t solve all of them, then abortion must be retained as the solution of final resort (the final solution?).  And not just for mothers who face difficult circumstances, but for all mothers.

EKU was our third stop on a 2-week GAP trip through Kentucky.  It was our third visit to that campus, the latest being in April 2011.  It was cold, but we didn’t let that deter us from winning hearts, changing minds, and saving lives at EKU.  Media coverage:

• Anti-abortion display on Powell Corner

Olivia pressed her point, “Do you support free access to contraception?”

Mark pointed to one of the 10-week abortion photos (a picture of a hand and an arm on a dime) and asked, “Is it ever morally justifiable to do this to another human being?”  Her eyes moved to the picture and focused on the remains of the child, and she struggled with the reality of abortion as if she saw it for the very first time.

Mark gave her time to process the image.  When she again tried to change the subject, Mark described what happened in a D&E abortion, and asked her if it is ever morally acceptable to do that to another human being.  She again stared at the image and struggled with what she saw.  Finally she said that she would have to “get [her] sources” and then she walked away.

Of course some people change their minds right there on the spot.  But many, like Olivia, need time to consider the facts and weigh the arguments.  Let us pray for Olivia and many more like her who are struggling with the truth they saw on campus last week.

Maybe Olivia will become the next Julie:

Bryan McKinney with daughter Elizabeth.

A group of Black women approached CBR volunteer Bryan McKinney at Northern Kentucky University (NKU).  Bryan had joined us for the entire Kentucky GAP tour, along with his wife Christy and his 2-year-old daughter Elizabeth.  What an awesome family!

Shirby Ferguson, President of the Black United Students (BUS), told Bryan that BUS officers and members had e-mailed and texted her about the Genocide Awareness Project (GAP) display.  They were upset about the use of lynching photos in our display.  Shirby said none of them had the courage to come out and speak with us, so she was there representing all of them.

Before long, Shirby and Bryan were engrossed in dialogue that lasted well over half an hour.  Bryan explained that CBR’s entire operating philosophy comes from the King family.  Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. (MLK) said that America would never reject racism until America saw racism.  Dr. King’s niece, Dr. Alveda King, now says that, in the same way, America will never reject abortion until America sees abortion.

MLK compared racial injustice to the Holocaust on many levels, particularly with respect the dehumanization of their intended victims.  Additionally, MLK knew people needed to see pictures of racial injustice to understand the plight of the Black man, just like they needed to see pictures of the death camps to understand the horror of the Holocaust.

Once Bryan explained that MLK and other social reformers in US history had used images to help change hearts and minds, Shirby immediately changed her mind about our display.  She had been pro-life already, but she had not understood why our display used the comparisons that we did.  She stayed for over an hour to speak with other volunteers and staff members, accompanied by BUS members.

Bryan also mentioned that, as a white man, images of racial injustice were the closest he could ever come to understanding her personal connection with the injustice of racism.  On the other hand, images of Holocaust victims were the closest she could ever come to understanding his personal connection with the Holocaust, a time during which several of Bryans relatives were killed.

Your humble correspondent was interviewed by Tom Dupree on WLAP Radio, the Rush Limbaugh station in Lexington.  To listen to the podcast, click here.

This interview was aired on Sunday morning, October 26.  Tom is a great interviewer.  We covered a lot of serious ground, but it was fun, too.  Hope you enjoy listening.

Sign-holding protesters (right side of walkway) draw big crowds at Auburn University. They tried to defend the indefensible, but could not. Having failed that, they called us names or simply tried to change the subject. But all of it focused attention on GAP and abortion.

History is clear on this point: injustice can be defeated only by reformers who confront evil and accept persecution from angry defenders of the status quo.  People who exploit others are enraged when their cruel tyranny is threatened.  When William Wilberforce used pictures to win the debate over slavery, he was attacked in the newspapers, physically assaulted, and even threatened with death.  But he showed the pictures anyway.

Conflict is not only an indicator that the status quo is threatened; it is also a facilitator of change.  It focuses public attention in ways nothing else will.  Dr. Martin Luther King said, “I am not afraid of the word ‘tension.’  I have earnestly opposed violent tension, but there is a type of constructive, nonviolent tension which is necessary for growth.”  This tension created a public forum in which racists were forced to defend segregation.  They could not do it, so the reformers won.

Images like this educated the public on the evils of slavery. Additionally, they created the kind of tension/conflict that (a) forced the public to think about slavery and (b) created a public forum that forced slave traders to defend the indefensible.

CBR Maryland at the Bel Air Festival for the Arts

It seems that CBR Maryland’s presence is becoming well known in the Washington-Baltimore area.  “Jack” recently posted the following on Facebook, next to a photo of our Black Genocide Awareness Project display:

Jack ——-, August 25:

I saw these guys at the March yesterday and they really bothered me – they show up at most big events in DC, like a bloody wet blanket.  Dear Bloody Baby Guys,  I see your oversized panels of blood, guts and tiny human parts at most large gatherings on the Mall and it offends me. But frankly you bore me, and I can’t take you seriously and you all are aggressively annoying and I think, intellectually dishonest.

Unbeknownst to Jack, one of his own Facebook friends was CBR Maryland volunteer David, who responded, instigating the following conversation:

David ——-, August 25:

Hi Jack. If you continued down to the second to last sign on the left you would have found me. I didn’t see you there so maybe you didn’t see that at least 6 of our members were women. For the most part people seemed interested, shook my hand, and thanked me for being there.

Jack ——-, August 25:

Dave, I am proud to call you a friend and neighbor! Much love back at ya!  Please answer this, Dave, why the giant gross-out signs? Such a negative presence, I personally don’t like them, but further I can’t imagine they win many to your cause. For every one person you may win I suspect you drive away 20!

David ——-, August 25:

I believe that it is important to put a real face on the victims of abortion just as for years we have put a real face on the victims of poverty, war, human trafficking. You know this from Time, Life, and so on. Young people who see these images begin conversations because they are so shocking and then we instantly have another pro-lifer for the rest of her/his life. Never does it work in the reverse unless that person is nuts. 40 years of legal abortion on demand at any stage of fetal development and very little change in public policy because when people say choice they think “reproductive health rights”. The images will help associate “choice” or “right to choose” with the true end product of the wrong choice, a dead baby.

Tim ——-, August 25:

I think that was a great explanation.

Jack’s comments are proof positive that, despite the media blackout, pro-lifers can still succeed in getting their message across to the community.  If it can be done in DC, it can be done anywhere!  If this is what we can do with a mere sixteen volunteers, image what would be possible with a hundred or more!

Jonathan Darnel speaks to a group of young people

CBR peacefully confronts a crowd of 350,000 with the truth. What an honor to bring light to this darkened place! What a tragedy more pro-lifers don’t do it.

FAB is grateful to CBR Maryland Operations for filing this report.

Pro-life activism at it’s best — Artscape 2013

Again this year, CBR rocked the Baltimore art scene to its core with three days of non-consentual, anti-abortion witnessing.  Twenty volunteers helped reveal the truth of child-killing to a crowd of 350,000.  Many of them were willing to see and hear the pro-life message.  Reactions ranged from extremely hostile to enthusiastically supportive.  In fact, four people came out of the crowd and joined our demonstration!

On Friday, a woman who had protested against us last year turned up again, this time with spray paint.  She defaced one of our signs and violently assaulted a volunteer before being apprehended by Baltimore police officers.  There were many more incidents of vitriol and rage, but this was the only physical assault, thanks to the diligence of the Baltimore Police Department.

Two volunteers abandon their plans for the day to help save babies. Will you abandon your plans for the day and help? Whether you hold a sign yourself or buy a sign for somebody else to hold, your contribution saves lives.

Saturday and Sunday gave us greater exposure, as the size and density of the crowd increased.  Our headline banner could be read seen from the other end of the fairway, so we attracted a great deal of attention.  People of all races, ages, and backgrounds passed by to read our messages and see the reality of abortion.  We spoke to Satanists, eugenicists, homosexuals, atheists, Christians, post-abortive women, adopted children, and a self-described socially liberal, gay, pro-life young woman running for state delegate.  The diversity of human emotions and reactions was incredible.

It is often saddening to see how absolutely the pro-abortion narrative dominates people’s thinking, despite their pro-life instincts.  Over and over, they confirm what CBR Executive Director Gregg Cunningham has long said,

When the topic of abortion comes up, the average IQ in the room drops by about 40 points.

People have taught themselves to believe really stupid things about abortion that they don’t … well … things they don’t really believe.

We met several who did not believe late term abortions were performed in Maryland.  The assumption that the world is overpopulated was almost universal.  Few people, even the most intelligent, had a coherent idea of what constitutes a “person,” almost as if they had never considered the question before — which most probably hadn’t.  As always, many had simply never seen what an abortion looks like.

What an honor to bring light to this darkened place!  What a tragedy more pro-lifers don’t do it.

As we departed for the last time Sunday afternoon, a police officer quietly shared with one volunteer that his parents had considered aborting his younger brother, yet chose life instead.  This same brother is now designing satellite systems.  What a testimony!  If only every unborn child were given the same chance!

The pro-life movement cannot afford to overlook opportunities like Artscape.  Everywhere we turn, there are people whose pro-abortion assumptions have never been challenged.  How can we expect to win without converting people to our side?  Babies are being murdered even as you read this.  To save them, we must reach our fellow citizens … where they are … and make them see.  Please help us do it.  There is no time to waste.

Outside a Baltimore Abortuary

CBR Maryland reports on how a graphic abortion video on the Center for Bio-Ethical Reform’s (CBR’s) website, AbortionNO.org, was used to save a baby’s life.

“Star” was counseling for only the second time ever outside Planned Parenthood (PP)of Baltimore.  Among the numerous couples she approached was a woman in her 30’s, escorted by her male friend.  While mom didn’t want to speak to anyone, her friend was willing to hang around and chat.  Like most people headed into an abortion clinic, he was convinced that this was the only choice.

Star procured a smart phone and persuaded him to watch the graphic abortion video posted on AbortionNO.org.  He was visibly disturbed and told her that witnessing abortion certainly did change his perspective.  Eventually mom came out again to retrieve her friend, who urged her to view the video herself.  Reluctantly, she did, and experienced the same paradigm shift.

Star continued counseling these two for 30 minutes, aided by other counselors on scene, until at last the couple departed the clinic, armed with information on a local crisis pregnancy center.  Victory!

Star was instrumental in another save that same day, and in a third encounter used the graphic video to persuade a woman to reenter the clinic and attempt to get her abortion-minded friend out of there (result inconclusive).

CBR encourages the use of graphic abortion images outside abortion mills.  The pictures do not make the sidewalk counselors unapproachable, and they have been instrumental in deterring several women from aborting their children.  Praise God that an image of man’s inhumanity can become a tool of life and love!

New report by Reuters says that graphic anti-smoking ads have resulted in 100,000 people kicking the habit.  Apparently, when people saw pictures of what smoking actually does to people, it motivated them to stop.

You reckon graphic images of abortion might work for the pro-life movement?

.

You could say that … but probably not 3 times really fast!

Anyway, great story in World Magazine on the Battle for Babies at Biola.  Link to World Magazine story here.  Link to original video here.

Excerpts:

She always considered herself pro-life, but after watching a video of an actual abortion earlier this year, she realized its horror and decided to do something about it.

***

[CBR Executive Director Gregg] Cunningham, pointing to social reforms such as slavery, child labor, and the civil rights movement, says public opinion changes only after people see images depicting the reality of the injustices. He says Christians have been overly concerned with not offending people, and he says schools like Biola help “Planned Parenthood hide the horror of abortion. … We’re losing ground until Christian colleges are willing to get serious and provide systematic leadership in defense of life.”

***

But when the fall semester begins on August 28, CBR is planning to greet returning students with large abortion posters at every campus entrance, along with aerial images pulled by planes flying over the university. Cunningham’s goal is for Christian schools to be radically pro-life, with programs and majors devoted to training activists: “It’s not going to happen until some china gets broken. We don’t wish it to be that way, but some china will get broken.”

For more, link to full story here.

Christian leaders, including the pro-life ones, have 10 people/day coming at them with some kind of agenda.  We pro-lifers are just another one of the 10.  For just that one day.  By the end of the week, we are forgotten and so are the children and moms we represent.  Unless we can create the kind of tension/conflict that forces many more pro-life Christian leaders to think about abortion — and hopefully act to end it — babies and moms will continue to be ignored.

Please pray that God will open doors for the kind of constructive tension/conflict that brings growth.  And pray that God will raise up Christians with the courage to walk through those doors.  To help create more growth-inducing tension at Christian schools, link here.

CBR volunteers show what “family planning” looks like to NEA delegates.

On Monday morning, July 1st, delegates of the National Education Association’s (NEA) annual assembly were in for an eyeful as they made their way to the Georgia World Congress Center in Atlanta.

CBR volunteers from all over Georgia stood at the intersection of Andrew Young International Boulevard and Marietta Street with CBR’s handheld “Choice” signs, which depict images of early-term aborted fetuses. Our group’s positions were adjusted throughout the morning to adapt to changing traffic patterns.

CBR was working alongside other pro life organizations, including Georgia Right to Life (GRTL) and Pro Life Educators of America (PLEA), to bring a message to the NEA: adopt a neutral position on abortion.

“We are not asking the NEA delegates to do a one-eighty and change our union’s abortion position and activism to being pro-life,” said Bob Pawson, Director of PLEA and  NEA member, “We are asking that our union be verifiably neutral and totally non-involved regarding abortion. And stop hiding their advocacy behind euphemistic language such as ‘reproductive freedom’ or ‘all methods of family planning,’” Pawson said.

CBR works to effectively dismantle such euphemisms. While other pro life advocates used text signs to exhort the NEA to neutralize it’s pro-abortion position, the graphic pictures we used showed exactly what certain methods of “reproductive freedom” and “family planning” do to unborn children (and future students).

The Truth Truck made several rounds in front of the CNN News Center in Atlanta.

NEA members were also shown the true meaning of these genteel phrases by billboard-sized abortion images on CBR’s “Truth Truck.” Our truck made rounds in the Georgia World Congress Center vicinity throughout the mornings and afternoons of July 1 and July 2, insuring that as many NEA delegates as possible would be exposed to the brutality that their union’s official resolution currently supports.

“Normally, in America’s news media, when citizens hear or read press reports about teacher unions and picketing, it is the union DOING the picketing; usually demanding more money. This event is one of those unusual instances in which the NEA Teacher Union is the TARGET OF PICKETING; ironically, by NEA members, taxpayer-parents, and students. The very constituencies which the NEA leadership touts itself as supposedly serving,” said Pawson.

While we received some of the usual irate responses, several passersby paused to observe and ask questions about the images. One driver, a young African-American woman, rolled down her window to address one of our volunteers when stopped at the traffic light:

“Excuse me, is that a real picture?”

“Yes, it is”

“Awe.” She was audibly saddened by what she saw.

Much conversation was overheard among pedestrians regarding abortion and the NEA’s stance on abortion. While some doubted that the NEA took a pro abortion stance, others indicated that they were previously unaware of the fact before encountering the message being shown to them. Pro life NEA members in particular expressed appreciation of CBR’s message and our assistance in reforming the teacher’s union.

For more on the NEA’s position, please see http://www.grtl.org/?q=NEA-pro-abortion-tendencies

Submitted by: Lincoln Brandenburg

Diana Jimenez

Even while Biola University was doing its best to suppress the truth of abortion on campus, a baby’s life was saved by the one student with the courage to break the rules.

The following was posted at ArmsOfAudio.com:

There are a lot of people bashing Diana right now but first hand I can tell you she did what she was told to do.  I am 20.  A student of Biola and always claimed to be prolife.  I thought that until I got a positive pregnancy test.  This came after a night of partying just outside the campus and had a one night stand with a youth pastor in training.  I was going to go to Planned Parenthood that day and as I walked through campus her signs made me realize there is a human life in my womb ….  In that moment I went to my dorm room got on my knees and asked that I would have the strength to be my baby’s mom.  STOP saying she didn’t follow her stupid rules.  God came through for me because of her.  And Susan Elliot is a tool of the devil.

Dr. La Verne Tolbert recently blogged the claim that “Biola University is pro-life.”

CBR Executive Director Gregg Cunningham replied:

Gregg Cunningham response to La Verne Tolbert

Pastor Clenard Childress, my long-time, highly-valued friend, and a man who has served for nearly twenty years on the board of our pro-life Center For Bio-Ethical Reform (CBR), just forwarded to me your [blog posting], criticizing what you apparently misunderstand to be our attitudes and activities regarding Biola’s punishment of a nursing student who displayed abortion photos on Biola’s campus.  Because your concerns seem to derive from several mistaken assumptions of fact, I believe it might be helpful I offer you a somewhat different perspective on these issues.

To provide some context for this discussion, the public abortion photo display of which you disapprove saved the life of the child of at least one Biola student.  At ArmsOfAudio.com this young mother posted the following:

There are a lot of people bashing Diana right now but first hand I can tell you she did what she was told to do. I am 20. A student of Biola and always claimed to be prolife. I thought that until I got a positive pregnancy test. This came after a night of partying just outside the campus and had a one night stand with a youth pastor in training. I was going to go to Planned Parenthood that day and as I walked through campus her signs made me realize there is a human life in my womb ….  In that moment I went to my dorm room got on my knees and asked that I would have the strength to be my baby’s mom. STOP saying she didn’t follow her stupid rules. God came through for me because of her. And Susan Elliot is a tool of the devil.

First of all, your excellent pro-life reputation precedes you Dr. Tolbert, and we deeply appreciate all you do to defend unborn life conduct youth ministry.

Your important efforts in the fields of abandonment and adoption are also close to our hearts because my wife and I have adopted three little orphan girls abandoned because of disfiguring birth defects.  We are in the process of adopting a fourth who was abandoned because she was born with cerebral palsy.

We additionally share your devotion to Biola.  My wife is a graduate of Biola’s nursing program.  Our Director of Operations has a science degree from Biola.  Our Director of Administration is a graduate of Biola’s Talbot Theological Seminary.  Our International Director has a degree from Talbot.  We are currently attempting to hire a potential recruit who also has a Biola degree.  One of our student interns intends to enroll at Talbot next year.  The accusation that we are trying to discredit Biola is utterly without basis in fact.  We are merely exposing Biola’s discreditable treatment of a student who broke the rules of man when they conflicted with the laws of God.  We are also urging Biola to do more to inspire and equip its students to enter into full-time pro-life ministry.

Equally baseless is your contention that we are accusing Biola of not being pro-life.  Of course Biola is “pro-life,” but that means little when Biola’s ban on the public display of abortion photos is killing babies just like the one Ms. Jimenez saved when she defied that un-Godly ban.  Biola, along with virtually every other Christian school, is helping Planned Parenthood hide the horror of abortion.  Biola — and the rest Christian higher education — is failing to offer an entire major with courses specifically designed to qualify students for full-time service in pro-life ministry.  Occasional lectures and chapel presentations are no substitute for the sort of serious curricular reform without which the pro-life movement will continue to be hampered by undue reliance on part-time, amateur volunteers to save babies — while the abortion industry employs full-time, paid-staff professionals to kill them.

We appreciate your use of a video which includes brief glimpses of two of our abortion photos.  We wish you would have chosen to show it during the Biola Chapel event at which you recently spoke.  I am certain you are aware, however, that Biola students are not required to attend every chapel presentation, and those who most need to see the horror of abortion are the students who are least likely to attend pro-life lectures.  I know this from personal experience because I have delivered multiple pro-life talks at Biola and they were poorly attended, despite the fact that they were heavily promoted.

We did not create the Biola controversy.  Biola created controversy.  We merely exposed it.  What half of the story which you accuse us of omitting could justify the abusive, vindictive bullying of Biola’s administrators and police?

You say the nursing student had several options and your point seems to be that some of those options would not have broken the rules.  As a black woman, you must certainly be aware that Martin Luther King also had several options which would not have broken the rules in Birmingham, AL in 1963.  But none of the approved options would have advanced the cause of civil rights and none of the Biola nurse’s approved options would have advanced the cause of unborn children.  With all due respect, “panel discussions” never ended any terrible injustice.

Your assertion that “…if graphic images were the solution that would end abortion, abortion would have ended 30 years ago!” could not be more incorrect.  Most pro-life organizations and all Christian colleges and the entire church have worked tirelessly to suppress any widespread display of abortion imagery.  That is why we are losing!

Then you accuse us of “defaming Christians” when all we are doing is forcing a debate Biola is attempting to avoid.  Mature believers should have the intellectual honesty to disagree without personalizing differences as “defamation” Your nearly fanatical loyalty to Biola has sadly blinded you to the University’s guilt in shamefully abusing this student.

You question the student’s use of a video camera despite the fact that this officer was trying to turn off so no one would see him exceed his authority.  Thank God we have a record of his misconduct.  Without it there would be no accountability.  That camera might have deterred even worse abuses.  People who are about to do bad things always want to stop the filming.  On September 23, 1957 as the first black students integrated the Little Rock, Arkansas High School, “ … the mob turned its anger on white journalists on the scene.  Life magazine reporter Paul Welch and two photographers, Grey Villet and Francis Miller, were harassed and beaten.  The photographers’ equipment was smashed to the ground.”  (Eyes On The Prize, America’s Civil Rights Years, 1954-1965, Juan Williams, Penguin Books, 1987.)

Here is what really happened at Biola and below the link is my critique of the University’s misconduct:  http://www.jillstanek.com/2013/06/christian-university-retaliates-against-pro-life-student-for-showing-graphic-reality-of-abortion/

Biola is spinning this scandal as reasonable punishment for a student who repeatedly broke the rules.  In Matthew 15:8-9, Christ rebukes religious leaders who teach the rules of man as though they were the laws of God.  Jesus does not love rules more than lives.  In Mark 3:4, Jesus asked rhetorically whether it is lawful to break rules to save lives.  Ms. Jimenez was trying to save the lives of babies, some of whose mothers could only be reached with photos that broke Biola’s rules.  Jesus repeatedly broke rules to save lives by, for instance, healing on the Sabbath.  He criticized legalists who had the hard hearts of Pharisees.  Ephesians 5:11 commands us to expose the “deeds of darkness.”  Diana Jimenez defied the rules of Biola in fidelity to the laws of God.  Lives were almost certainly saved.  May others follow her righteous example.

In Jeremiah 7:1-7 God commanded his prophet to “Stand in the gate of the Lord’s house…” (verse 2) for the purpose of confronting His people over the sin of “shedding innocent blood” in the form of child sacrifice (verse 6).  Jeremiah was terribly persecuted and so was Ms. Jimenez.

Susan Elliott, Biola’s director of nursing, ordered the faculty to deny Diana Jimenez routinely granted letters of reference for use in applying for nursing jobs.  Our lawyers are examining Biola’s active attempts to sabotage Ms. Jimenez’s employment prospects because they believe this sort of vindictive cruelty is not only unwarranted, but it is unlawful.  How is it not a scandal for the administration of Christian college to destroy a student’s career … for holding up an abortion photo?  What chilling message does this send to already risk-averse faculty members?

In more than twenty years of pro-life ministry on hundreds of college campuses, I have never seen pagan administrators at any secular school abuse their authority as egregiously as have the supposedly Christian administrators at Biola.  Vengeance of this sort is more commonly associated with cults, such as Scientology, which retaliate against former members who expose embarrassing church practices.

The administration says it bans abortion photos to create a “safe” place for students on campus. “Safe” from what?  The burden of having to avert their gaze if they don’t want to see a picture which will save a classmate’s baby?  Biola is infantilizing its educational experience.  It is robbing students of coping skills and leadership abilities.  Most other Christian colleges are as bad or worse.  That may be why Christian sociologist and pollster George Barna reports that only 6% of Protestant pastors believe they have the gift of leadership.  Barna has fallen out of favor in Evangelical circles for calling attention to surveys which document the awkward fact that lay people increasingly lack biblical world views because Christian leaders increasingly lack biblical world views.

In Luke 16:20-21, the friends of Lazarus carry this poor, sick, disabled vagrant to the gates of a rich man.  They took him there in the hope that the rich man would take pity on their pathetic friend.  The rich man had attempted to create a “safe” place, behind gates, on private property, in which he and his family would not be troubled by disturbing sights such as hungry beggars dying with open wounds.  Depositing Lazarus at the rich man’s gate made his plight impossible to trivialize or ignore.  This in-your-face gesture was an annoying, disruptive, cry for help.  The rich man would have banned it had he been able.  But Jesus seems to have approved.  It was in that spirit that Diana Jimenez carried pictures of aborted babies to the center of her Christian college campus.

By God’s grace, on public university campuses, our Center for Bio-Ethical Reform (CBR) has saved countless babies (view the testimonies abortionNO.org) of students who told us that nothing less shocking than our abortion photos would have sufficed to dissuade them from aborting.  None would have come to see our photos had they been displayed at some more obscure location.  Many claimed the Name of Christ but mistakenly underestimated abortion’s evil.  There are no words which are adequate to describe the magnitude of the evil abortion represents.  It must be seen to be fully understood.

Biola teaches that abortion is evil but refuses to prove how evil it actually is.  This lapse causes many Biola students to kill their babies under the mistaken impression that abortion is the lesser-of-two-evils.

Many pro-life activists are now accusing Biola of caring more about the feelings of born children than the lives of unborn children, but the issue of children being traumatized by abortion photos is a red herring.  Ms. Jimenez offered to surround her display with warning signs which would have given adults all the notice required to steer children away from her abortion photos.

When Biola helps Planned Parenthood hide the horror of abortion, savable babies are butchered and vulnerable mothers are abused.  The history of social reform, from the abolition of slavery, to the enactment of prohibitions against child labor, to the civil rights movement, etc., is the history of shocking pictures.  Before the display of pictures, words failed to change many minds on any of these issues. No injustice has ever been reformed by covering it up.  Countless black children saw and were horrified by the photos of Emmitt Till’s mutilated body when they were published in the Detroit Defender and Jet Magazine.  But those photos also inspired Martin Luther King and Rosa Parks to start the civil rights movement with a bus-boycott in Montgomery, Alabama.

This university argues that “we’re all pro-life here” and then attempts to minimize this dispute as little more than predictable differences over strategy and tactics.  That’s not true.  Biola’s administration gushes about what it does concerning abortion (largely half-measures offered as fig leaves) in an effort to avoid any debate over what it refuses to do, which is to expose the whole truth.  Biola quotes from its official documents which condemn abortion.  But the priest and Levite who passed by on the other side of the beating in Christ’s Parable of the Good Samaritan would have condemned street violence.  They would have felt pity for victims of street violence.  But they weren’t willing to show pity for victims of street violence.  They refused to take risks and make sacrifices to intervene on behalf of those victims.  Words without meaningful action are as empty as faith without works.  James 2:16 warns that “If one of you says to them, ‘Go in peace; keep warm and well fed,’ but does nothing about their physical needs, what good does it do?”  Biola isn’t doing “nothing” for the unborn, but Biola refuses to do what most needs to be done, which is exposing the horror and inspiring students to fight that horror with their diplomas because doing so would create uncomfortable risk and require painful sacrifice.

Had the Good Samaritan been a Biola grad, he might have preached John 3:16 while the beating victim bled to death.

In 1963, Martin Luther King found himself in a dilemma similar to that with which Diana Jimenez was confronted at Biola.  Like Biola’s administrators, the civil rights leaders in Birmingham, Alabama were insulted by MLK’s contention that they weren’t doing enough.  In reply, they anathematized Dr. King as a disruptive, dangerous outsider and demanded that he stay out of their city.  They resentfully argued that his use of confrontation was counterproductive and that their more diplomatic resort to education and negotiation and litigation was the way forward.  MLK countered that their tepid methods had failed and that invisible violence against blacks needed to be made shockingly visible, or public opinion would never support political reform.

He believed that racists who had been abusing blacks in private needed to be provoked into abusing them in public, where a sympathetic press could make disturbing photographs with which to build support for social reform.  Injustice needed to be dramatized and given a human face and like Ms. Jimenez, he would have to break the rules to save lives.  He understood that blacks would pay a heavy price for these tactics but believed that things had to get worse before they could get better.  And he was willing to pay that price with them.

Birmingham was then America’s most segregated city and it was home to the country’s most violent Klan chapter.  Local racists had coerced the black community into an ugly understanding:  If blacks accepted tolerable abuses, whites would not escalate those abuses to intolerable levels.  MLK’s decision to upset this fragile coalition between the city’s oppressors and its oppressed was opposed by local civil rights leaders, in part, because it was bad for business.  In addition to inviting heightened persecution, it damaged the city’s economy and reputation.  But Dr. King needed horrifying pictures and he was willing to break many rules to get them.  He pushed past local obstructionists whom he derided as civil rights “moderates,” and the outcome was the passage of the Civil Rights Act of 1964 and the Voting Rights Act of 1965.

Richard B. Speed’s review of Mark Kurlansky’s book 1968: The Year That Rocked The World, describes this enormously successful use of civil disobedience and disturbing photos.  In discussing the impact of civil disobedience, Kurlansky relates a telling incident that took place during a 1965 march in Selma, Alabama.  Martin Luther King apparently noticed that Life Magazine photographer, Flip Schulke had put down his camera in order to help a demonstrator injured by the police.  Afterward, according to Kurlansky, King rebuked Schulke, telling him that ‘Your job is to photograph what is happening to us.’

CBR’s job is to photograph what is happening to unborn children and, in the absence of a sympathetic press, to display those photos in the public square.

In his seminal “Letter From a Birmingham Jail,” Dr. King addressed these “moderates,” who were represented by a group of local clergy who had publicly condemned his methods in a newspaper advertisement.  He said “I have almost reached the regrettable conclusion that the Negro’s great stumbling block in the stride toward freedom is not the White Citizens Councilor or the Ku Klux Klanner but the … [civil rights] moderate who is more devoted to order than to justice; who prefers a negative peace which is the absence of tension to a positive peace which is the presence of justice; who constantly says, ‘I agree with you in the goal you seek, but I can’t agree with your methods of direct action ….’”

Dr. King could have been describing pro-life moderates at Biola.

MLK rejected both the appeasement strategy of civil rights moderates and the violence strategy of black nationalists.  History has vindicated the wisdom of his willingness to advance reform through civil disobedience which broke rules to acquire disturbing photographic documentation of injustice which had to be seen to be fully understood.  He used horrifying pictures for the same reason successful reformers almost always use them.  Injustice which remains invisible tends to become tolerable.  A failure of public imagination is inevitable without visual depictions of indescribable injustice.

The first Biola official to confront Diana Jimenez when she appeared on campus with CBR abortion imagery was the Assistant Director of Public Relations and Internal Communications.  She told Ms. Jimenez “You’re making us look bad!”  Ms. Jimenez replied “You’re worried about saving face but I am worried about saving babies.”  The first person to confront me after I posted CBR’s video, which depicts Ms. Jimenez’s shameful treatment by the Biola administration, was the university’s VP for Communications and Marketing.  Biola sees this dispute as a public relations crisis, not an abortion crisis.  When I recently requested a meeting with Biola’s president, I was initially told I could only discuss these issues with public relations officials.  Biola has become a business and abortion pictures are as bad for business at Biola as MLK’s protest marches were for business in Birmingham.  Biola may be profitable but it is no longer prophetic.

Penn State University tried to cover-up the preventable abuse of born children because exposing that abuse would have been bad for business.  Children, and ultimately the school itself, paid a terrible price for this cynical commercialism.  Many senior Catholic clergy, the Boy Scouts, and numerous other institutions have also swept child abuse under the rug, with equally disastrous consequences.  Christian colleges are doing much the same, for many of the same self-serving reasons, but the victims in these cases are unborn children.  Many of these tragedies would be preventable if Biola had the “courage and conviction” to adopt a “women and children” first policy on abortion.

Biola and a small segment of the Christian community have tried to talk America out of abortion for forty years, and public opinion continues to worsen, particularly early in pregnancy, when 90% of abortions are performed.  For thirty years William Wilberforce tried to end the slave trade with essays and lectures and got exactly nowhere, because slavery was as invisible in England as abortion is at Biola.  When the abolitionists began to use disturbing pictures, public opinion began to shift at the levels required to create the political consensus necessary for reform.  It is unlikely that St. John’s College at Cambridge would have threatened to expel Wilberforce, withhold his diploma, or arrest him, had he exhibited the shocking slavery pictures for whose display his life would be threatened later in his career.

Prior to 1964, even public university students were denied basic expressive rights on campus.  That repressive policy began to change when Mario Savio, a student at U.C. Berkeley, was repeatedly arrested for distributing civil rights literature on his campus.  Many of his classmates were willing to join him in handcuffs and eventually Berkeley’s administration wilted under an avalanche of embarrassing publicity.  The student Free Speech Movement quickly overspread the country, but never made it onto Christian college campuses.

CBR is meeting with our attorneys to develop a legal strategy to compel California’s private colleges to grant their students many of the same expressive rights guaranteed by the First Amendment to students at public universities.  In a case titled Robins v. Pruneyard Shopping Center, the California Constitution has been interpreted by the California Supreme Court (affirmed by the U.S. Supreme Court) to extend what amount to First Amendment speech rights to picketers inside large, indoor shopping malls.  The Court’s theory is that large, private commercial spaces have become communities in their own right, maintaining what is essentially a public square in which expanded expressive rights are as appropriate as they would be within the boundaries of municipal corporations.

We believe the same theory can reasonably be extended to private college campuses, which are not only self-contained communities like the towns which surround them, but that are supposedly committed to academic freedom in the marketplace of ideas.  California’s politically liberal court system is obviously hostile to Christian institutions of all kinds.  It could, therefore, be much in Biola’s interest to expand its students’ expressive rights through negotiation rather than litigation.  A negotiated agreement could preserve Biola’s statement of faith as a balanced limit on speech which would no reasonable Christian would find to be consistent with scripture.

In its first week, You Tube has registered more than 12,000 views of our video which contrasts Biola President Barry Corey’s soaring chapel rhetoric with his police chief’s cruel thuggery.  More than 600 comments have been posted on just two social sites and they are running 5-1 against Biola’s expressive rights policies and its harsh (and perhaps unlawful) enforcement of those policies.  That is, indeed, a public relations crisis.

The video is now going viral all over the internet.  We have more videos of this type in production.  The people expressing the greatest anger toward Biola are the kinds of Christians who write donation checks and tuition checks and this is only the beginning.  We are aware of other students whose consciences have been awakened by Ms. Jimenez’s courage and they are prepared to force Biola to arrest them or grant them a level of academic freedom which is limited only by Biola’s statement of faith.

The pro-life movement will continue to lose the abortion wars as long as the church remains essentially on the sidelines.  The church will remain on the sidelines as long as pastors believe that fighting abortion is primarily someone else’s responsibility.  Pastors will remain conscientious objectors in the abortion wars as long as Christian colleges and seminaries refuse to effectively train and inspire their students to fight abortion professionally.

Abortion hides behind its own horror.  Because Christian leaders believe abortion is too terrible to display, Christian lay people underestimate its evil, concluding it is too inconsequential to fight.  Virtually everyone I know who does pro-life work full-time says their first look at abortion photos was the turning point in their professional lives.

Biola is thinking small on abortion. Liberal, secular schools have dedicated entire curricula to preparing feminists to advance the interests of the abortion industry. Not one, single, Christian college offers a major exclusively designed to prepare students to fight abortion as full-time ministry.  While students at secular schools have successfully demanded courses and even majors — in gender studies, and human sexuality, and racial politics, and abortion practice, etc., — Biola students seem blissfully unconcerned that their Christian school (and nearly every other) is trivializing abortion as a sin unworthy of serious academic focus (by which I do not mean occasional lectures or chapel presentations).

In Revelation 3:1-2 we read the words of Christ criticizing the ministry of a church whose agenda wasn’t broad enough:  “I know your deeds; you have a reputation of being alive, but … I have not found your deeds complete in the sight of God.”  In Revelation 3:13-22, Jesus says, “I know your deeds ….  So because you are lukewarm and neither hot nor cold, I will spit you out of my mouth.”  Lukewarm almost perfectly describes Biola’s opposition to abortion.  In Matthew 24:12, Jesus told us that we could expect the end times when “the love of most grows cold.”  Biola’s love for the unborn may not have grown “cold” but it has certainly cooled to room-temperature.

Until pro-life ministry employs as many people working full-time to save babies as there are working full-time to kill them, we have no chance to prevail in this struggle.  Biola could lead on this front if its policy makers were visionaries who, to quote Barry Corey, had the “courage and conviction” to replace inadequate words with empowering policies and programs.  The university says it bans abortion photos because their display is disruptive.  I believe that this ban will prove to be more disruptive than any display.

If we cannot persuade Biola to permit the orderly, public display of abortion imagery on campus, we are prepared to display it at entrances to the campus (and over campus with large aerial billboard photos) every time Biola hosts special events.  Biola students are going to see the horror of abortion, either occasionally (and in ways which improve the school’s reputation) or incessantly (and in ways which damage the school’s reputation).  And it is not we will do that damage.  Biola has proven itself quite adept at reputational self-destruction.

None of this might suffice to soften Biola’s heart on abortion, but three years ago, three weeks of CBR aerial billboards and billboard trucks and hand-held abortion photos over and around Notre Dame University’s campus convinced every other Catholic college in the country that inviting Barack Obama to speak would provoke pickets which would be too disruptive to risk.  The President has not delivered a single commencement address at any Catholic college in the intervening years.  Perhaps the tactics on which we relied to dissuade Catholic colleges from doing evil will persuade Evangelical colleges to do good.  In a world of sane journalism, pro-life picketers, relentlessly on the sidewalks of a supposedly pro-life college, would certainly qualify as a man-bites-dog story.

Two of our senior staff members are Biola grads and another has a Talbot degree. We are also attempting to recruit a recent Biola graduate.  One of our student interns intends to enroll in Biola’s Talbot Theological Seminary next year.  We ARE Biola.  We care about Biola.  But if we can’t halt the abortion cover-up at Christian colleges, we will never persuade prospective pastors to use their diplomas to end the bloodiest mass murder in human history.  And if we can’t stop that cover-up at Biola, at which Christian college can it be stopped?

We were thrilled to meet Alyssa Massaro, one of the pro-life student leaders at Georgia Tech, because CBR played a key role in her journey over to our side.

In 2004, Alyssa was 12 years old and living with her family in Cheshire, Connecticut.  That summer, two of our truth trucks drove past Cheshire on the way to Maine.  It was part of our Key States Initiative (KSI) that focused on nearly 20 battleground states for controlling the White House and the Senate.

I saw the image and I knew it for what it was.  I burst out crying, because I knew that was a child and it had been murdered.
***
That is one of the experiences that fired me up the most.  I don’t know if I would have seen [the truth] any other way.

In 2004, we were just on the road to Maine.  To our knowledge, Connecticut was not a key state.  We were wrong, because God had picked out a 12-year-old girl in Cheshire to see the truth.  In her own words …