CCBR volunteer Mingy Xu (right) from Ontario speaking one-on-one with a student at North Florida University.

This article from Mick Hunt, on location with the Genocide Awareness Project (GAP) in Florida

Genocide Awareness Project 2014 Kicks Off in Florida
by Mick Hunt

Greetings from the only state in the union that didn’t receive snow last Wednesday … Florida.  We have brought the Genocide Awareness Project (GAP) to Florida for two weeks.  The Canadian CBR (CCBR) brought a team of perhaps 30 young people from all over Canada, from Vancouver in the west to Ontario in the east.  CBR is providing the GAP kit and truck, plus three of us older gentleman to help set up the display.  I’m here with my wife Edie; my specific duty is to make sure all operations are safe.

This week we’ve been one day on the campus of Florida Gulf Coast University, way down in the southwest, near Fort Myers.  Then we spent two days on the opposite corner at North Florida University.  Next week it will be Florida State and Central Florida University.  Edie and I are leaving and Lincoln Brandenburg, CBR Project Coordinator for Georgia, will be taking my place for next week.

I’ve been involved in GAP for 10 years on perhaps 50 campuses.  Only one of those GAPs approached the kind of personal outreach I’ve seen this week with the group from Canada.   In Oklahoma, we had about 100 people come to our training session at a sponsoring church. Then during GAP most of those people came to the display.  At any point you could see 50 different conversations going on at any time.  It was amazing.  GAP this week has been like that on a smaller scale, but with great effectiveness.   The CCBR young people are well trained in prolife apologetics.  They are outgoing, and many of them have considerable experience in one-on-one debate/conversation.  I must say that it is encouraging to me to see young people involved on this level, some of them high school students.  The average age on the CCBR team is 23 years, which suggests that even their leaders are young.  Stephanie Grey, the Executive Director is only 33.  They are zealous and compassionate … both.  One of the leaders, Jonathan, told me that they are well aware of the importance of learning from us who have been around for awhile longer.  CCBR, I hope, reflects the future of the pro-life movement.

Youth and openness to wisdom are strengths, and their experience comes from going out to high schools on a weekly basis and talking with students on their lunch breaks.  You can see this in how they handle themselves.  The arguments and style have been honed by many 60-second conversations.  I’ve seen this so much this week.   Jonathan told me that they have notebooks full of testimonies about how people have become more pro-life on abortion.  I hope to be able to share some of those with you in the next few days.

But for now, we have a long drive ahead back home to snowy North Carolina today.

Stephanie Grey at Florida Gulf Coast University debating a professor (the larger fellow in a t-shirt) who brought out his class on “Art and Propaganda”.

The best way to protest abortion is to let abortion protest itself.  CBR’s Gregg Cunningham:

We don’t protest abortion.  We expose abortion.  Abortion protests itself.

It was certainly true at Florida Gulf Coast University (FGCU) yesterday.  Link to TV news coverage/video here.  Quote:

The images are so graphic and disturbing some students left school for the day.

Wow.   They really can’t handle the truth.  But if abortion is such a great thing for women and for society and even for children, why do pictures of it make people so upset?

Interesting student comments:

1. Kaley Dietrich: “It makes you feel uncomfortable.  It makes you not feel safe on campus.”  [FAB: Dietrich feels uncomfortable because she has a functioning conscience.  She feels “not safe” because she can’t handle the truth and wants it to go away.]
2. Mike Malat: “It’s pretty disruptive … to have these big things shoved in your face all the time.  I mean you’re hear to learn objectively on what you want to learn.”  [FAB: Malat thinks that truth is disruptive.  He’s right; truth disrupts lying.  Note how effective the pictures are.  We go to FGCU every year or two, but in Malat’s mind, it’s “all the time.”]
3. Kaley Dietrich: “Were not trying to limit their free speech, …  But we do want students to be able to choose whether they see these images or not.”  [FAB: In other words, Dietrich wants to choose which images get seen and which do not.]