Rest in Peace: Dorothy Cotton Dorothy Cotton (CLN Endorser since June 1993) died June 10, 2018, the day after her 88th birthday. She led the Citizenship Education Program of the Southern Christian Leadership Conference in the 1960s, with monthly five-day seminars directly teaching thousands of people who also went out to educate thousands more. The position made her the only woman in the organization’s executive staff – and one that refused to fetch coffee for the men. She also led many marches, and during a particularly brutal campaign she said: “We sang before every night we went out to get up our courage. . . . After we were attacked we’d come back to the church, and somehow always we’d come back bleeding, and singing.”
Photo: Memoir from 2012
Latest Issue of Life Matters Journal – Vol. 6, #4
This consistent-life journal, put out by CLN member group Rehumanize International, has in its June 2018 edition various pieces on technology, power, and human life. The contents include “Connection That Does Not Kill: Technology for (re)Humanization,” “Parkland and Columbine, Photoshop and Tech Paradigms: Do Images Dehumanize?” and “In the Future, No One Starves” (a short story). It also has poetry, a book review, and an editorial cartoon.
Our Regular Peace Vigil at the White House We held our latest peace vigil to protest against nuclear weapons and armed drones this past Saturday, June 9th. Co-sponsoring was CLN member group Pax Christi Metro DC- Baltimore (which protests against drones every month), as well as the American Solidarity Party of Maryland, Baltimore Nonviolence Center, Franciscan Action Network, and Imago Dei Politics. Several representatives of the co-sponsoring groups spoke, and we also handed out literature about the dangers of nukes and drones. We got an unusual amount of criticism and heckling from passersby. One passerby asked a vigil participant if he had served in the military, and asserted if he had he wouldn’t be protesting drones. This criticism resembles that made by abortion advocates who assert that men and others who haven’t had an unwanted pregnancy don’t have the standing to criticize it. But as we’ve discussed, some involved in abortion and drone killing come to regret it.
Photo: CLN President John Whitehead (with microphone) speaks at the vigil.
Latest CLN Blog Post: Martin Luther King Jr. This year is the 50th anniversary of the assassination of Martin Luther King Jr. As mentioned above, his confidante Dorothy Cotton was one of our endorsers – but would he have been? He died before the term “the consistent life ethic” was coined, and before abortion became a major public issue that he could have been asked about. Rob Arner covers what we know in Where Does Martin Luther King Jr. Fit into the Consistent Life Ethic?
Quotation of the Week Julia Smucker Of Guns and Gosnell: Just Laws vs. Root Cause As a firm believer in the consistent ethic of life, I have been challenged to consider my own degree of consistency in the way I think about life issues such as abortion and gun control. I have found it helpful, for consistency’s sake, to engage in the simple thought experiment of pretending not to know which issue is under discussion – or, from another angle, examining the two beside each other as parts of a whole – with the understanding that, in terms of the best means of seeking solutions, a principle that applies to one also applies to the other. This can hopefully clear the way for a fresh examination of the relation between laws and systems.
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