Sidewalk Advocates for Life Taking advantage of years of experience in nonviolent action at abortion centers offering life-affirming options to pregnant women and clinic workers, Sidewalk Advocates for Life held a successful first conference last weekend. Speakers included CLN endorsers Abby Johnson and Destiny Herndon-de La Rosa. As a group that provides services to help abortion workers get out (currently, 467 former workers), our member group And Then There Were None had a prominent role in the program.
The idea of our campaign, Grassroots Defunding: Finding Alternatives to Planned Parenthood, was so obvious to sidewalk advocates that it got expounded on many times. Rachel MacNair, project coordinator, handed out flyers about how our campaign website is a clearinghouse for sharing information and ideas for finding better options for non-abortion medical care.
Upcoming: Peace Conference in November We are co-sponsoring “Two Minutes to Midnight: What We Can Do to Prevent Nuclear War,” a conference for peace-minded people to be held at Goucher College in Baltimore on Saturday, November 17, from 10 am to 4 pm. Come join us as we bring together activists, students, experts, and average citizens to examine how we can work collaboratively in Maryland to reduce the threat of nuclear war. Speakers include Ray Acheson, director of Reaching Critical Will/Women’s International League for Peace and Freedom, and Ira Helfand, former co-president of the International Physicians for the Prevention of Nuclear War. Attendance is free; register now!
Around the Web ∞ Yemen and Khashoggi We share the general horror over the murder of Jamal Khashoggi, but have to ask: why don’t brutal starvation and bombing deaths of children in Yemen receive similar coverage? Max Fisher of the New York Times ponders: How One Journalist’s Death Provoked a Backlash That Thousands Dead in Yemen Did Not. To his point about one death being a tragedy and a million deaths a statistic, we add: one lone day of mass murder is a news event, whereas day after day and year after year of this kind of mass murder is labeled “war” and happens too frequently for each day to be newsworthy.
∞ Hollywood’s Anti-Abortion Movie Matthew Archbold in The National Catholic Register: 100 Years Ago, Hollywood Made an Anti-Abortion Movie. There haven't been many since Where Are My Children. The movie is an embedded video in the article.
∞ Racism and Population Control Conservative New York Times columnist Ross Douthat discusses Fear of a Black Continent: Why European elites are worrying about African babies. ∞ Racism and Potentially Lethal Calls to Cops On the lighter side, as a comedic satire, the New York Times has set up a “Hotline for Racists,” complete with a promotional commercial: “a radical new product that will save you all the headache of being filmed and outed as a racist.” Slate offers the video and comment.
Latest CLN Blog Post Hot off the presses, the new book A Consistent Life: The Young Advocates Guide to Living Peace & Justice Daily, by Mary Grace Coltharp (pictured middle) and Aimee Murphy (pictured right), is reviewed by John Whitehead in How to Move from Theory to Practice: Reading A Consistent Life.
Quotation of the Week Signs of Peace Journal of the Catholic Peace Fellowship Spring 2009 When people in the peace movement dismiss or fall silent on pro-life issues, they reveal the extent to which they have been co-opted by US political culture and the long reach of the nation-state. They neglect the fundamental principle on which all peacemaking is grounded: the principle of nonviolence.
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