A group of youths arrested and charged with vandalizing a Kentucky pro-life campus display said that destroying the display was an expression of their “right to free speech.”
Pro-life leaders of Northern Right to Life at Northern Kentucky University (NKU) say they first set up the display on Monday morning. It consisted of tiny onesies hanging on a line with red “X” taped onto every fourth outfit to symbolize a life lost to abortion. The display included a sign explaining its significance and citing the Guttmacher Institute.
But after the display was torn down twice within the first two days, members of the pro-life group began taking night shifts to watch for the vandals. On Friday morning around 1am, they say they spotted four young men beginning to cut down the line and throwing the clothing, which was to be donated to needy local children, in the trash.
[…]Both Piron and the Kentucky Post report that the three suspects police caught – Travis Black, Steven White and Montez Jenkins Copeland – have been charged with Criminal Mischief.
“Though the vandals don’t think they deserve to be faced with consequences, we at NRTL believe that it’s important for people to understand that they cannot just rip down a display simply because they disagree with its message,” said Piron.
A fourth suspect who had turned himself in, Kyle Pickett, agreed with pro-lifers that they had a right to display the clothing as free speech – but justified the vandalism as equally protected.
“Tearing it down was expressing our right to free speech,” he said, according to the Post.
I think that the pro-life movement would do well to buckle down and learn how to defend the pro-life view with arguments and evidence. Because if undecided people have to decide between persuasion and violence, persuasion is going to win every time.
I recommend taking a look at Neil’s round-up. There were several good stories in there, but I just chose one to link to.
Scott Klusendorf, the top pro-life debater on planet Earth, will be facing James Croft in Bowling Green, OH on Thursday at 7 PM.
Where: 101 Olscamp Hall, Bowling Green State University
When: 7 p.m. Thursday
Speakers: Scott Klusendor and James Croft
Excerpt:
The debate was organized by Veritas, the Christian Catholic Student Life Group that normally hosts similar events, but its members realized that a debate featuring speakers for the other side as well would be more constructive, said Eric Bower, president of the Bowling Green Secular Society that is now co-hosting the event.
“We thought it would be an excellent opportunity for discussion,” Bower said. “Hopefully the atmosphere will lead to a uniting of the community over the idea of healthy debate and talking.”
The focus of the debate will be two professional speakers, one brought in by each group, who will discuss and answer questions about abortion, according to a press release emailed by Veritas.
The speaker for the abortion rights arguments will be James Croft, a doctoral candidate at the Harvard Graduate School of Education who is the vice president of the Humanist Graduate Community at Harvard and elected Fellow of the Royal Society for the encouragement of Arts, Manufactures and Commerce.
The speaker for the anti-abortion arguments will be Scott Klusendorf, the founder and president of the Life Training Institute in Atlanta, Ga. He is a graduate of UCLA who has debated or lectured to student groups at more than 70 colleges and universities around the nation. He is also the author of “The Case for Life: Equipping Christians to Engage the Culture.”
You can see Scott Klusendorf in action in a previous debate against Nadine Strossen:
And you get the audio from that previous debate, too.
And you can get Scott Klusendorf’s book right here! I highly recommend it for ALL pro-lifers, from beginner to expert.
Here’s a review from Jay Watts of the Life Training Institute, my favorite pro-life organization.
Excerpt:
This past weekend I was privileged to see an advanced screening of October Baby. You can read the promotional material for the film here.
October Baby tells the story of young woman – Hannah, played by Rachel Hendrix – who finds out that there is an explanation for her lifetime severe physical and emotional struggles. She was adopted by her parents after she survived a botched abortion. With the help of her best friend – Jason played by Jason Burkey- they set out on a road trip to search out her birth mother and the full story of Hannah’s past.
Whatever concerns I had about the quality of the film I was screening were quickly allayed.October Baby is not an amateur production. The filmmakers, Andrew and Jon Erwin, understand how to make a movie. Anytime you watch an independent film you know that the producers sacrifice some elements of larger productions – usually film quality and acting – in order to tell a more personal and intimate story. The Erwin’s seem to understand the limits of a production at this level and use their unusual skill to mitigate the weaker elements of small films, or – more simply put – they shot an independent film that looks great.
My only concern about movies about abortion is that they will bash the men and make the women out to be innocent victims. I did a little digging and it seems to be that this movie does not do that. I’m not sure, but I think it takes a subtle shot at feminism – something I read seemed to indicate that.
It’s endorsed by Fathers.com. This interview with the actor who plays the adoptive father says this:
NCF: The character you play, the father in this film, has his own journey through the film. Describe his journey and maybe what you saw as some of the mistakes he made and some of the things he did right and some of the things he learned through this journey that’s portrayed in the film.
JS:Well, my guy, he did a very right thing when his wife and he lost their twins, miscarried their twins, when his wife came to him and said, “There are twins up for adoption that would have been born around the same time our twins would have been born.” Obviously he supported that and they went and adopted these two little babies even though one of them was horrifically disfigured and not likely to make it out of the hospital—and the other one had health issues as well. So this is a guy who supported his wife’s desire to have twins, he supported her faith that there was a reason why she was made aware of these twins. So, he did that right.
The only thing as far as I can see … there’s a wonderful line of dialogue in there where the daughter says, “Why didn’t you tell me?” And basically, without saying this exact line, he said that, “I was always going to, but life kind of got away from us. We were working and …” he was at that point trying to become a doctor, he was going to school, and they had financial trouble, and it just kind of got away from him. It didn’t slip his mind, but the perfect time to have that conversation never really appeared. So he had to do it under duress. He had to do it in a doctor’s office when she was wondering why she was always so sick. So if he did anything wrong, that was it. Because he’s very protective of his daughter with her friend….
I love that about the movie too—the platonic, wonderful, buddy relationship between my daughter and her pal in his movie is so real. And as a movie-goer, you think, Okay these two have got to get together somehow. But it just is so wonderfully real. So my character, the dad in this movie, does a great job, I think, of protecting her against a teenage boy’s stupidity [laughs] … his judgment, from an eighteen-year-old boy’s perspective.
And I’ve said this to my kids many times. I haven’t said it recently, but … “One of the biggest differences between me and you is that I’ve been seventeen, and you have not been fifty. So your perspective is very narrow, very short. It is your perspective, and I’m not going to discount it, but my job as a dad is … if I’ve sat on a stove that you’re about to hike your butt up onto, my responsibility is to let you know it’s hot. I’m not going to keep you from sitting on it, but I’m going to let you know that it’s going to hurt when you do.” I think there’s that in this film as well, and I like that.
As far as what he learns, I think he learns in this movie that the resiliency of a seventeen-year-old girl is more than he thought, that a young person can actually handle more emotional information, more potentially hurtful information than you think they can. So there’s that wonderful scene where he tells her the whole thing about her brother, and it’s so moving. He’s a dad, and it pains fathers when their children go through that “Dad is an idiot” stage. It really pains them. It’s not just confusing, it’s hurtful. But the good news, dad, is that it does have a shelf life. They do love their dads through all that stuff too, they just don’t let you know it. But later on they do. I used to tell friends of mine, “Don’t worry. They turn back into people just as magically as they turned into aliens.”
I think it’s safe for us men to watch this – we won’t be blamed and bashed. The father character is strong and good. I have seen the trailer posted on men’s rights blogs AND pro-life blogs, so it looks like it’s worth a shot.
Please post comments below if you go see the movie.
WINTERY KNIGHT 