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News and commentary from the Pro-Life Action League
You are currently browsing the Pro-Life Hotline blog archives for the year 2010.
December 31, 1996—The League leads a group of twelve pro-lifers into the Chicago offices of the American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU) to sing Christmas Carols, continuing a Christmas season tradition of several years, which sometimes included ACLU staffers providing cookies and joining in the caroling.
December 30, 1988—League Director Joe Scheidler and stalwart pro-life activist Jim Finnegan appear on The Warren Freiberg Show on WCIU TV in Chicago with Rob Sherman, an inveterate atheist, who also happens to be pro-life. When Rob goes to the rest room during a break, Joe quickly tries to convert his son, saying he wants Rob to have no one on his side when he returns to the studio.
December 29, 1984—League Director Joe Scheidler travels to Washington, DC, to tape a interview for Face the Nation on CBS-TV, and the following day the Face The Nation crew shoots footage at the Scheidler home in Chicago. While in DC, Joe also meets a photographer for a Time Magazine article in which Sr. Donna Quinn (pictured right) urges Catholics to demand that the Church to change its position on abortion.
December 28, 2000—Fulfilling League Director Joe Scheidler’s dream of having a chapel in the League’s Chicago headquarters, the St. Joseph Chapel is dedicated. Stalwart activist Noel Naughton volunteered his time and carpentry skills to build an altar and a platform for choir stalls acquired from New Mellory Abbey in Dubuque, Iowa. Other supporters contributed candlesticks and a tabernacle. A story on the dedication in the League newspaper would prompt a call from the vice-chancellor of the Archdiocese of Chicago, saying the League should have sought permission for a chapel. The Archdiocese representative sent to inspect the chapel would not only approve it, but suggest the Blessed Sacrament could be reserved if the tabernacle were bolted down and a sanctuary lamp were added.
December 27, 1994—The League receives a tip from an insider that Diane Wood (pictured right) is up for nomination to the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Seventh Circuit, headquartered in Chicago. The tipster warns that she’s “a clone of Harry Blackmun,” for whom she clerked in the 1970′s. President Bill Clinton would indeed nominate Wood in March 1995, and five years later she would sit on the panel ruling against League Director Joe Scheidler’s appeal of the 1998 verdict against him in NOW v. Scheidler—a ruling to be overturned by the U.S. Supreme Court in 2003.
Mike Gilkey, owner of Gilkey Windows
I was speechless when I answered the phone and Theresa from Gilkey Windows told me that Mike Gilkey wanted to donate new windows for my house. Vandals had thrown chunks of asphalt through our two front windows in the middle of the night on December 2. Mike Gilkey, owner of Gilkey Windows, is passionately pro-life and as soon as he hard about the vandalism, wanted to show his solidarity with us personally and with the pro-life movement that the vandals were actually attacking.
Mike doesn’t want to just replace the two windows that were broken, but all the windows in the living room and dining room, as well as a bedroom. This is an unbelievably generous gift. If we ever had any doubts about taking risks for the sake of life, Mike Gilkey’s generosity sure wipes those away.
No doubt our vandals hoped that their middle-of-the-night attack would scare us into backing off of our commitment to the pro-life cause. That will never happen. We have dedicated that past thirty-eight years to the fight to protect the unborn. Whatever number of years God gives us in the future, we will continue along this same path.
Christmas day our entire family gathered at our home in Chicago—thirty-three of us. The place was teeming with life: seven children, four sons- and daughters-in-law and twenty grandchildren sang carols, played games, opened presents, shared a meal and reveled in God’s gracious kindness to all of us. We are incredibly blessed in both our nuclear family and the larger pro-life family we have been so fortunate to be a part of.
One of our favorite Christmas traditions is watching the George C. Scott “Christmas Carol.” We join Tiny Tim in proclaiming, “God bless us all—every one.”
December 26, 1989—On his Action News Hotline, Joe Scheidler declares that “the Feast of St. Stephen, the first Christian to die for the Gospel of Jesus Christ, seems an appropriate feast for the Pro-Life Action League to announce a new campaign: ‘No More Mr. Nice Guy.’” Joe says he’s fed up with compromises of the 1980′s and plans to make the 90′s a decade of confronting the abortionists and their supporters.
December 25, 1984—The MacNeil/Lehrer report plays segments from a previously recorded special, attempting to connect the League to the Christmas day bombing of three abortion clinics. The “damning” quote from Joe—”I have yet to shed my first tear when I hear that an abortion clinic has been shut down and nobody was hurt”—only reveals how desperate the media are to link peaceful pro-life groups like the League to attacks on abortion facilities.
December 24, 2003—The League brings Christmas cheer to a firehouse in the Village of Glenview, Illinois, that had been stripped of all Christmas decorations—including the firefighters’ Christmas tree—after a complaint from a local Scrooge. Under the direction of the League’s Ann Scheidler—who grew up in Glenview and whose father was a volunteer fireman—pro-lifers erected up a small Christmas tree outside the firehouse and sang carols for the firefighters stationed there during the Christmas holiday.
I’m very excited to share this new video from last Saturday’s “Empty Manger” Christmas Caroling Day. My assistant Matt and I put in some long hours to get this video put together before Christmas Eve, so I hope you’ll really enjoy it.
If you like what you see here, consider conducting a caroling day like this in your own community. We’ve even got a song sheet [PDF] you can download with a selection of appropriate carols.
Here’s wishing a Merry Christmas to everyone who braved the cold, all across the country, to illuminate the spiritual darkness enveloping our nation’s abortion facilities with the light of Christmas hope.