One benefit of our Face the Truth Tours is that they generate lots of letters and comments in local newspapers. Bob Brady of Rockford IL sent us several items from the Rockford Register Star. One is a column by Judy Emerson, in which she expresses love for the First Amendment, but doesn’t think pro-lifers should be allowed to use it.
Rockford Writer Calls Us Terrorists
Here’s Judy: “The First Amendment is a beautiful thing, but it sometimes becomes a shield for people who use it to terrorize children. I’m talking about the radical anti-abortion activists who picket with graphic, bloody 5 and 6 foot posters showing mutilated fetuses.”
Notice her selectivism. You’d think we target kindergartens, instead of standing along busy highways showing drivers what abortion does to a baby. We don’t ever target children. We place huge warning signs far ahead of the pictures. If parents have children in the car they can take a different route or tell the kids to look the other way. We cover only one side of the road. Many of the sign holders are children.
Emerson says reasonable people are not won over to the cause by seeing these pictures. She calls us hypocrites and frauds. She is wrong. Fifteen people stopped and joined our tour this year. We have many conversions.
She says we are terrorists who harass and intimidate. She even says some of us have killed people. She claims our passions are stoked by religious fervor and a conviction that we are right and everybody else is wrong. She says she is afraid of us. We are irrational, and deluded into thinking our tactics work.
She contacted the Winnebago County States Attorney and the City Attorney, both assuring her that we DO have a first amendment right to show our signs. Emerson ends, “So what if our kids get nightmares. It’s all in a good days work for the zealots.”
Accompanying this column were the usual letters about traumatized children. The fact is, it’s the parents stopping to scream obscenities at us that traumatizes. Studies show that children at no age are traumatized by the abortion pictures — what they see is something broken, and usually ask “Who broke that baby?” Intelligent, caring parents can easily explain what its about in a reassuring way.
Keep the First Amendment Out of My Neighborhood!
Another Rockford Register Star writer, Linda Cunningham, confesses that she opposes abortion and believes life begins at conception, even though the Star is pro-abortion. But this said, Linda launches into a tirade against the pictures.
She says pro-lifers use the First Amendment to terrorize her neighborhood, probably referring to local pro-lifers who picket the abortionist’s home. “Last weekend,” she complains, “a group of anti-abortion protesters carried their picket signs into a Rockford neighborhood, disrupting the comfortable Saturday morning family routines . . . terrorizing and threatening the folks who live there.”
“Do these protesters have a right to their positions?” she asks. “Absolutely! Do they have a right to protest vocally and even offensively? Yes! Do they have a right to do it on the streets of your neighborhood?” Then she argues that since “a person’s home is his, or her, castle,” nobody’s allowed to upset people in their homes.
She defends their right to protest, “except in my neighborhood.” Sound familiar?
Others in Rockford Defend Truth Tour
On July 20 the Rockford Register Star ran four letters defending the right to show graphic pictures. Stephanie Lintz asked if Emerson interviewed any of the numerous residents who honked and waved and said thank you and gave the thumbs up. Doug Lintz was surprised to hear his wife called a “terrorist.”
The three McManon teen-age sisters said it was their duty as Americans to protect the unborn, that people need to see that abortion is the killing of innocent humans, and that the signs made them want to take action against abortion. Adrian Horiens said it is the abortionists who terrorize children, not pictures of abortion.
We don’t like the pictures either, but so long as abortion is the law of the land, we will show people how ugly it is. No social movement ever succeeded without the public seeing pictures of the victims. So we show them and will continue to show them.
