My curiosity continues to grow concerning the mail fraud the League was targeted with last week.
Returned Mail Yields A Clue
This week we have received a number of returned letters which were sent out with the incorrect addresses. Intended recipients include:
- a number of state Right to Life affiliates,
- a Presbyterian and a Lutheran church (ELCA,which is not pro-life) in South Dakota
- and a church in Oklahoma (affiliated with the Lutheran Church Missouri Synod, which is pro-life).
Based on those letters returned for incorrect addresses, I found one of the lists the Hoaxer apparently used to select his recipients. It is a listing of state right to life groups compiled by “Country Preacher,” a person active in the Church of Christ as well as being active in pro-life.
Country Preacher’s list, however, does not include churches of various denominations, pregnancy centers, or respect life offices (several of whom have called to inform us they received the letter). So the perpetrator must have had another list or two as well.
Why Would Someone Do Such A Thing?
Knowing that the simplest answer is often the right one, I’ve been puzzling over why this deceiver would spend so much time and money on such a strange project—the printer ink, the paper and envelopes, the time stuffing and sealing envelopes, and (most of all) the postage must have really set him back!
If he wanted us to receive strange phone calls, there are ways to make sure we receive tons of them…
If he wanted our name to be blackened by the connection to abortion, he’d have actually used our name….
Sending out this disgusting letter to pro-life organizations just didn’t make sense to me.
But Ann Scheidler pointed out to me that, perhaps, that’s just the point: It’s disgusting. Perhaps the Hoaxer targeted people he knew would be most disgusted and horrified by the ad. Maybe the point was just to make people queasy.
Strange, but plausible, I think.
Who Would Do Such A Thing?
That still leaves the question of who. The letter was postmarked from Carol Stream, Illinois, so it’s presumably someone local.
But it’s also someone very disrespectful of what his peers typically refer to as a “woman’s private choice.” To suggest that a woman would be so cavalier toward abortion that she ought to order in bulk [pdf] to save money shows very little respect for a decision that even the 100% pro-abortion president Obama calls “tragic.”
And pro-abortion politicians like Bill Clinton became famous for pushing for abortion to be “safe, legal, and rare“—a position the Guttmacher Institute stands beside [pdf], explaining,
Most on the prochoice side would agree that lessening the need for abortion is a worthy goal, one both that reflects the fact that most American women try to control their fertility by using birth control rather than abortion and that recognizes the reality that even many of those who support legal abortion also have moral qualms about it. [emphasis added]
So at least we can rule out Bill Clinton and the Guttmacher Institute as the perpetrators of this hoax.
