Toto

Fear of sexuality run rampant. Fear that God will punish them for something.

winstonjen

I never said it did. I simply spoke from the experience that I have with pro-lifers. I didn't mean to use stereotypes.

Biff the unclean

Many summers ago I volunteered as an "escort" for Planned Parenthood in Manhattan. An "escort" is a person who enables a woman to get through the lines of Christians who block the entrance. Since I would stand out in the street with them and chat with them when I wasn't knocking them out of the way I got to know where they were coming from.
I've traveled around the world and have been in the backwaters of Asian and Africa and have seen my share of scum. I've never seen any human garbage lower than this lot. It's all about control. They don't care about life, or women or babies. They just want to force people to obey them.

RevDahlia

ooh, Biff, must have anecdotes!

Biff the unclean

Well I remember one girl that arrived when all the escorts were busy. The RtL set upon her and started screaming at her that she was a murdering whore. The poor kid ran down Second Ave in traffic in hysterics. About an hour and a half later it had been quiet for awhile and one of the Xian women turned to me and said "You have to admit, after all, that we are good and decent people." Fortunately I had served in the Navy in the South China Sea so my vocabulary was up to an appropriate reply.

The School of Visual Arts held classes in the same building as Planned Parenthood so some of the women were only art students and models, this did not stop the Xians from attacking them. Models, it turns out, have even more extensive vocabularies than sailors do.

Philosoft

I also volunteered as a clinic escort for a summer, at the same clinic that was the site of the murders of Dr. John Britton and escort James Barrett by Paul Hill.

My anecdote: the bulk of the protesters were "lead" by a man called John Burt. He owned the property adjacent to the Ladies' Center, and the protestors used to stand on ladders next to the fence that was erected on the Ladies' Center property. This was sometime after the passage of the clinic access law, which has since been repealed (I think). There's a timeline of Burt's activities here. Burt and his wife also ran a Christian shelter for young women who were pregnant, or otherwise had nowhere else to go.

Long story short, a couple months ago, Burt was reported missing. The media intimated foul play at first but, when Burt turned up alive and reasonably well some two weeks later - he had apparently been living in his van - the story broke that Burt stood accused of sexually molesting a 15-year-old girl who was living at the shelter. Further revelations included the fact that several previous molestation complaints had been lodged against Burt (but he never went to trial, apparently) and that Burt had subsequently been prohibited from being alone in the shelter with any of the children. The current case is scheduled for trial next year, I believe.

pmurray

I think it was Dan Barker who pointed out that Christianity is not pro-life, it is merely anti-choice.

Why is it that the OT contains no provisiuons whatever prohibiting the infanticide of unwanted girl children?

RevDahlia

AFAIK, there isn't a verse in the whole Bible that deals with abortion per se, either.

True, there is that "thou shalt not kill" thing, but the rest of the OT is crammed with God-sanctioned killing. So the commandment against killing is hardly black-and-white, Godwise.

The way I see it... if God really cared about the fate of fetuses, his book would be far more explicit about it... as explicit as it is about, say, wearing mixed fibers and eating shellfish.

(If one of the more Biblically-literate folk round these parts do know of scripture that pertains to abortion and see fit to point it out, I stand corrected in advance.)

winstonjen

Now THAT is a keeper. Too bad we don't have laws against stupidity or brainwashing.

Bad Kitty

I didn't mean to infer that you were using stereotypes; I just meant to make it plain that neither of these statements applied to me. In other words, your theory did not cover someone such as myself.


I was using the "pro-life" term as it is commonly used -- to identify a person who is against abortion (the same as Winstonjen used in the OP). Anyway, I was not making a philosophical statement about the appropriateness of the term "pro-life" itself -- which seems like a different topic to me.

The basis for my belief is that I believe a human fetus deserves the same rights and considerations under the law as a human infant. I find no convincing evidence that human life begins at the third trimester. But as this wasn�t really Winstonjen�s topic, I don�t think the thread should be hijacked by this discussion. There are several threads currently on the board that discuss it in depth.

I can agree that some pro-life protestors are just assholes. In every group of people there will be extremists and downright obnoxious people who are there for the wrong reasons. Also, I am always surprised at how much hate some Christian protesters can generate, since "God" is supposed to be "Love".

But it is wrong to paint all pro-life adherents/protesters (Christian or otherwise) with this same ugly brush. There are people who truly feel that the aborting of approximately 40 million babies since 1973 is nothing short of a holocaust, and those people feel it is their duty to those children and their conscience to stand up and say, "This is wrong". I can respect that.

Regards,

Michelle