#429 New Blog, Conferences, Kavanaugh - September 21, 2018
New Blog for the Grassroots Defunding Campaign
The website for our campaign, Grassroots Defunding (finding alternatives to Planned Parenthood), serves as a clearinghouse of information for local activists, and has mainly focused on a directory of alternatives and a lot of ideas of what to do with the information. But the whole point of the “grassroots” aspect is that we’ll gain experience as we go along, and we’ll need to share our stories with each other. What worked, what didn’t, and why? For this, we’ve added a blog to the website for local activists like Dianna Lara of Lewisville, Texas (pictured), who wrote “The Power of a Promo Card.” From New England, we have CJ Williams writing about how she and her friends threw “Research Parties.” We hope these two are the seeds that will grow more stories to share.
Rehumanize International Conference The Rehumanize International conference is coming up October 12-14 in Pittsburgh. RI is a member group and this is a consistent-life conference; some of our board members are presenting, along with many other fine speakers. For those coming, please register right away – it makes a huge difference to conference planners to get those registrations in!
Prevent Nuclear War: November Conference We’re co-sponsoring the conference “Two Minutes to Midnight: What We Can Do to Prevent Nuclear War,” November 17 in Baltimore. The conference sessions will educate on the dangers of nuclear weapons and political strategies for preventing nuclear war, with a focus on working in Maryland. Speakers include Daryl Kimball of the Arms Control Association; Ray Acheson of Reaching Critical Will, and Dr. Vincent Intondi, author of African Americans Against the Bomb. Register now! The conference is organized by Prevent Nuclear War-Maryland, part of the larger Prevent Nuclear War campaign, of which the Consistent Life Network is an endorser. We encourage other peace-minded groups and individuals to join in endorsing the campaign.
Charge Against Kavanaugh Ross Douthat offers several points worth reflecting on in his Opinion column in the New York Times: The Pro-Life Movement’s Kavanaugh Dilemma: Repealing Roe won’t matter if the anti-abortion cause is hitched to a party that’s seen as anti-woman.
Latest CLN Blog Post John Whitehead offers Answering Objections to the Consistent Life Ethic from Mainstream Pro-Lifers. There are three main categories of objection: partisan politics, disagreement on other issues, and a feeling of being attacked (and sometimes they actually are being attacked) as not being “really” pro-life - a put down that people focusing on other single issues don’t normally face. We hope this post will help consistent-lifers to engage in productive dialogue with people who agree with us on abortion but are skeptical about the other connections we make. The post has already generated some discussion in the comments section.
Quotation of the Week Anonymous executioner Quoted in: Executing grace: How the death penalty killed Jesus and why it's killing us, by Shane Claiborne (a CLN endorser), 2016, page 231
This is typical of the post-trauma reactions to any form of killing human beings. I started to have some horrible nightmares. It was the faces of the men that I executed. I woke up and saw them literally sitting on the edge of my bed. I'd move over to make room for them. They didn't say anything to me. They just looked. Shane says the executioner was drinking a bottle of whiskey a day to try to drown out the images, but it didn't work. Only when he left the line of work and started testifying for abolition was he relieved of the images.
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