Wednesday, September 24, 2008

Letter to the Editor, Asheville Citizen-Times: Sarah Palin, the Heir of Susan B. Anthony and Elizabeth Cady Stanton, by M.E. Hunt

Liberal Democrats for years have sold the idea that women in elected office can best represent women, never mind a candidate’s or official’s positions. Of course, the women that liberal Democrats champion are pro abortion-choice and now that John McCain selected Sarah Palin as a running mate, liberal Democrats are scrambling to un-sell their idea. They are desperate to remind us that Palin opposes legal abortion, as if this were a bad thing. And yet, contrary to the insistence of abortion-choice advocates, abortion not only kills a child in the womb, it hurts women. Because of this, unlike Obama, Biden, and Hillary Clinton, Sarah Palin truly represents the best for women. She is the heir of the legacy of social reformers and early women’s suffragettes like Susan B. Anthony (1820-1906) and Elizabeth Cady Stanton (1815-1902), who in their periodic journal titled “Revolution,” and elsewhere, strongly opposed abortion. Stanton believed that abortion is infanticide. In Sarah Palin, mother of five children, governor of Alaska and candidate for the Vice President of the United States, women’s true rights fighters Anthony and Stanton would find their hopes fulfilled.

[Check out the PBS documentary by Ken Burns titled, “Not for Ourselves Alone” on Susan B. Anthony and Elizabeth Cady Stanton at
www.pbs.org/stantonanthony/ . Click on the left hand half of the page to begin an audio/slide version of the film.]

Tuesday, September 23, 2008

Donald Miller & Barack Obama

Donald Miller, author of “Blue Like Jazz” and “Searching for God Knows What” apparently has endorsed Barack Obama. What follows are two entries that I posted on Miller’s official blogsite at http://donmilleris.com/ .

Entry One
When I heard that an evangelical [writer] named Donald Miller supported Barack Obama for president, I thought I had seen that name before and, sure enough, a well-worn book titled, “Searching for God Knows What” sat on my wife’s bedside table with a bookmark tucked in the middle. So, I checked to confirm the Obama story and found this blog. In the past few minutes I have leafed through the book, which up until now, had only been a familiar cover. What I have seen so far… supporting Barack Obama, who supports the legal killing of children in the womb, says that Donald Miller is at a minimum, a greatly confused man, and because of his extensive influence, a harmful man. He seems to represent an over-introspective, self-absorptive, emasculated Christianity. Quite likely I will be chucking the book into the trash. I can only think of two other books that have been on our home that merited this treatment: Lolita by Vladimir Nabokov, and Jude the Obscure by Thomas Hardy. Lolita was simply pornographic. Jude portrays simply unremitting despair. And Donald Miller represents, simply, longstanding accommodation, to evil, an accommodation bred from de-sensitation to killing in the womb and the decline of our culture. And since I wrote the above, I have learned that Miller gave a benediction at the Democratic National Convention and he is on some kind of faith tour with Obama which suggests that, even worse, he engages in foolish collaboration.

Note: I am not a Republican.


Entry Two
Donald Miller is greatly confused about politics and especially about the politics of abortion, and being so he actually joined forces with those who are maintaining the legality of abortion! He doesn’t realize that the idea of “reducing the number of abortions” is a propaganda ploy to suck in the gullible. The “information” that abortion somehow decreased under Clinton and increased under Bush is, as he said, only a slice of the pie, if it is true, which I doubt, since I have heard committed pro abortion-choice people say the same thing. In the long-term, there are multiple policies which influence whether or not people kill their offspring, and Republican ideas, generally, conform to the most important policy, or rather principle, that human life begins at fertilization and that human beings bear the image of the Creator. Also, it is does not follow logically that because McCain/Palin (or Republicans) will not, supposedly, reduce abortion, that one must support Obama who, supposedly, will reduce abortion. A wiser man than Donald Miller would at least not become a pawn of the Democrats. Or, if he were uncertain about the Republicans, he would abstain from politics. The liberal Democrat and abortion-choice strategy is to foster an impression that they will reduce abortion (and the “need” for abortion) while making certain that abortion remains an absolutely fixed component of our culture forever. Democrats like Obama will ensure through the courts (by judicial appointments) that our laws will never change. Politics is messy, but truth is clear. The truth is that Barack Obama, because of his support for the killing of children in the womb is disqualified to be President of the United States. But, perhaps Mr. Miller can support Obama because he does not really understand abortion. Look at the website
www.abortionNo.org before you vote.

Miller is not so much a problem in himself. He is a product and an expression of a Church that has accommodated the killing of abortion for so long that it has adjusted its theology to make Christians feel comfortable. Rather than pay the price required to end the killing and transform our culture, we have just changed our perspective to “do what’s possible.” Our nation knew the price it would take to save civilization back in the 1940’s when we put an end to Nazi ambitions to conquer the world and annihilate all Jewish people. We defeated the Germans. People gave their lives. Behind the lines, people rescued Jews. Miller himself, in the one short passage I have (today) read in one of his books, "Searching for God..." said that he would participate in effort to kill Hitler. Many other people feel/felt the same way. One was a German officer who, when he was on the eastern front, saw lines of naked Jewish people lined up a the edge of a pit to be shot. (I saw this story on a PBS special.) He was so angry that he wanted to grab a machine gun and begin shooting his fellow soldiers, but he realized that he would only be killed immediately and not save anyone. But that’s when he joined a conspiracy to assassinate Hitler, which as we know, failed. Years later, that German officer realized that there was a higher way in the face of such evil as the Holocaust. He realized that the only human way to respond to the horrible slaughter that he saw in Russia or Poland was to take off his clothes and get into the line. That is Christ’s way, and of course, practically no one is doing this now regarding abortion. No wonder the Republicans can do little in the political realm—they lack the example in the spiritual/human realm. The Democrat Party and Barack Obama are so far out of line on the murdering of children in the womb, that the only Christian political response to them is to consign them to defeat.

Monday, September 22, 2008

The Genocide Awareness Project @ Transylvania University in Lexington, Kentucky, April 4, 2008

These TU students set up their educational notification early and soon afterwards, wind and rain took the brown paper banners down.
Dr. Fletcher Armstrong, SE Director of the Center for Bio-ethical Reform, talks with a TU student.

Notes on TU GAP of April 4, 2008

Transylvania University ( TU) is the first private campus I have been on . Since we were there by the indulgence of the U and not necessarily under the First Amendment, we took pains to be on our best behavior.

That week was wet much of the time and the one day, a Friday, on TU was no exception. The day was warm and not terribly rainy, but windy. Due to the smallness of the campus and weather conditions, we set up eight signs instead of the full compliment of 17. This did not compromise our effectiveness.

Some TU students organized an impromptu protest. I photographed them before the wind took its toll. A small gathering formed about midday, and by the end of the day, most individuals in it had moved to the display to observe and discuss. Frequently, students and some profs gathered to debate with us. The discussion was often intense and on a relatively sophisticated level.

Three Conversations: Early after the display set-up was complete, two professors appeared nearly at once. Professor One is “Chair, Division of Social Sciences; Professor Of History.” Initially, without words from me, he began bellowing as loudly as possible a foot from my face that our display was an outrage. He was extremely loud, and I do not wish to understate this, except that it lasted only a few seconds. I remained calm and asked him if any of his relatives had died in the Holocaust. He said, “Maybe” in a way that suggested that he did not know, or that maybe he did not wish to tell me. At some point he said that he taught a course on the Holocaust and I asked him for a course outline. He said that I couldn’t possibly understand what he was telling me, because I was “a blank wall.”

Professor Two said she taught in the Psychology Department. She insisted that no medical textbook said that an individual human life began at fertilization. I asked her to bring me a medical text, and she returned with a Developmental Psychology book that referred to the entity soon after fertilization as an “organism” I asked, what kind of organism? “Not a plant or animal, but human,” I said. I said that her text did not deny that human life began at fertilization, but was simply unclear. And then I showed her the text we carry with GAP, the page with a chart headed “prenatal human development” that indicates fertilization as the beginning. Somehow she did not understand this and did not really know what “prenatal” meant and said that she was “disappointed” that I could not discuss “responsibly.”

The History professor returned later with his course outline and we talked further. His main point then was that he questioned whether or not the victims of the Holocaust and the other atrocities would support the use of their photographs. To show him I wasn't’ a blank wall, I said, “When Schindler’s List came out, I read the book before the release of the film. And whenever I heard the music from the film, I cried.” He said quickly, as if he were sarcastic, “I’m touched.” When I told him that I could learn from him, he said that I would misuse the learning. When I returned home after GAP I sent him an e-mail. (See post below. Note that the prof never answered my e-mail.)

Conversation Three was with a Philosophy/History student. This was challenging because of the intelligence of the student, my fatigue at the end of the day at the end of the week, and because we spoke fast and furious, though civil. The student was more open minded than the profs and we were able to interject some humor, except he gave me a fake e-mail address after saying it was real, which leads me to doubt his sincerity. His main point was that an act is evil solely to the degree it inflicts suffering. I said that an act can be evil even if no one suffers, for example, abortion is evil because it robs a human being of life, though no evident suffering occurs.

The e-mail to a Transy Professor

Dear Dr. S... ,

Thank you again for the course outline you gave me on Friday. Some of the books and films are new to me and I will add them to my To Do list. One of my recent interests in Holocaust study is the partisans of Vilna.

I noted your work on Soviet guerillas of World War II. This is a subject I've never thought of before and it seems that Stalin’s treatment of them fits a familiar pattern—though not as extreme as how the Soviets regarded Red Army POW’s. My most recent venture into Soviet History was reading Anne Applebaum’s book, Gulag. A more or less hero of mine is Natan Shcharansky.

In conversation with you, I mentioned the PBS documentary “Memory of the Camps.” It’s an amazing film created from footage taken by allied forces during the liberation of the death camps. A script was composed for the film after the war but the project was never completed until 1985. Here’s a link to the site:
http://www.pbs.org/wgbh/pages/frontline/camp/ . Perhaps it can be a resource for your students.

I will hazard here to quote the concluding words of this documentary as an explanation for the use of the images in our Genocide Awareness Project.

“The dead have been buried; it remains for us to care for these, the living. It remains for us to hope that Germans may help to mend what they have broken, and cleanse what they have befouled. Thousands of German people were made to see for themselves, to bury the dead, to file past the victims. This was the end of the journey they had so confidently begun in 1933. Twelve years? No, in terms of barbarity and brutality they had traveled backwards for 12 thousand years. Unless the world learns the lesson these pictures teach, night will fall, but by God’s grace, we who live, will learn.”

Sincerely,
Meredith Eugene Hunt
Asheville, North Carolina
828-545-2284

April 7, 2008

More GAP at TU Photos

These Transylvania University Students, above, discuss the Genocide Awareness Project among themselves. Below, another group talks with CBR-SE Director, Dr. Fletcher Armstrong (in the red cap).

Rebecca, a CBR volunteer from Nebraska, and other CBR volunteers, talk at length with TU students.


Friday, September 19, 2008

The Genocide Awareness Project at University of Kentucky in Lexington, April 2 & 3, 2008






Pro-Choice @ U of K

The girl in red is proudly pro-choice, though that attitute seems grotesquely out of place in front of the images of aborted children. After this student did her interveiw for these media students, I followed with an interview.

Rain at U of K GAP



The student on the right in the above photo engaged us in loud debate for quite some time, and then when he left the scene, he tipped over a set of our auxillary signs--one a warning sign and the other giving a Post Abortion counseling telephone number. When I called out to him he turned around, and I said, "Come back and set these up!" He replied, "I don't want to!"


The Final Pro-Choice Argument


U of K GAP Umbrellas






Thursday, September 18, 2008

The Genocide Awareness Project @ the University of Louisville, Kentucky --March 31 & April 1, 2008

Lisa, above, a volunteer from Oklahoma, talks with a young man in brown. Below, Rebecca, from Nebraska, discusses with the student in a backpack.

These students above are taking it all in. They stood and looked for quite a while.

GAP has a way of engaging people with the horrible truth of abortion.

GAP at University of Louisville

This man talking with Lisa must be a professor. Most of them from other lands are pro-life. Most USA university professors seem unwilling to talk with us.

This large group of school children was headed toward the display, then they all suddenly stopped and diverted around.

Perhaps they noticed a warning sign, like the orange one here in the photo.

Tyler of the graffiti may be Ty Pennington the host of Extreme Makeover: Home Edition. One of the days at U of L, I noticed a student being pushed in a wheelchair and I recognized him as Patrick Henry Hughes, whose family was featured on that TV program on 2/17/08. It's a great story. Patrick has no eyes so he couldn't see the images.

This blonde girl knelt to take pictures of the GAP display. She looked rather shocked.

More Looks at U of Louisville GAP

University campuses are often nicely landscaped. These flowers above likely are magnolia. You can see the GAP display out of focus in the background.











Passing crowds. The yellow tape was intended to set off a zone for abortion-choice protestors, but they never showed.

Tim in the red cap, a volunteer from Louisville discusses with the student all in black.

Inexpensive rubber boots in bright colors seemed to be the rain fashion of the day.