The next pro-abortion generation
The Washington Post, as part of its coverage of the big March for Dead Babies Women's Lives, lets us know that there's a new generation of culture of death apostles coming along:
The voices of the abortion rights movement are changing. As young take over for the old, reason is replacing wrath and nuance, the earlier–and perhaps necessary–absolutes.
That would be news to those who were in Washington yesterday. Reason and nuance were in short supply, rage and obscenity very much in fashion (for details, check here, here, here, and here).
"When you look at the primary organizations who put together Sunday's march, their members are all over 30," says 24-year-old Grayson Crosby, who helped arrange today's discussions. "We wanted to make sure there was a space for younger voices to be heard."
Crosby, recently named one of the top 30 abortion rights activists under 30 by Choice USA, started volunteering at a Planned Parenthood clinic when she was 13, and six years later went to work for the organization as an educator and trainer....
Crosby experienced her own crisis two years ago when she became pregnant. Despite all the coaching she had done and all the friends she could have turned to, "I felt like a bad person because I felt so sad and confused. I never once questioned whether I should have an abortion, but I wondered why is there not any conversation anywhere about these feelings?"
Gives you a lot of confidence in Planned Parenthood when one of their own "educators and trainers" doesn't seem to know how this little problem can be prevented. Of course, even as she decided to kill the baby her "educating" and "training" should have prevented from being conceived, she still felt bad when she had it killed. That's a nice touch–shows her conscience isn't completely dead, so maybe there's hope.
Priscilla Padilla, an abortion counselor in San Francisco, says she and many of her friends don't even like being labeled "pro-choice."
"It puts us in a box that is hard to get out of," she says.
This independence helps explain how Padilla–a politically liberal, first-generation Mexican American–can debate abortion rights with a politically conservative Orthodox Jew and still consider him one of her best friends. Or why Dina Morad, a young grantmaker for a nonprofit organization in Washington, doesn't run away from a conversation with a new acquaintance who is opposed to abortion.
"I have not met one person who is very anti-choice," she says. "I have met people who said they would never think about having an abortion but they always add it's the person's choice."
It's no wonder people like Padilla have such a hard time understanding how those of us in the flyover states think. She's never met one person who agrees with the majority of Americans that abortion should be restricted (that's the definition of "anti-choice" among such people).
Read the whole article. It's an eye-opener.
Athanasius on 04.26.04 @ 10:41 PM EST [link]
Recruiting for al-Qaeda, in London of all places
The New York Times ran an article today that ought to send British officials running to courts for deportation orders–not that they'd get them. For instance, here's a Muslim leader calling his troops to jihad:
On Thursday evening, at a tennis center community hall in Slough, west of London, their leader, Sheik Omar Bakri Mohammad, spoke of his adherence to Osama bin Laden. If Europe fails to heed Mr. bin Laden's offer of a truce—provided that all foreign troops are withdrawn from Iraq in three months—Muslims will no longer be restrained from attacking the Western countries that play host to them, the sheik said.
"All Muslims of the West will be obliged," he said, to "become his sword" in a new battle. Europeans take heed, he added, saying, "It is foolish to fight people who want death—that is what they are looking for."
That "truce" offer has already been rejected by every Western European government for the sham that it is. Why foreigners, or even British citizens, are allowed to incite to violence without penalty is bewildering. The article indicates, for instance, that the government has been trying to strip al Qaeda recruiters of citizenship and/or deport them for years, without being able to get court approval. I've got no truck with laws abridging even hateful speech, but incitement to violence is another story. Fortunately, by no means all of Britain's Muslims are supporters of the fanatics:
Muhammad Sulaiman, a stalwart of the mainstream Central Mosque here, was penniless when he arrived from the Kashmiri frontier of Pakistan in 1956. He raised money to build the Central Mosque here and now leads a campaign to ban Al Muhajiroun radicals from the city's 10 mosques.
"This is show-off business," he says in accented English. "I don't want these kids in my mosque."
Other community leaders look to the government to do something, if only to help prevent the demonization of British Muslims, or "Islamophobia," as some here call it.
"I think these kids are being brainwashed by a few radical clerics," said Akhbar Dad Khan, another elder of the Central Mosque. He wants them prosecuted or deported. "We should be able to control this negativity," he said.
What is it about "we want to destroy you" that the West doesn't seem to understand?
Athanasius on 04.26.04 @ 10:02 PM EST [link]
