By DEXTER DUGGAN
SAN FRANCISCO — An activist black pastor voiced defiance of the Obama administration’s threat to individual conscience through its health-care mandate during speeches in front of San Francisco City Hall at the 10th annual Walk for Life West Coast here.
“Enough is enough! We will not surrender our conscience,” said Rev. Clenard Childress Jr., one of four main pro-life speakers at Civic Center Plaza on January 25. “We will stay in the streets. We will engage in civil disobedience.”
In his ten-minute talk, Childress recalled that German-born genius and physicist Albert Einstein, who refused to return to that country when National Socialist dictator Adolf Hitler took power, had warned, “Never surrender conscience, even if the state demands it.”
Barack Obama’s Obamacare asserts that Americans’ health plans must provide for contraception, sterilization, and abortifacient coverage, regardless of individual conscience — an act of arrogance under widespread challenge in the courts.
Estimates of marchers here ranged from more than 50,000 to 70,000 people, the second-largest annual pro-life demonstration across the United States. The national March for Life, in Washington, D.C., is the largest by far, with numbers often exceeding a half-million.
Numerous other cities also have rallies and marches every January to mourn the U.S. Supreme Court’s unsupportable invention of an imaginary national right to permissive abortion on January 22, 1973, a raw exhibition of power by an elite that manages to continue to assert its domination of national life.
From Oregon to South Carolina, from Texas to Minnesota, pro-lifers pledged at rallies that the High Court’s grievous error would come to an end.
Pro-life broadcaster Barbara Simpson wrote an online column in California about the Walk for Life West Coast’s success, and a pro-lifer in Texas captured the unfairness of permissive abortion in a powerful comment he put online at the end of that column.
The Texan said he attended the rally in the state capital of Austin with his ten-year-old twin girls: “They do not understand why a mommy would kill her baby. They wonder why the mommy does not simply put the baby up for adoption. Since the girls are adopted, this issue is close to their hearts.”
An estimated 4,000 Texans attended that rally.
Dolores Meehan, cofounder of the Walk for Life West Coast, told The Wanderer: “The level of peace and joy that emanated from the 50,000-plus attendees — young and old and in-between — imparted a really special blessing on the city of San Francisco.
“The great thing about reaching out in love and joy,” Meehan said, “is that it falls on everyone, whether they are with us or protesting against us. It was a great day to be alive.”
Childress, a veteran speaker at Walk for Life West Coast, said this event notifies the Obama administration, “I will not surrender my conscience. . . . You [marchers] do what is right not for reward . . . but because it’s right.”
Recalling that the president falsely said people could keep their doctors and medical plans under Obamacare, the emphatic pastor said there’s a more authoritative doctor who has a better plan for the people.
“Who is the doctor? He is the King of Glory. We have to keep the doctor and keep the plan,” Childress proclaimed.
Childress is founder of BlackGenocide.org, which calls attention to racists and eugenicists like Planned Parenthood targeting minority communities.
When the talks ended shortly before 1:45 p.m., the huge crowd moved onto nearby Market Street, demonstrating their presence to the city by marching curb-to-curb nearly two miles down the thoroughfare to San Francisco’s Ferry Building on the Bay.
Four hours before Childress spoke, about 3,500 people jammed St. Mary of the Assumption Cathedral, atop Cathedral Hill, for the Walk for Life Mass, with the homily given by local Catholic Archbishop Salvatore Cordileone.
Cordileone called attention to the number of young people present, whom he described as the second generation of pro-lifers, their parents being the first. He noted that the attack on preborn babies’ lives has been joined by another attack, against traditional marriage.
In his prepared remarks, the archbishop said: “Now the same contempt, accusations, and name-calling are being hurled at those who stand for the truth of marriage as were hurled against those who stood for life a generation and two ago. But we cannot allow ourselves to be shamed into silence. The truth needs a voice, and you, my dear young people, are that voice for the next generation.”
He noted that women are pressured to keep quiet if they dare to doubt the alleged benefits of abortion.
“All too often these women are shamed into silence, intimidated — even if implicitly — not to share their true feelings for fear of rejection, of being shut down and marginalized, or just not trusting that there is anyone who would really understand and listen compassionately,” Cordileone said.
“Instead, they get the message that they are not supposed to have these feelings, because this is something that was supposed to be good for them.”
Departing from his prepared remarks, Cordileone noted that the cathedral was “jammed to overflowing,” and tens of thousands of people soon would be marching through downtown San Francisco, but don’t look for the news in the media.
About three hours later, Cordileone told the City Hall rally that Pope Francis imparted an apostolic blessing upon them.
Little or no attention from biased media is what pro-lifers expect from long experience, but they still realize it’s unfair, whether under the warm sun here on January 25 or the frigid temperatures in the nation’s capital on January 22.
Margaret Sullivan, the “public editor” of The New York Times, noted reader complaints that the “newspaper of record” printed no story but only one photograph of this year’s Washington, D.C., march, with a two-line caption on page A-17.
Sullivan quoted this complaint: “Several hundred thousand people travel to Washington each year for this event, held on the anniversary of the Roe v. Wade decision. Yesterday’s march was especially impressive given the severe cold and the presence of so many young people. It is extraordinary that it was not properly reported. . . .”
The Times should have assigned a staff reporter in Washington, Sullivan conceded, even though severe winter weather may have reduced crowd numbers a bit.
“The march may happen every year, and this one may have been smaller than usual, but it still is a major event,” Sullivan wrote, “and there were fresh angles available, including the more inclusive approach, the large number of young people involved, and the difficulties of participating in the storm. The lack of staff coverage unfortunately gives fuel to those who accuse The Times of being anti-Catholic, and to those who charge that the paper’s news coverage continually reflects a liberal bias.”
Sullivan’s admission was hardly the first by a Times “public editor” that its coverage is plainly unfair on the pro-life issue. But the blatant slant continues year after year.
Both Sides
Meanwhile, on the opposite coast, northern California’s dominant newspaper, the liberal San Francisco Chronicle, took a baby step in the right direction, although it, like The New York Times, printed only a photo, no story.
The January 26 Chronicle had a color photo all the way across the top of page C-2, by far the biggest photo in the last three years. It showed some of the pro-life marchers, but the first sentence of the caption falsely represented the turnout by the opposing sides of the issue.
“Both sides of the abortion debate were out in force Saturday afternoon in downtown San Francisco for the 10th annual Walk for Life,” it said, adding in the second sentence that “tens of thousands of abortion protesters paraded down Market Street.” The third and last sentence of the caption said they “were countered loudly by hundreds of activists” with “abortion on demand” stickers.
So “tens of thousands” of pro-lifers and “hundreds” of champions of abortion equal both sides being “out in force” to the Chronicle.
In fact, last year’s Chronicle published a story, although it was deeper in the paper, on page C-12, and presented the same phony equivalence of both sides participating, although the paper’s own numbers showed the pro-lifers dominating by far.
Two years ago the Chronicle printed only a modest two-column black-and-white photo on page C-3, with a caption saying “thousands” of pro-lifers participated.
Each year it’s like pulling teeth just to expect any recognition of major pro-life stories in the dominant news media. Meanwhile, stereotypically, this year’s January 26 Chronicle had a major front-page story about the threat to California’s coho salmon, including two photos on page one and three more photos when the story was continued inside for a full page.
One might think that with this being the 10th annual Walk for Life West Coast, which has shown tremendous growth in turnout in one decade, an editor might schedule space for an interesting anniversary retrospective. One would have expected wrong.
Many talks at such rallies are educational and therefore ignored because they, too, have information unwelcome in newsrooms.
“We Are Winning”
One of the speakers at the San Francisco rally, Monica Snyder, represented the organization named Secular Pro-Life, many of whose members follow no organized religion, and all of whom argue from a secular perspective.
Snyder, who majored in chemical biology at the University of California-Berkeley, told the crowd that by focusing on factual arguments about prenatal development, Secular Pro-Life easily overcomes the approach of abortion champions who want to debate issues like when the soul enters the body.
“We take away their favorite distraction,” she said, adding later: “The fact that I have no religion but I am still passionately pro-life means we are winning. . . .
“The pro-life movement is winning because we are the big tent. . . . Everyone who recognizes the horror of abortion is welcome” to belong, whether they’re atheists, agnostics, or of some other belief, Snyder said.
Forgiveness for sins and errors was one theme at the rally.
Speaker Grace Dulaney, founder of the Lamb of God Maternity Home, a San Diego-area ranch for unwed mothers contemplating adoption, told the crowd that she was going through a divorce when she became pregnant, an experience that eventually led her into adoption advocacy.
“I am not proud of how I got myself into the situation, but I am proud of what I did with it,” Dulaney says of the unexpected pregnancy.
“God often uses our deepest pain as the launching pad for our greatest calling,” she said.
“Reproductive Harm”
Toward the end of the march, a few hundred champions of abortion stood along Market Street, many holding orange and black signs saying, “Abortion on demand & without apology.”
A larger sign said, “Life begins when you stand up to Christian fascists.”
Before the cathedral Mass, The Wanderer spoke with Fr. Frank Pavone, national director of Priests for Life, on the church steps.
“I’ve never been more convinced that we are winning,” he said. “. . . The progress is accelerating” on various fronts, although the U.S. Supreme Court remains an obstacle.
With considerable change occurring on lower levels of government, Pavone said, “I think these dynamics that are underneath will rise up” and Roe v. Wade “just becomes obsolete” at some point.
The following day, at the 11 a.m. Sunday Mass at the cathedral, a homilist told a story that could apply in many situations. He said a rooster had pridefully concluded that it was his crowing that made the sun rise. On a cloudy day the exhausted rooster died of a broken heart when the sun failed to come at his call.
The lesson: We have our missions in life, but God’s in control.
Good to remember when the legal system needs someone to crow it into awakening. At area stores selling cigarettes, the state of California has signs warning that the tobacco sticks are known to cause “reproductive harm.” What could this imply when the very purpose of abortion clinics is to cause downright fatal harm to the objects of reproduction?
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