By DEXTER DUGGAN
SAN FRANCISCO — In what amounted to strange symbolism, fierce foes of Donald Trump virtually invited the public to tread upon and thereby dirty their posters that proclaimed derision of traditional morality. Here’s how that came about.
Coincidentally in 2017, the West’s largest annual pro-life march occurred immediately before, and in the very same location of, the local anti-Donald Trump demonstration scheduled the day after the new president’s January 20 inauguration.
The Walk for Life West Coast marches through San Francisco on the Saturday closest to the January 22 date of the U.S. Supreme Court’s unreasoned imposition of massive national permissive abortion in 1973.
In recent years, tens of thousands of pro-lifers have rallied for an hour at the plaza in front of San Francisco City Hall, then marched for another hour or so along downtown thoroughfare Market Street to the Ferry Building on the bay.
This year, by prearrangement to avoid conflicts over space by the two groups, the anti-Trump tens of thousands began their own rally on the same plaza less than two hours after the pro-lifers departed for Market Street.
The pro-life rally organizers held to their traditional standard of avoiding explicit political identification because they believe pro-life activism is wider than partisanship. But it was hard to avoid rally speakers acknowledging positive news from the nation’s capital about the new climate under Republican Trump.
The Trump haters, on the other hand, made plain their overt partisan fealty to social radicalism as they rallied then headed to demonstrate on Market Street.
Warning her reporters against openly joining anti-Trump activities, Audrey Cooper, editor of the San Francisco Chronicle, reportedly cautioned staff journalists: “No newsroom employee, regardless of job function or title, can participate in political demonstrations of any sort.”
The liberal Chronicle is northern California’s largest daily.
When pro-lifers here concluded their January 21 march, they continued carrying signs with them while departing — often the well-known “I Am the Pro-Life Generation” poster in either English or Spanish — instead of just throwing them away.
However, pedestrians along some of Market Street and adjoining territory saw numerous discarded “women’s rights” posters scattered around, even lying right in the middle of the sidewalk.
That rainy evening, a misstep on a poster could have caused slippery footing. I saw one abandoned sign right in the gutter, perhaps appropriately so.
This recalled observers’ accounts from several years ago that Tea Party rallies left their sites neat, but locations used by Occupy movement leftists were trashy.
Eva Muntean, a cofounder of the 13-year-old pro-life walk, told The Wanderer that 50,000 people attended this year.
Earlier, a crowd estimated at up to 4,000 packed St. Mary of the Assumption Cathedral for a 9:30 a.m. pro-life Mass celebrated by San Francisco Archbishop Salvatore Cordileone before they walked down the slopes of Cathedral Hill to the City Hall plaza.
Cordileone reminded his audience of the primacy of Christ in their lives, but this doesn’t mean they cut themselves off from the world.
“This . . . does not mean that we should remain uninvolved in temporal affairs, much less allow ourselves to be gullible,” he said in his prepared text.
“We must seize the opportunities we have, and partner with those who have power in the worldly sense to build a culture of life in service to the common good. We are happy to do so and are thankful to them for the opportunity.
“Being engaged in the temporal realm is, after all, why we are here today, and why we will walk this afternoon,” Cordileone said.
One of the rally’s biggest cheers occurred when Reggie Littlejohn, president of Women’s Rights Without Frontiers (WRWF), told the crowd that Trump would sign an executive order the next day to stop taxpayer funding of the International Planned Parenthood Federation (IPPF).
Littlejohn is a leading activist against Communist China’s coercive abortion policy. Her business card reads, “A coalition to combat forced abortion and sexual slavery in China.”
Actually, Trump didn’t sign the order on Sunday but waited one more day, the first business day of the new week, January 23, to reinstate what is called the Mexico City Policy, developed through President Ronald Reagan.
It forbids taxpayer funding for international groups that perform or promote abortion, but was rescinded when pro-abortion Democrats Bill Clinton and Barack Obama were in the White House.
Before her talk, Littlejohn recalled for The Wanderer that shortly after Trump was elected in November, she sent him a letter requesting that he investigate IPPF. The letter, reproduced at LifeSiteNews.com, said:
“Transparency is demanded by the fact that IPPF receives taxpayer dollars from the United States and other nations as well. I believe it is impossible to partner so closely with the Chinese Communist Party’s forced-abortion machine without being complicit in its atrocities. This is especially the case when this year we learned that the number of abortions in China is not 13 million, but a staggering 23 million a year.”
To the extent that the U.S. has funded organizations pushing coercive population control, “their blood is on our hands,” Littlejohn told The Wanderer. She said Trump’s action “is a huge victory for Women’s Rights Without Frontiers and women throughout the world.”
The United Nations Population Fund (UNFPA) should be defunded as well, she added. “They’re working hand in hand on coercive population control in China for decades.”
Littlejohn told the rally that China has the highest female suicide rate in the world, and she doesn’t think that’s unrelated to the abortion policy.
Two pastors at the rally expressed hope that their black communities would cease being targeted by abortionists.
Northern California pastor Walter Hoye, who was jailed in 2009 for offering pro-life assistance to women outside an abortion clinic, told The Wanderer that if certain things occur, “we can look forward to the end of abortion, and the end of the impact of abortion on the black community.”
Hoye enumerated: “I want to see President Trump — and I love saying it, ‘President Trump’ — follow through with a clearly articulated agenda. We’re talking about Supreme Court justices. We’re talking about defunding Planned Parenthood entirely. We’re talking about repealing and replacing Obamacare. We’ve got to make it clear that, constitutionally, personhood begins in the womb.”
His website is issues4life.org.
He later went on stage with New Jersey pastor Clenard Childress Jr., a longtime speaker at the Walk for Life rally and founder of blackgenocide.org, which educates people about blacks being targeted by abortionists.
“I’ve never been more excited than now. I’ve never had the expectations I have,” Childress told the crowd at the beginning of the Trump administration. “. . . You have to pray now like never before. . . . This is your moment….
“In order for your light to be seen, you have to be outside the sanctuary, in the public square,” Childress continued. “. . . You can’t shut up now. You have to shout it from the rooftops. . . . The shedding of innocent blood pollutes the land. Our land needs healing.”
As Fr. Frank Pavone, national director of the New York-based Priests for Life, walked along Market Street with other pro-lifers, people came up to him to shake hands, take pictures, and congratulate his work.
He had flown in at night from the January 20 inauguration, Pavone told The Wanderer, where he’d seen people by the thousands wearing Trump’s “Make America Great Again” red hats.
Pavone said he heard repeatedly from people there: “Now we have an opportunity, we have a reprieve, we have a new chance…but if we don’t take it, we’re going to be in real trouble.”
There’s “a lot of eagerness to get to work” and help Trump fulfill his commitments, Pavone said.
Having grown up in New York, Pavone said he already was familiar with the billionaire Manhattan developer and his straight way of talking.
“Early on in the primaries, I got behind Mr. Trump. I noticed something about Mr. Trump right away,” Pavone told The Wanderer. “…He says things the way the average American thinks should be said.”
The priest was encouraged when he spoke with Trump’s advisers, he said, and concluded “that he is completely in our corner on issues that matter the most, and that he’s a man who follows through on what needs to be done.”
Having met personally with Trump twice before the general election, Pavone said, “I think he’s going to be good for things we believe in.”
Trump’s Advisers
Rally speaker Melissa Ohden, who survived a saline abortion in 1977 in a Sioux City, Iowa, hospital, told The Wanderer she is encouraged that Trump “has surrounded himself with such strong pro-life advisers.”
“I have hope, I really do. I have more hope than I’ve had in a long time,” Ohden said.
She told the rally that she managed to survive the toxic saline effects not merely for three days but for five, and was born at about 31 weeks weighing two pounds, 14 ounces, not the 20 weeks that the abortionist wanted to claim.
“You are truly here marching for children like me,” where the intent “was to poison me, to scald off the top layer of my skin” with an abortion method commonly used in the 1970s, she told the crowd.
“This is what a culture of death has brought about in our society,” with babies expected to be delivered dead, she said, but Ohden encouraged her listeners to love those involved in abortion, “and to love those who’ll be marching after us today,” a reference to the pro-abortion anti-Trumpsters.
Ohden is author of a recently released book, You Carried Me: A Daughter’s Memoir (Plough Books), about her search to find and forgive her birth mother.
Although rain had been forecast as a 100 percent certainty, the sky was blue early in the day, and even as clouds gathered, the sun shone through like a beacon in a fog. Rain finally began about the time the pro-life activities ended and the anti-Trump demonstrators massed.
Another pro-life speaker was Pam Tebow, a San Francisco native who had been urged to have an abortion to save her life, but she said she placed her trust in God and went on to give birth to future Heisman Trophy winner Tim Tebow.
The mother and son made a lighthearted 2010 Super Bowl commercial that, Pam Tebow said, led 5.5 million people to rethink their stand on abortion.
As the rally began, Cordileone, the archbishop, read a letter imparting Pope Francis’s apostolic blessing on the gathering, then San Diego physician George Delgado received a prize for his work reversing medication abortions.
Delgado told the rally that more than 40 percent of Planned Parenthood abortions aren’t surgical now, but done by medication, but there still could be time to reverse the effects of the RU-486 pill if a pregnant woman acts quickly.
More information is available at www.abortionpillreversal.com.
Run For Life
The person who may have traveled the farthest for the Walk for Life was Karen Patnaude, from the Republic of Fiji, in the South Pacific Ocean, an American whose husband works there for an airline.
Patnaude, a member of the international LIFE Runners organization (www.liferunners.org), told The Wanderer that it was more than a 10-hour direct flight to reach San Francisco.
Although they can spread their pro-life message through public running events, the only requirement to belong to LIFE Runners is to wear its distinctive blue shirt, she said.
“We’re living billboards of this message of truth, whether we’re walking or running or grocery shopping,” Patnaude, a non-Catholic, said. “. . . The abortion issue is a human issue. . . . The unborn baby is a human,” so it’s not just a question of “choice.”
She said there are more than 300 LIFE Runners in Fiji, and more than 5,000 in 29 nations, from ages 1 to 101.
Pat Castle, from Jefferson City, Mo., who founded the organization in 2008, was among other LIFE Runners in San Francisco for the Walk for Life. Castle said he’s a lifelong runner who has dashed along sites including the Great Wall of China.
One may hope that with the Trump presidency, the pro-life movement draws closer to a victory line.
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