Thread by me.
An Oakland, California, pastor could face jail time for expressing his pro-life views.
Pastor Walter Hoye ran into trouble with an abortion clinic while doing an informational picket. Dennis Howard, leader of The Movement for a Better America, believes Hoye is innocent.
"His approach was simply to carry a sign that said 'Jesus Loves You. Can We Help?' and offering those who wanted it some information about alternatives to abortion," Howard explains.
Thread by GonzoII.
TORONTO, February 11, 2009 (LifeSiteNews.com) - 12-year-old "Lia" of Toronto has become a star at her school and on Youtube with her five-minute pro-life speech, crafted for a school competition. Despite discouragement and outright opposition, Lia's presentation was so well done that she reportedly won the contest she was told she would be disqualified from, due to the "controversial" message of her speech.
Lia's mother broke the story of her daughter's win in an e-mail to the Moral Outcry blog. LifeSiteNews.com attempts to contact Lia and her parents for comment were unreturned by press time. The speech, however, is available in its entirety on Youtube, where it has been viewed over 100,000 times and sparked a heated discussion. (See: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wOR1wUqvJS4&feature=channel_page)
"What if I told you that right now, someone was choosing if you were gonna live or die?" begins the charismatic seventh-grader in a practice recording of the speech posted on Youtube. "What if I told you that this choice wasn't based on what you could or couldn't do, what you'd done in the past, or what you would do in the future? And what if I told you, you could do nothing about it?
"Fellow students and teachers, thousands of children are right now in that very situation. Someone is choosing without even knowing them whether they are going to live or die. That someone is their mother. And that choice is abortion."
Lia, speaking easily and with sunny enthusiasm, fires off answers to several common objections in the brief speech.
"Why do we think that just because a fetus can't talk or do what we do, it isn't a human being yet?" She asks. "Some babies are born after only five months. Is this baby not human?
"We would never say that. Yet abortions are performed on 5-month-old fetuses all the time. Or do we only call them humans if they're wanted?
"Think about the child's rights, that were never given to it. No matter what rights the mother has, it doesn't mean we can deny the rights of the fetus," she said. "We must remember that with our rights and our choices come responsibilities, and we can't take someone else's rights away to avoid our responsibilities."
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