CL at March for Life in D.C. 
 
        We had a lot of positive contact with people at the March and the two conferences we covered on Saturday. We had about a dozen people at the post-March gathering and some good ideas and feedback came out of that.
       The combined march group with Life Matters Journal was great. Sally Winn remarked that this was the biggest showing of the alternative pro-life groups since the 1997 Leftout contingent. In general, the crowd seemed more open to our ideas. From the stage, there wasn't really explicit CLE content, but the tone reflected more openness to diversity in the pro-life movement. Perhaps a goal for the future is to get a CLE speaker for the March.

 









CL at Students for Life
 
        Carol Crossed reports: I was given 5 minutes to speak at the Students for Life conference at a leadership workshop of student university organizations, about 75 leaders. I talked about strategies to create broader participation in their groups by connecting with anti-war, hunger, capital punishment student groups – that these folks don’t necessarily support abortion, but would respect consistency from us. It was well received, peppered with applause throughout. Afterward, students stood in line to speak to me for 50 minutes and told me some of the most amazing stories of how they are connecting
 
       Bill Samuel reports: At the SFLA conference, we had many good conversations with students and other attenders and exhibitors, and got a number of signups. The Consistent cards were very popular. I think our general feeling is that there is a lot of openness to our perspective within the pro-life movement today, and the challenge is how to reach out to nurture that more. It is clear that exhibiting like this is important outreach, as the bulk of the people who came by who were supportive did not previously know about us.
 
West Coast Walk for Life
 
        Ruth Enero, a past President of CL, and Advisory Board member Joan Baranow, among others, were active at the Walk for Life on the west coast in San Francisco.
        Ruth has a large, professionally made CL sign. (The sign maker didn't charge his normal $50 price once he found out what the sign said. He made it for her for free.)
        Ruth always tries to walk on the edge, where the pro-choice protestors can see her sign. Their reaction was mostly positive. A lot of people congratulated her and asked permission to photograph her and the sign. One woman from the pro- choice crowd, determinedly got around the police barricade that was trying to keep the two sides apart, ran over to Ruth, thanked her for the sign, and said it almost made her change sides.
 
Mary Krane Derr in National Catholic Reporter
 
        Patrick O’Neill has published an excellent article remembering Mary.
 
Quotation of the Week
Blog posted by Lew Rockwell
December 30, 2012

        Is there a culture of violence and death in America? Of course. It's fostered by constant wars and millions of corpses, threats of more war, murderous sanctions, soldier and police worship, the cult of empire, CIA death squads, capital punishment, Pentagon-promoted video war games, war movies and TV, other bloody movies and TV, millions of abortions, extensive euthanasia killings, and relentless propaganda for all these evils.