+ + + Sign of the Crossing + + +

  Shortly before he went off to prison, my friend Will Goodman told me a bit about a small community in DC that is exploring "vulnerability and solidarity." I mentioned that the first piece I wrote about pro-life activism was about vulnerability. He was interested, so I went looking for it, and located it. I wrote it for the 1976 National Right to Life Convention, in Boston, in the summer of 1976. It was my intention to reproduce it unchanged, but I had to make two small changes -- replacing language that was insensitive and has since that time been discarded by people who listen respectfully and try to speak respectfully.  Human and Vulnerable                                         by John O'Keefe   I find it inexpressibly odd that in our protection of the weakest members of soc...

I was blessed today to attend a trial in DC – pro-life friends on trial for a rescue in DC two years ago. Will Goodman, Lauren Handy, John Hinshaw, Herb Geraghty, and Heather Idoni are charged with violating the FACE Act (Freedom of Access to Clinic Entrance) and conspiracy. This is in a Federal court; the charges are Federal. FACE carries a maximum penalty of one year; conspiracy has a max of ten years. The conspiracy charge is more than slightly weird; every single act of civil disobedience that Rev. Martin Luther King engaged in required a “conspiracy” to prepare. The judge is Colleen Kollar-Kotelly. She’s half-Irish, half-Hungarian, educated in Catholic schools in DC – Visitation then Catholic U then CUA Law School. My experience with Catholic judges in years past was bad: they often leaned over backwards to prove that they weren’t bowing forward towards Rome, and so they hammered pro-lifers. But she has a solid reputation as a judge who listens. We’ll see. The trial may last t...

  Friends, I follow your work from a distance, with some admiration. So I read the exchange about Abby Johnson, and then watched her interview with Church Mili-Protestant. Respectfully, I’d like to speak up again, briefly. Nonviolence is not an interim step between politics and war. Nonviolence, understood and undertaken seriously, has proven to be as powerful as any war has ever been. It is disturbing to listen to Abby and Michael Voris “thinking” about what the pro-life movement should do. Perhaps, they flirted, we should get serious and go to war. The nation did that once before, right? Dear Lord, give us the humility to study. Give us wisdom. Yes, the nation fought to protect an oppressed minority once before. About a million people were killed or wounded in that war. If we do the same today, with similar determination, that would cost about 20 million killed and wounded. Oops. And then the pro-life side would lose. In the Civil War, the anti-slavery side had the power an...