Glad You Are Here
From: Mewes, Br William
Sent: Monday, May 04, 2009 1:51 PM
To: Gregg Cunningham
Subject: Glad
I was glad to see your plane and banner flying around Notre Dame. I was surprised that it got here way before graduation weekend. The same goes for the picture trucks.
This was well covered on the local Fox TV news the other night at 10:00 p.m., but they covered all the pictures.
Keep up your good work!
Brother Bill
On May 4, 2009, at 2:41 PM, Gregg Cunningham wrote:
Dear Brother Bill,
Thank you for your kind and encouraging note. We don’t receive many messages of that sort from Notre Dame but we don’t expect to. We decided to send in the photos early as a way of settling the facts. We intentionally chose delivery methods designed to make those facts unavoidable. We knew the invitation to Mr. Obama would stimulate a debate. We wanted this exchange of opinion to be informed by those facts. The word abortion has become an abstraction. It has lost almost all of its meaning. This has allowed our adversaries to argue that abortion is an nominal evil best left to personal discretion. Most fundamentally, it is important for people to be able to see what no words are adequate to convey: Who is the baby and what does abortion do to him? Then the implications of those facts can be meaningfully discussed. Is the baby developmentally entitled to rights of personhood? Is abortion an evil of sufficient magnitude to justify criminalizing the act? As a graduation speaker, are Mr. Obama’s supposed virtues sufficiently noble to offset his insistence on making elective abortion more even accessible? Is it morally sufficient to merely reduce the “need” to torture babies to death and if abortion isn’t torturing babies to death, why are the students so desperate to have us suspend our photo displays?
Of course the photos are only useful to viewers who have or will someday acquire a fully functioning conscience. The bad news is that many college students are still in the process of conscience formation. The good news is that most are more ignorant than evil and as their sense of right and wrong matures, our pictures will be lingering in their minds, waiting to ambush every delusional, pro-abortion fantasy with the culture of death tries to indoctrinate them. The students are angry at us now because complicity in mass murder is not how they wish to think of Mr. Obama or themselves. Indifference to serial killing is not how they wish to think of Fr. Jenkins or Notre Dame. But no matter how angry they might be at us, every time they hear the word abortion they will, from now on, see a dead baby, not some abstract right or a healthcare issue or an obsession of religious fanatics. Now that they have seen the truth, most will eventually come around. Patience.
Lord bless,
Gregg Cunningham
The Center For Bio-Ethical Reform