Polarize or Die
Thanks for the encouragement Lila. I am thankful that you continue to move in the right direction strategically. I response to your question, these HumanLife.org people are quintessentially typical of the pro-life movement; nice, well-intentioned people who think they have to be popular to be effective. The fatal flaw in their tactic is that they rely for their very existence upon the good will of pro-abortion campus newspaper editors. If they tick off the editors, they won’t run the pro-life tabloid insert. When you give rights of censorship to people who hate you, your project gets designed around what your adversaries will tolerate, not what will change hearts and save lives. Our adversaries won’t tolerate the truth about abortion so HumanLife.org must cover up that truth if they are going to get their insert stuffed.
Every image and word of text CBR publishes is carefully designed to expose, not cover up, the truth about abortion. We establish the humanity of the unborn child and the inhumanity of his slaughter. Every delivery medium we use communicate those images and text (the web, our trucks, our planes, our static sign displays, etc.) is carefully designed to be unstoppable. We give rights of censorship to no one. Instead of trying to avoid conflict, as most pro-life groups do, we go out of our way to provoke conflict, because first of all, we want to polarize the public to drive the broad mass of Americans out of the middle. Secondly, conflict forces the news media to engage. When we published our ObamaCare Joker poster as a press release, 5000 news organizations roundly ignored it. When we put it on the side of a truck and drive it around a middle school as the students are arriving, we will get so many people so angry that we will generate newspaper, TV and radio news coverage for a week. Everyone will be saying two things: CBR is terrible and the pictures are terrible. We are only too glad to let people think we are terrible if it also convinces them that abortion is terrible. The difference between being ignored and dominating several consecutive news cycles is conflict. It is parents and teachers administrators infuriated that we are making it much more difficult for them to lie to children about what abortion is and does.
One very good way to gage the relative effectiveness of our GAP signs versus HumanLife.org’s newspaper inserts is how many times and with what ferocity do the newspapers get trashed before they can be delivered, versus the intensity and frequency of the attacks on our GAP projects. The inserts cause less anger because they are so much less threatening to the other side. The newspaper inserts express the opinion that abortion is not a good choice. Our GAP signs prove the fact that abortion is an act of violence which kills a baby. That is VERY threatening to the other side and they know it and they act accordingly. I would be very nervous about any project which provoked relatively little anger from the pro-aborts and public.
Gregg Cunningham