Dear Christian abortion protesters: Is it worth it?

Dear Christian Abortion protesters,

     Greetings from a fellow believer. I see you marching, holding signs, and taking out billboards protesting the legality of an act that our country has deemed legal. I don't like it either. But I've had a question regarding abortion that has been in my head for years. I've only recently shared it and I will do so here as well.

     Doesn't an aborted fetus automatically go to heaven in your view? That's a pretty standard view among Christians that a fetus has a soul. Is protesting for the life of a soul that is assured entry into the pearly gates worth alienating a life that may or may not have decided to accept Christ? I look at some of your signs and billboards (the most recently newsworthy one can be seen here ), and I think "are these people trying to win hearts and minds and change policies or just trying to irritate a lot people?"

     I think it's safe to say that your signs aren't working. Oh sure there may be an isolated case here or there, but think about the people whose hearts you have probably hardened against your views. And also think about the way our country's abortion policy has remained pretty much consistent for decades, even with a so called "pro-life" party in power at different times.

     I know that we can never know what could have come of the lives lost to abortion, but is this world or the next your priority? I'm actually asking this because so much of the suffering in this world doesn't stir near the feeling out of my fellow Christians as this act.

     So once again:   "Is protesting for the life of a soul that is assured entry into the pearly gates worth alienating a life that may or may not have decided to accept Christ?"

Arkansas's Congressmen and the F-35

The US House recently voted to stop funding for GE's alternate F-35 engine. This has been touted as an example of making the military sacrifice during these hard economic times, even though the engine is being called a redundancy (therefore not a sacrifice) at the same time. While I support the vote to stop it, I saw an ad in the Dem-Gaz which raised my curiousity.

The ad congratulated all of Arkansas's Congressmen for "protecting the American taxpayer" by voting against the alternate engine, all the Congressmen that is, except for Mike Ross. Yet Mike Ross, the lone Democrat in the delegation, voted to kill the engine too. But he wasn't thanked in the ad. Curious.

The ad was taken out in the paper by Pratt&Whitney Engines and United Technologies. Why would these companies take out an ad for this? Oh yeah, that's right because they're the ones making the F-35 engine.

Pratt & Whitney is the subsidiary of United Technologies that makes the engine. A more honest wording of the ad would probably have been, "thank you for taking care of our competition".

I'm as much for cutting waste as anyone, but I don't like companies being disingenuous.

As far as why Mike Ross wasn't mentioned, the mystery goes on. It would be interesting to see info on recent and future campaign contributions from United Technologies, and on GE for that matter, to members of the U.S. House and see if any of them correlate to yea or nay votes.

Spike Lee at UCA

Spike Lee spoke at UCA last night and if you didn't catch it then it was your loss. Regardless of your opinion of his films and his politics (I think the former are brilliant and the latter hit or miss), his lecture was one of the least divisive things I've heard in a long time. He touched on the lack of and need for more black, male teachers ( and as someone pointed out during the Q&A male teachers in general). His other big topics were hard work, having a supporting family, and self reliance (I'm sure my GOP readers loved to hear that, although shouldn't we all?).There was also a great surprise during the Q&A time when Lee found out that Minnijean Brown-Trickey of the Little Rock Nine was in the balcony and he had her come down to the stage to a standing ovation. It was definitely a big moment for both of them and the pressure was on from the audience for him to make a Central High film.

Hearing Lee's story firsthand about how he became a filmmaker, and then having it followed by Miss Brown-Trickey was inspirational. He mentioned with sadness how back when he was growing up, intelligence wasn't something that was frowned upon among black youth. Those with brains were as respected as those with basketball skills, or those who could "rap and talk to the ladies" as he said.  I don't care what you think about his views, the black community could use a few more Spike Lees and a few less Jay Zs (although dude can flow, I'm not hatin'), and so could our nation. I'm pretty sure that those 9 men and women who made a stand for education would agree.