March for Life 2009

Every January 22nd for the past 10 or 12 years, some or all of our family has made the pilgrimage to Washington D.C. for the annual March For Life. This date is significant because it's the anniversary of the Supreme Court decision "Roe v. Wade," which decriminalized abortion.

The March is one of the high points of my children's year. For various reasons, they can't wait to get up before dawn, watch the sun rise from a bus window, eat a diner breakfast, ride the D.C. metro system, mill around in a countless crowd, play "I spy the sharpshooter on the White House roof," speculate whether they are genuine homeless persons or scam artists, take a stroll up Constitution Avenue and Capitol Hill, then do it all again in reverse.

There have been a few years when I opted not to go along - I gave the executive veto the year there was a sniper picking off random citizens in the DC/Virginia area, for instance, and I opted out the year I had 3-week-old twins - but usually I have gone along with whatever baby/babies we have at the time. I know plenty of large families who go together every year, en masse, by hook or by crook, but I am not that strong. At this particular age, our twins are too hard for me to manage during a trip to the grocery store, let alone in such a sea of humanity.

Every year the crowd seems to get bigger. Last year it was immense - a sea of people as far in front and behind as you could see. And this year, with the dawn of a new and blatantly pro-death choice administration, our pilgrims reported a larger crowd than ever. We usually get off the metro and walk along with a trickle of people, which opens up to a throng on the National Mall. This year, however, they met up with heavy crowds several blocks before the Mall, and when they got to the Mall, they stood in place for two to three hours before their part of the crowd began to move along Constitution Avenue (another reason I'm glad I stayed at home with the twins and my bursitis). During this time, there were speeches being given, but none of our group had a chance to get near enough to hear anything they said.

They never saw such a crowd. The odd thing is that there was scarcely a mention of this in the mainstream media (as usual), and you can NEVER find a realistic estimate of the numbers in attendance.

But for the inauguration of the first black president two days prior? What did they estimate? A jillion-and-a-half in attendance? How do they know how many people were there? Did they have a sign-in sheet or something?

The March For Life reports usually say "crowds" or "legions;" one website put the attendance at 250,000. "Legions" is good, though. It certainly rings truer than the "several thousand" that has been used in prior years. And if you do see a video clip on the news, instead of focusing on the fact that it's a peaceful civil protest, it usually showcases the extreme cases - the real religious nuts or the "shock value" signs. Trust me, you don't want to see those.

What does a crowd of 250,000 look like? If you're in the middle of it, I imagine that it could look an awful lot like a million people, so it's impossible for me to guesstimate. One year of record attendance (I believe it was the 30th anniversary of Roe v. Wade), the msm reported that 50,000 people were in attendance. {scoff}

Oh well. I have grown accustomed to the bias of the msm, but at times it still makes my blood boil.

Here's an related article from the National Catholic Register.

This is a Superbowl ad rejected by NBC.

Here are some pictures from the March this year. I guess there were two or three dozen people there.

Why do we do it? Well...

“They came first for the Communists…but I didn’t speak up because I wasn’t a communist. Then they came for the Jews…but I didn’t speak up because I wasn’t a Jew. Then they came for the Unionists…but I didn’t speak up because I wasn’t a Unionist. Then they came for the Catholics…but I didn’t speak up because I was a Protestant. Then they came for me…and by that time there was no one left to speak for me.” ~Martin Niemöller


(And no, I'm not going to call him the first African-American president. Sorry. He's not from Africa. My father's 100% Irish. I don't go around calling myself Irish-American. I was born and raised in America. I am just a plain old un-hyphenated American.

I just read in Wiki that Obama is the child of Barack Obama, Sr., of Kenya, and Stanley Ann Dunham, a European-American from Kansas. She was born in Kansas of Kansas-born parents. How does that make her a European-American??? Doesn't that make every single white person in America a European-American??? )

(Sorry about the mini-rant....)

(Stanley Ann?)