Fletcher's Blog

Rep. Frank Niceley

Speaking before the House Judiciary Committee of the 104th Tennessee General Assembly, State Representative Frank Niceley (R-Strawberry Plains) defines eco-terrorism, PETA, and left-wing eco-greenie wackos (which are sort of like fire-ants).

Note: the cartoon explosions and animal sound effects have been added after-the-fact.  Pigs and cows won’t come into the State Captial building when politicians are present.  I think they can’t stand the smell.

I just love Tennessee.

Stacey Campfield

My good friend Stacey Campfield wondered why conservatives are called the “right” and liberals are called the “left.”  He found the answer in the Bible, of course:

“The heart of the wise inclines to the right, but the heart of the fool to the left.”  (Ecclesiastes 10:2)

Training prepares students to articulate and respectfully defend the pro-life position.

CBR Southeast announces a new page on Facebook that will focus on our pro-life apologetics training.

Our Pro Life Training Academy (PLTA) is an ourtreach primarily to Christian/pro-life college and high-school students, but even experienced activists will benefit from the training.

Pro-life youth are a critical group because they are the future leaders of the movement. More immediately, they wield enormous influence on their peers, particularly when they are trained and equipped.

Please go “Like” our new page at www.facebook.com/ProLifeTraining.

A full-day seminar prepares the student to articulate and respectfully defend the pro-life position, even before hostile audiences. Role-playing exercises allow the student to practice for real-life encounters.  For students ready to take the next step, CBR’s Genocide Awareness Project (GAP) provides a unique opportunity for on-the-job training (www.facebook.com/ProLifeOnCampus).

In addition to the training pro-life advocates, the PLTA unites pro-lifers behind common goals of education, training, and outreach. Community pro-life advocates host, promote, and participate in the training. Target audiences include college pro-life groups, Church youth groups, Christian high schools, pro-life agencies, and pro-life volunteers.

CBR and the local community stakeholders work jointly to fund community-wide training.

Here is Dr. Alveda King speaking at the Jefferson Memorial at the Restoring Honor Rally on August 28, 2010.

You can watch the entire rally here.  Glenn Beck said early media reports indicated that ”over a thousand” people were in attendance!

Charles Krauthammer

I wanted to share with you two op-ed pieces by Charles Krauthammer.  Well worth the read.

• The last refuge of a liberal - The theme of the column is summed up in two words near the end, “undisguised contempt”.
• It’s nonsense to say the U.S. is ungovernable – The Left’s contempt for American institutions.

Restoring Honor Rally at the Lincoln Memorial

I was at the National Mall Saturday.  It was a huge crowd, much larger than the “tens of thousands” reported by the MSM.  I’ve been to many football games at the U of Tennessee, so I know what 100,000 people looks like.

For comparison purposes, I saw a photo (on the world-wide-interwebs) of an Obama election rally at the Gateway Arch  (St. Louis), which was reported to be 100,000 people.  I looked at areal shots of both venues (National Mall and Gateway Arch) at the same scale.  The Beck crowd was many times larger in size, although perhaps not as dense in some areas.  My best guess is 300,000 or more were there Saturday.  No way the crowd was smaller than 200,000.  I wouln’t scoff if you told me 500,000.

The remarkable thing about the crowd Saturday is that the rally got very little pre-publicity, except on Beck’s TV and radio shows.  I’m on a bunch of e-mail lists and I frequently get appeals to do this or that, especially when somebody is trying to drive up numbers.  I never once got an e-mail to come to the Lincoln Memorial.  (I was there because I just happened to be in DC last week.)  I wouldn’t have known about it if my wife hadn’t told me about it, so I was shocked to see so many people.

More important than attendance was the actual message.  More on that later.

Pastor Cecil Clark of True Vine Baptist Church outside an abortion clinic in Knoxville.

“Would you look at that?” he said, as we stood on the U of Louisville campus. Pastor Dave Daubenmire and I watched as professional pro-aborts desperately denied the truth staring them in the face.  The students weren’t buying it.

“Every time Christians show up with the truth, we win.”  But then Pastor Dave hit me where it hurts, “The only problem is, we Christians usually don’t show up.” 

Jesus said the gates of Hell would not prevail against the Church (Matthew 16:18), but can we really apply that verse when the Church does nothing?

The biggest example of this is abortion. We have abortion in American because the “pro-life” church isn’t showing up. I’m not talking about the churches that are officially pro-abortion.  I’m talking about just the churches you and I attend.

If you are reading this, you probably attend a church that claims to be “pro-life.”  But is it really?  An easy test to perform:

1. Go to the nearest abortion clinic when the killing is going on.  Count the number of your pastors/elders/church leaders that show up.
2. Go to the next meeting of any pro-life endeavor in your community and count the number of your pastors/elders/church leaders that show up.
3. Take a look at the budget of your church and add up the money spent on stopping abortion. Then add up the money spent on church-run sports programs. Then add up the money spent on making the music better on Sunday morning. If you add it up all over Knoxville, where I live, it will be a few thousand dollars to stop abortion, hundreds of thousands to run sports programming, and millions of dollars on the Sunday morning music. I’m not knocking music or sports, but I am wondering why full-time professionals are hired to run sports and music programs in almost every major church, but almost zero staff time is ever devoted to help stop killing babies.  That despite the fact that approximately 1 in 5 women who aborts her baby identifies herself as a “born-again” or “evangelical” Christian.
4. Take a look at the required core education curriculum of your church. It has to be on paper (or online) or it doesn’t count. Look for the mandated requirements for teaching middle and high-school students about abortion. Are there any such requirements? No? Then is it any wonder why so many of our children have abortions?
5. As you evaluate the pro-life education requirements at your church, find out if photos/videos of aborted babies are mandated as part of the published curriculum. We hear from the students who grew up in “pro-life” churches all the time.  Just recently, two student government leaders at Liberty University told me they were not commited pro-lifers until I showed them pictures of abortion.  The “pro-life” church had hidden the truth from them, and they had never known nor cared because they had never seen.

So, is your church “pro-life”?  What are you going to do about it?

What would Jesus do?

P.S.  A pastor recently told me that his church ”works through” the local CPC that some of their members helped to start 20 years ago. Not sure what that means, but I do know it ain’t much. They were not interested in doing anything more.  I can tell you that babies are dying in that church, but the pastor believes that their only responsibility to those babies is to send a few dollars to a pregnancy center across town.  If I ever have a heart attack, I hope I’m not sitting in that church!

Baby saved at the University of Tennessee.

We are pleased to announce that a generous donor is willing to match your gift to CBR-SE / Pro Life on Campus.  Not once.  Not twice.  But three times!

3-FOR-1 MATCHING PROGRAM!

That means for every $1 you provide, we receive $4 to save babies and moms.

Here’s how it works.  When you sign up for an automatic monthly gift, our anonymous donor will match your first month’s gift—his $3 for every $1 you commit.  Example: you give $60/month, our donor gives $180 today!  Your $60 puts $240 to work saving babies and moms, right now!  No gift will go unmatched; your $10 puts $40 to work!  Please give now, before our donor goes broke and it’s too late!   Here’s the page link.  Then hit “Monthly DONATION” and provide the requested information over our secure connection. 

Please pass this along to all your pro-life friends.  If you care about saving babies and moms, this deal is too good to miss.

As 145 soldiers returning from Iraq and Afghanistan walked through the double doors in Terminal D at DFW Airport last week for two weeks of R&R, they were greeted not only by their families, but by President George Bush and his wife Laura.

My letter to the Knoxville News Sentinel has been published:

http://www.knoxnews.com/news/2010/aug/17/letters-democrats-attacking-first-amendment/

Lots of comments already.  I’ve responded to some of them.  Please leave your own comments on the KNS website (if appropriate to the topic), and also below (to tell me what a smart guy I am)!

Follow CBR / Pro Life on Campus on Facebook, Twitter, and YouTube.

Hot in Tennessee (Charlie Daniel, KnoxNews.com)

It’s so dry in Tennessee, …

• the Baptists are baptizing by sprinkling,
• the Methodists are using wet-wipes,
• the Presbyterians are giving rain checks, and
• the Catholics are praying for the wine to turn back into water!

It’s so hot in Tennessee, …

• birds have to use potholders to pull the worms out of the ground.
• the trees are whistling for the dogs.
• hot water comes from both taps.
• lizards jump into the fire to get under the shade of the skillet.
• the temperature drops below 95 F and you feel a little chilly.
• you break into a sweat when you step outside at 7:30 am.
• you realize that asphalt has a liquid stage.
• cows are giving evaporated milk.
• farmers are feeding their chickens crushed ice so they won’t lay boiled eggs.

(Thanks to State Rep. Stacey Campfield and KNS/Charlie Daniel.)

Appalachian State students plan their pro-life year

Please forward this link to every pro-life student you know.

CBR / Pro Life on Campus and the Students for Life of America (SFLA) announce the 5th Annual Pro-Life Student Leadership Conference, to be held on September 10-11, 2010 in Knoxville, Tennessee.  The theme for this years conference is Sharpening Your Focus to Cultivate a Pro-Life Campus.  For more information, click here.

This Conference is about how to make your student pro-life group more effective on your campus.  We show you how to:

1. select projects that work,
2. recruit members to grow,
3. raise money to pay for projects,
4. assert your First Amendment rights when they are threatened, and
5. maximize media exposure.

Put them all together, and you have a comprehensive pro-life action plan for your campus.

In short, we give you the entire tool-box you need to make a huge and ongoing impact on your campus. If you do the things we teach, you will be the most talked-about student group on campus within a year, and number 2 won’t even be close.  And we back that up with a money-back guarantee.  Who else does that?  And who else offers a conference for only $10, and that includes housing and meals?!

 You can get more information and register here.  Deadline for reserving free housing is August 28, so call now.

Check out this video on media fraud at the annual March for Life in Washington, DC.  Look for the CBR truth truck!

I am stunned.  This is the best and most encouraging pro-life story I’ve seen in a long time.  I’m speechless.  Check it out.

Not only are the Midland Catholics for Life doing a GREAT job, one TV station is willing to cover it.

Its right out of the CBR playbook.  Educate people about the horrifying reality of abortion, and do it in such a way that compels the media to cover it.  Create conflict—not uncontrolled conflict, but modulated conflict—that draws attention to the plight of the preborn child.  Media might not like us, but they can’t resist conflict.  Thank you Midland Catholics for Life!

The abortion photos on the billboard came from CBR.  We provide graphic images to pro-life groups all over the world who (1) comply with our non-violence policy condemning all abortion-related violence and refusing to associate with groups or individuals who fail to condemn such violence, and (2) agree not to alter the images.

We give all glory to God, and we are so thankful he is using us in this way.  Please share in our blessing by $upporting our work!