Ann claims that "the majority of anti-choice bloggers, judging by the attendance, are 50-year-old men, several of whom brought their young sons along. Nearly every younger woman I noticed there was attending as a reporter" while Dana notes "few members of the mostly-male, mostly-middle-aged audience seemed to be bloggers." How does one "seem to be" a blogger? Do you need to be carrying around a laptop and constantly posting while attending a conference? Do you need to be a college-aged? Can middle-aged men not blog?
I don't know if Ann and Dana had blinders on which prevented them from seeing prolife people who don't match their stereotypes of prolifers but their descriptions of the audience are simply inaccurate. I have a sneaking suspicion that the young woman sitting next to my wife during the morning session was Ann. My wife and I are both in our 20's while a friend who was sitting next to me is a woman in her 30's. From my memory, the audience was split fairly evenly with regards to gender and I think there were even more women in the audience than men. I remember one older gentleman who was probably in his 60's. There were a couple of men (3 or 4) who were probably in their 40's. There were a number of middle-aged women, some college students from LSU, and a fair number of men in their 20's like myself. I also noticed a fair number of younger women. I don't know if they were almost all there as reporters as Ann claims. There were a number of young men whom I assumed worked for the Family Research Council who would come in and out and the audience grew larger when Senator Brownback arrived because I'm guessing he brought some of his staff. I think most of the children (2 or 3) there were the children of Charmaine Yoest (FRC's Vice-President of Communications). Tim from Prolifeblogs might have also brought a son along as well.
Ann also claims that "(t)here was also much talk about how the annual March for Life never receives any coverage from the "secular media."" I attended the whole conference (with the exception of David Prentice's speech at the end) and I don't ever recall hearing anything like that. The liberal bent of the mainstream media was mentioned from the podium but I don't recall the March for Life being mentioned with regards to media coverage. Did Ann hear that from a speaker or one of the conference attendees? Who said that exactly? While I know some prolifers feel the March doesn't get the media attention it deserves, I doubt anyone would claim it never gets any.
I think the oddest part of Ann's analysis is when she writes,
See, if you ask Sam Brownback, one of the problems with America is that we treat fetuses as second-class citizens, much like African-Americans were treated in the pre-civil rights era. Does this seem more than a little insulting to anyone else? Saying that black people and fetuses (and really, embryos) should be considered "equally human"? Wow.
Wow indeed. It's amazing Ann seems to be so ignorant of the prolife view that she doesn't understand prolifers view all human beings regardless of race, development, size, etc. as being "equally human." This is the basic premise of the prolife movement yet Ann thinks she came across the Northwest Passage.
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