The Rally for Life, face masks and red herrings
We should not be distracted by "questions" that are never asked in good faith.
We had our Rally for Life a week ago, which marks 20 years that I have had an active role in helping with the annual event. (Including being the featured speaker in 2018.) As expected, our rally brought some opposition, though this year it was mostly online.
While The Bloomingtonian showed up to take pictures of the rally, The Herald-Times was absent again. There is simply no excuse for the local newspaper to not send a reporter to cover a rally with 200 people that they knew about well in advance, especially since the H-T has covered much smaller protests many times. The only reason for this disparate coverage is bias, and that has been consistent for two decades now.
One of the most prominent criticisms was that many people at the Rally were not wearing masks. Since we are not wearing masks, we do not care about saving lives, right? Wrong. There is very little evidence of COVID-19 transmission outside, so to assume we are not in favor of protecting lives is simply not backed by scientific data. A mask outside is a more of a security blanket than a pandemic mitigation tool. If you want to wear one, fine, but it is silly to judge anyone else.
Speaking only for myself, I am fully vaccinated against COVID-19 and I wear a mask when I am in a public place in submission to the county's mask mandate. (See Romans 13.) Other than keeping my face warm when it is cold, I am not wearing a mask outside when there is no need to do so.
The usual red herrings were also tossed about. What about being pro-life on this or that or the other thing? It is not worth responding to these "questions," because the "questions" are almost never asked in good faith. It is either intended to expose "hypocrisy" or to derail the conversation by directing it to something else. The people asking the "questions" are uncomfortable with the subject of abortion, so they are trying to play "gotcha" with other issues.
Let's not be distracted. There have been 62 million babies killed since 1973, and there are still nearly 900,000 babies being butchered every year. There is reason to hope, though. Surgical abortion has significantly declined over the last few years, from a height of 1.6 million per year. With a much larger population, the abortion rate has declined even more. But there is more work to be done, and we should not be satisfied until the murder of innocent babies is completely criminalized.