Signs Around Town (Excerpt)
Similar Posts
Found Exhortation
Peace and light, E — Posted with WordPress for BlackBerry.
The truly pro-life would support basic gynecological care for poor women (I Stand With Planned Parenthood)
Almost none of the services provided by Planned Parenthood are abortions. Rather, they provide much needed health care to women in underserved communities. Please stand with Planned Parenthood today:
Dear Elizabeth, Minutes ago, the U.S. House of Representatives voted to bar Planned Parenthood from all federal funding for any purpose whatsoever. That means no funding to Planned Parenthood health centers for birth control, lifesaving cancer screenings, HIV testing, and other essential care. By far, this is the most dangerous legislative assault on women’s health in our history, and it cannot go unanswered. We need you to stand united with us now. We need you to stand with Planned Parenthood and with the three million women, men, and teens we serve, who are now at risk of losing access to basic care. We’ve drafted an open letter to every single representative in the House who voted for this cruel, unconscionable, unthinkable bill, and to every senator who still has a chance to stop it. Will you sign it — and share it right now?
AN OPEN LETTER TO CONGRESSTo the members of the House of Representatives who voted for the Pence Amendment to H.R. 1: How could you? How could you betray millions of women — and men, and teens — who rely on Planned Parenthood for basic health care? How could you condemn countless women in this country to undiagnosed cancer, unintended pregnancies, and untreated illnesses? Your vote was not only against those who seek care at Planned Parenthood health centers, but against every one of us who has ever sought care there, and against every one of us who knows that when we are healthy, when we are in charge of our lives, we thrive. It was a vote against me. To every senator who will soon consider this legislation: I stand with Planned Parenthood to say to you: STOP THIS. I stand with Planned Parenthood and the hundreds of thousands of people from every walk of life and every corner of this country who join me in signing this letter to tell you that we will fight this bill and we expect you to do the same. I stand with and for the millions of women, men, and teens who rely on Planned Parenthood, and I expect you to do the same. To every member of Congress, know that we stand together today against this outrageous assault, and together we will not lose. 
Elizabeth, this fight will continue next week when our legislators return to their home districts, and when the vote heads to the U.S. Senate the following week. Your voice, your strength, and your unwavering support are absolutely critical, now and in the weeks ahead. I am so glad to know you are with us during this very challenging time. 
Sincerely, 
Cecile Richards, President
Planned Parenthood Federation of AmericaP.S. Thank you also for your patience as these ongoing threats to Planned Parenthood require us to communicate with you so frequently. On Seeing
When I paused to photograph this marker on a DC sidewalk yesterday, I wondered how many hundreds of people have walked past it–once or hundreds of times–without noticing it at all. I connected this sense of acute awareness with a conversation I had with Douglas Brooks in India, in which he said to me that he guaranteed that at that moment he was seeing more than I was seeing. He had experienced the place before, studied it extensively and intensively, and was still open to seeing. I did not take offense and none was meant. I am one who notices, but it is a given that study and experience, if one retains an openness to new understanding, maximizes the opportunity to witness.
Paul Muller-Ortega describes the expanding ability to see and understand in terms of the essential interrelationship between jnana and vijnana–book knowledge and experiential knowledge. One without the other does not permit for complete understanding. The two together, with ever-expanding and present openness is what leads to wisdom.
Thus, though I am one who tends to notice much of what is in my field of vision, I could not, on my first visit, possibly have seen as much in the immediate landscape as one who has devoted much of his life both to studying and experiencing it.
Peace and light, E — Posted with WordPress for BlackBerry.
