Writing a letter to the Arizona Republic in response to Susan Estrich's objections to the projected anti-abortion superbowl ad

Opinions@arizonarepublic.com

Re: Anti-abortion ad

Susan Estrich suggests that the country's million and more legal abortions a year are all performed for important reasons, such as rape or incest, or retardation, which were usually the only reasons abortion could be obtained in most states before Roe vs. Wade in 1973. You could not say the father abused you which seems to be justafication enough for her. The point is that most of the a large number of abortions performed in this country now are for birth control purposes. It is legal to get an abortion for any reason up to birth. The media by becoming predominately pro choice has suppressed pro life arguments for years. I don't know how this ad slipped through. I hope that it means less suppression of discussion of the many reasons legalized abortion seems brutal and inhumane to many. One ad cannot possibly represent all the reasons abortion may not be a good idea and to expect one to do so is only another justification for continued suppression of pro life arguments
.
Gerry King Hitt"

This is the letter I sent. Susan Estrich suggests in her column today that abuse by the father is also a valid reason to get an abortion. I thought gee, if all women who got abused by the father of their unborn children got an abortion!!

I want to point out that the media went immediately pro choice once legalized abortion was unexpectedly accomplished with the Roe vs. Wade decision by the Supreme Court, but this has continued to be one of the most divisive issues in our country today. You would not think anybody who worked for a newspaper believed in God or a hereafter or a soul or else none of them had the courage of their convictions. If you were going to lose your job because of your religious beliefs in pro life, you might be tempted to change your mind. Because of the embrace of so many in the media of this new more brutal attitude about the unborn, I had to accept the fact that I was going to be mighty unpopular if I continued to try to be a playwright and novelist and pro life, too. It seemed that the two just weren't compatible even on the less sophisticated supposedly newspaper staff on Arizona's largest newspaper in its largest city, Phoenix. It seemed that a leftist liberal editorial page in the Arizona Republic was supported by the owner and publisher in a supposedly Republican conservative state. So I am sure that no newspaper in the country published more leftist pro choice columnists than the Republic. I know because I was kept so busy for years protesting them.
The newspaper was sold less than 10 years ago to Garnett which also published the national newspaper, Today, which some of you may have read. But the editorial staff retained the man who used to pick those pro choice columns to print, so I am sure he has continued to have quite a lot of influence in keeping the editorial page supportive of legalized abortion. And it would not be hard to find enough pro choice newspaper staff to keep the newspaper just as firmly pro choice as it has been since the Roe vs. Wade decision.
John McCain is notably pro life. Makes no difference. So now I will be surprised if my letter is even printed since very few pro life letters are printed in this newspaper. Yes, you can slant the letter section. Pro life writers can be ignored for years if that is what the editor of the editorial page wants to do, which is why I have almost given up posting in my G4Life blog on AZCentral, the newspaper's blog site. If the newspaper never prints any protest columns or letters, nobody is going to read mine back there on the blog site. There are so many blogs now days mine could easily be overlooked. All the columnists are blogging. It is a good line of defense in order to defuse what the people blog you disagree with, and if you are already an established columnist who are people going to read? Suppression of opinion on this subject has been very effective. You end up having to fight a pro choice media on and on for years.
However if you disagree with pro choice you try to keep your point of view alive even if no one seems to be reading.
I will be surprised if the anti-abortion ad that the controversy is all about will even run, but it is creating a stir at this stage. It suggests that an abortion might have deprived us of a future Heisman winner since one winner's mother had been advised to get an abortion because of a medical condition. She didn't, the baby was fine, and he went on to become the great football player the ad features by name.
But yes that is one disturbing thing about legalizing abortion for any reason up to 9 months. The mother does not have to have 'a good reason.' In previous days most states would allow abortion for only such reasons as incest or rape and in some states tests that proved the baby had Down's syndrome or some other serious impairment. Abuse by the father was not considered a good enough reason. So yes, now days you could be aborting a great athlete, a musical genius, for not very good reasons to my mind.

Religion has become synonymous with believing in a soul and an afterlife, either heaven or hell depending on your history. So I assume that most who believe in legalized abortion don't necessarily believe that these children survive death and we will meet them someday and have to have a discussion about why it was necessary to abort them, that is if we are agreeable to a judgment day and an assessment of our wrong doings.
I am one who thinks I have seen and experienced enough evidence to convince me that there is eternal life. Otherwise why would I feel myself going thousands of miles an hour into space to a place called heaven at the exact moment I may have suffered an interruption of life after an operation? Shortly following a cesarian I dreamed I saw my soul drifting upwards in the form of streams of light with my father who had passed sitting by my bedside. I woke up and felt myself dying and called for help. I felt my heart about to go into cardiac arrest when nurses and doctors burst into the room.
During another time, I ceased to feel, saw a light coming down which I perceived as an angel. I felt ecstasy and prepared to ascend into paradise. The person who had been trying to kill me for several hours had his hands around my throat and at that critical moment he stopped.
I do not feel that members of the media will even allow themselves to be impressed by such experiences. They are not 'scientific.' In other words nothing has been proved. Well, I could hardly go any further than I did into death on several occasions and live to tell about it, but such experiences have been continually dismissed by the media. I call it inability to reason about very complex matters. In other words we are often in the hands of the skeptical who are skeptical to a fault. We all know people who could not be persuaded no matter what evidence a reasonable person be expected to accept. Some skeptical are not reasonable. Yes, they exist, too. Their minds are closed. Yes, people on both sides can have closed minds. A closed mind can be a liberal fault when it comes to an issue like abortion especially. Hey, discussion closed. We now have abortion so accept it!
So we have to keep fighting to lessen the control of the media by the 'non believers.' That is people who equate such experiences as mine strongly suggesting the flight of the spirit from the body as it progresses toward death with the wishful thinking of the religious. I went as far as I could into those realms without actually dying, and I think spirits have visited me in the realm I inhabit in life as well as they could and still be spirits.
Yes, there is brain washing in religion. Religion has always been prey to charlatans who make false claims. By its very nature, religion lends itself to such, but by the same token, the debunkers can be just as insensitive to facts that require a lot of study and analysis to interpret. Nobody said it was easy to come to accurate conclusions about matters we don't know much about. I like to delve into these matters anyway, thinking that is always been the way of man studying what he does not yet understand. I try to figure out how we can get through the naysayers' control of the media. I am tired of them seeing through a glass darkly and getting me upset when I read the newspaper knowing from past experience it is going to be very hard to get anything past their bias. I am one reader and letter writer who does not count because I don't agree with the people who choose what letters to print! What they think is the truth is often very dull and boring and not very inspiring to read. A little conjecture based on facts would certainly liven their publications up, but these people do not have the imagination or courage to risk such thinking.

Photos with new eyes, tigers among us, and proving there is life after death

I have had to have my photographer Doc take some new photos of me without glasses. He has had quite a time to take some that flatter me. The above header is about the best he has been able to do with the subject. I took a profile photo of it to put on blogspot and Facebook. I spent an hour or so last evening scanning some old photos to Facebook. I love looking at the albums my family and friends put up there.
I called a friend last night whose dear husband passed away not long ago, and we were talking about the hereafter. She said she had some doubts about psychic pickups in dreams, etc, and mentioned that she listens to George Noory on talk radio, as I do if I listen to anyone. Lately to tell the truth I have not dared listen to radio in my bedroom at night since I am going a little deaf and need to turn it up to hear, and my neighbor has such keen ears he calls the police over imaginary sounds. I doubt if he can stand it here too many more months since he is now being shunned for good reason. It must be very lonely to come out as a tiger among people now wary of being clawed. Oh, by the way it is against the rules to post questionable pictures on your entrance, so since the owners are here visiting the complex from back east I believe he may have been told to remove that picture of a tiger. I was quite relieved to see it gone. I don't like to be reminded that I might live in a jungle.
Oh by the way, someone who saw the video I made in which I talked about the chronically mentally ill residents sometimes becoming dangerous made a comment on Youtube saying that was ridiculous, they were no more violent than anyone else. She also said that watching Doc and me in videos made her blood boil, and I ought to have her for a neighbor! Grrrr. Snarl, snarl. Oh there is more than one tiger or tigress watching us. She told me to move if I did not like it.
I must protest that unfortunately many murders have been committed in Phoenix by chronically mentally ill people. That is a fact as anyone who keeps track of violent crime can testify. Sadly, a police officer who stopped such a man just for an obscure license plate was shot in the head and killed Friday. A beloved police officer whose death by such violence caused such a meltdown of shock and grief as we have not had since the last good police officer was murdered by a citizen turned tiger.
HUD housing by law must not deny residency to ex convicts either, who may have been jailed for a combination of mental illness, criminal behavior, and substance abuse which is often the case.
I have chosen to continue to reside here, taking the chance that dangerous tendencies in a resident can be contained as I have become attached to this area and this historic landmark hotel as a residence. Besides the swimming pool will be wonderful this summer!
As for the hereafter I will continue to study and think on how it can be proved to exist. Remember, there has to be an extremely good escape hatch for people to escape pain when all else fails. The death of the body ensures the end of agony as is experienced by say a bullet wound in a vital spot. The good and the innocent die, so from where will justice come when that happens? There always seems to be unfinished business in such deaths. We need something like a hereafter desperately, it seems.
I heard on George Noory last night a man saying that science has never detected anything leaving the body when it dies. That is it. The end. Suggesting that the concept that a soul exists and departs to a heaven may be, sadly, pure fantasy.
I have pondered many hours and believe there could be a number of explanations why proof of a spirit is so hard to come by. I am going to be asking my sister LaRae some questions in the months to come. She has agreed to be the spirit on the other side who will try to explain to me as best as she can what happens when we 'pass over.' She has passed over. Tell me some of what you have told me, LaRae, in our conversations which of course could be suspect to science, too. I am making all this up. You are not talking to me. And so on. I don't say you are talking to me as we talk here, but I say you know my questions and you are responding. Here is the gist of what I think I am picking up from you.

LARAE: When I passed I did not believe in a hereafter either. I hoped but I was very doubtful, so when I found myself still existing I thought that I must have lost my mind and was in a mental hospital now. I went through days and days of doubt. Drifting in and out of consciousness. I was conscious of someone trying to help me and finally it occurred to me that I may have died. Was this oblivion? I asked this question over and over. And finally, you will find this quite amusing, I just got tired of trying to be obliterated and said I am going to get up and believe in whatever religious heaven I can find, just like everybody else. I was tired of this gray hell.
I had put up a good fight in life against religion which I thought was wrong, misguided, full of falsity. So when I got feeling better I asked the attendants to take me to talk to some people I knew. Somebody else who died. That was the beginning of my starting to come out of it. I really had cracked up. I realized that I had such great issues with religion that I was going to have to start from there. I felt I had been lied to. I could feel this great stubbornness in me about accepting anything. But I was finally able to isolate this lump of stubbornness that was stopping my progress. Yes, what is known as 'religion' can be flawed, but it is the language that is used to describe the hereafter. So the hereafter had become suspect. I fought against it as I fought against 'religion.' It was all a lie. Science said there was no such thing as a hereafter. So why did I find myself in this sick prison of the mind where sometimes I did not know if I was alive or dead. This went on for months. I was very very sick. I did not know when I could get well, I guess when science did discover there was a hereafter. Until then I would be forced to inhabit this cold grey hell where there seemed to be neither life or death, no end but no progress. If you didn't know what mental illness was before, now you have met it personified in me, as I was then. I did not know if I could ever 'get well.' Existence seemed like an illusion. Had I really ever lived? Well, I had to go on like this for months. I will tell you more next time. There were no miracles. I got better very very slowly. You might say as I rejected the dark conclusions of 'science' just as I had once rejected the falsities of religion. The story of how I lost my faith and regained it is the story of my life, both before and after 'death.'