YO NARAL!

guest post by JB, A California Democrat

TM NOTE: This letter was sent to each of the 50 Chapters of NARAL by a
California Democrat who emailed the text to me. I thought I’d share it with
you, because I think it speaks for many of you. I added the graphic and title, because it speaks to me on the subject. Hillary Clinton
deserved much better than she got from NARAL. At the very least they should have stayed neutral, backing the final nominee. As I’ve said before, I do not belong to or support NARAL. But if I did, I would not give them another dime. It is my plea that none of you do either. Perhaps support local chapters, like the one in St. Louis that came out to distance themselves from this horrendous decision, which is one choice. Send a message. Hit them where it hurts. Choke off their money.

Dear NARAL,

I would like to share my reasons for being disappointed with your decision
to endorse Senator Obama. For an introduction, I have had a life long argument
with my mother’s sister, my Aunt. My Aunt is a Carmalite lay nun for the Catholic
Church. When I was conceived, my mother attended a party and had alcohol for
the first time in her life. My father had made a bet with his high school friends
that he could have sex with my mother. In 1967, as you know birth control was
illegal. My mother was in her second year of high school. My father had been
a baseball jock who could have gone to college on a scholarship. I have told
my Aunt hundreds of times that if my mother had the choice to have an abortion,
that would have been my preference.

Being the product of a Cherokee Grandmother and Filipino Immigrant Farm Worker
who worked hard to raise his inter-racial children in the atmosphere of racial
hostility, I also became the child of two teenagers who were not prepared to
raise a child. My mother’s parents had died before I was born. Imagine that
she was only Sixteen when she was pregnant with me. She was an orphan living
with her Aunt and Uncle. She had not even gone through the pain of the grief
of the loss of her own two parents before I was born. Given the choice to give
me up for adoption or raise me, my mother became one of the large statistics
of single mothers. I attended to 12 schools before I graduated from high school.
There are very many wonderful things about my life. My Aunt can point those
out to me.

However, she did not live in my shoes. That Native American saying, “You
must walk a mile inside another’s mocasins until you know how they feel”
has been with me since I was a child. My father’s ancestors walked the Trail
of Tears. The personal Trail for my father and mother destroyed their future.
My father became a drug addict, my mother treed religion. Neither has satisfied
the loss of their youth. I consider myself lucky that I know my father because
many of my friends in college did not know their fathers. I realized that a
lot of children grew up without knowing how they were conceived. One of my best
friends in college never knew who here father was until she was about 26. When
she contacted him, he told her that he thought that her mother might have been
pregnant with his child but it was during Vietnam era and he never asked. My
friend was heart broken when her father told her that he was a Christian, had
a family, and that he could never tell them that he had another child. So many
Trails of Tears and not enough time to hear or tell them.

As someone who’s family roots are in the soil of the very beginnings of our
country-Mayflower voyagers, I have maintained open discussions about such issues
as abortion with my family members who voted for President Bush. My Aunt(s)
love me. Yet, if the world was enforced by the rules of their beliefs more children
will live through the trials and errors of young parents who are unprepared
for child rearing.

I will leave you with one more story about that. In 2003, I was invited as
a Minister to visit my Uncles’ Ministry in the Philippines. While I was there,
I was asked to perform a blessing on a child who was being fostered by a woman.
The child’s eyes were bulging like marbles with no skin padding his eye sockets.
His limbs were like sticks. He weighed nearly nothing. I was told that his mother
was a heroin addict. In the Philippines, the law states that a mother can bear
five children, each one dying from neglect before their government agencies
can step in and save the child. That woman was fighting with the parents for
custody. It was explained to me that the mother would beg on the streets with
the child, that she did not breast feed the child, that people would give her
money, and that she would buy drugs with that money. That opened my eyes to
the world of addiction and child abuse. I had already known that child trafficking
was happening around the world. And, now I can understand more about how people
lose their souls. The children of the world are not asking to be treated like
that.

Last year, when the campaigns began last year, I did research. As a promise
to my Republican Uncle, I researched his candidate and opponents. Of course,
I researched the Democratic candidates. I have read Dreams of My Father by Barack
Obama. More recently, I read a book about Hillary Clinton. However, I had been
struck for some years that the First Lady was a heroine for all those women
who could have left their husbands and did not. Like many women, she worked
on her relationship. That is a model for families. Not all men and women are
meant to be life long partners. A romp in the woods does not make a life time
of sharing philosophies belief. However, when people share common ground in
their relationships, wounds can heal. I began to respect the First Lady for
the first time because I grew up with a single mother. I understood what it
meant to not have a father except on an occasional weekend. I also knew what
it felt like to be told how many women my own father chased and was chased by.
Being young is simple but not easy.

When I read Senator Obama’s book, I was stuck with a sense of a young man who
was missing his own father like many people I have known. However, in his quest
for a father, he replaced the father figure with an idealistic desire to be
fulfilled by religion. When I have analyzed his words and actions, I see a man
who struggles with understand how other people feel. The example was one night
when his mother took him as a teenager to a movie about an inter-racial couple.
She likened it to the romance she had with his father. In his book, he tells
the reader about his own thoughts about her reactions to the movie. His analysis
is not one of compassion but one of almost sheer mockery. He reduced his mother
to an idealist child in his own eyes. I was struck by how little compassion
he felt about his mother telling him how she felt about his father. That struck
a chord within me to observe every nuance of his words. Since that time, I see
him his a person who could have attended a Neuro-Linguistic Programming Workshop
where he could have learned the techniques of aligning his mannerisms and speaking
patters to his listener. Let us face the facts. Hypnosis is a well known media
of accessing people’s behavioral responses. Behavioral Psychology was well studied
in the fifties. People knew how to illicit emotional responses were not only
possible but probable. The only effect that those so called scientists could
not to achieve was prediction. No one can predict how a person will react when
given a certain stimulus. A person could cry or become angry.

However, to a degree there are some predictable reactions. In Dreams of My
Father, Obama states:

Black politicians less gifted than Harold discovered what white politicians had known for a very long time: that race-baiting could make up for a host of limitations. Young leaders, eager to make a name for themselves, upped the ante, pedaling conspiracy theories all over town-the Koreans were funding the Klan, Jewish doctors were injecting black babies with the AIDS virus. It was a short cut to fame, if not always fortune; like sex, or violence on TV, black rage always found a ready market. Barack Obama. – Dreams from My Father (Chapter Chicago, Pg 203. 1995. 2004.)

It is clear to me as a minister who has counceled thousands of people, who
has given lectures and presentations, who has been accepted and considered an
advisor to a non-profit research board sitting next to a former NASA Psychologist
who respects my professional opinions of the mind, body and spirit, that Senator
Barack Obama has been using all of the techniques of a good orator, showman
and hypnotist. When I have seen Senator Hillary Clinton speak, I can see and
hear and feel that she is speaking from both facts she has accumulated and mastered
and her own experience of learning. The difference is someone using Neuro-Linguistic
Hypnosis Techniques and a teacher giving her class some data. I am more disappointed
that other women, who are holding the keys to the gate for the freedom of all
women to choose to control their own body could be seduced to believe that this
man is more prepared, unites more people than the woman who gave her heart and
mind to support you organization.

I will say, I am proud of those Chapters who have not been seduced into empty
promises with no evidence to prove that more than lip service and money is the
end result.

Sincerely, JB – CA Democrat