Filed under: Around the Web
From The Huffington Post: On March 29, Texas-based anti-abortion group Life Always launched a billboard campaign on the South Side of Chicago that features a picture of President Obama's face alongside the words, "Every 21 minutes, our next possible leader is aborted." Less than a week after the 30 billboards went up, community members covered most of them with fabric banners that featured angry messages written in red paint.
"There is no place for those billboards in the discourse," Hilary Shelton, director of the NAACP's Washington bureau, told HuffPost. "They were offensive because they focused on African American women and their wombs being somehow dangerous, and they raised major concerns in our community. The really underhanded attack on the president was also seen as being unfounded and unfair."
Rev. Derek McCoy, the public face of the Life Always billboard campaign, has not been deterred by the outcry. He said Life Always is planning on expanding its black-targeted anti-abortion campaign into new cities, including Atlanta, Los Angeles and Houston. He is confused by the African American community's outrage.
"I know I've punched my African American card, so to speak, so when folks tell me, 'Hey, this is a racist plot,' I think that's absolutely ludicrous," said McCoy, an outspoken Maryland pastor who sits on the board of directors at Life Always. "I'm not sold out to any particular party in terms of Democrat or Republican -- matter of fact, I'm Independent. But if I take a step back and look at this issue objectively and say, where are the majority of their abortion clinics? They're in urban and African American communities, hands down."
Read more at The Huffington Post