Wednesday morning I woke up and was getting ready to head in to my part-time job at the Victoria Right to Life Society office, but before I had a chance, my telephone rang. It was our president calling to tell me that our billboard had been vandalised. The society has spent about $3000 on the billboard and it was put up about a month ago on the highway between downtown Victoria and the ferries that go to Vancouver. I’m pretty sure it’s the only billboard that doesn’t advertise food, real estate, or tourist opportunities. A few years ago I was driving along that highway and saw a McDonald’s billboard that had been vandalised from “Treat your friends. Heck, treat them all” to “eat your friends. Heck, eat them all.” So vandalism isn’t unusual there; it gets very quiet late at night along that highway.
Our billboard is a relatively uncontroversial billboard. It simply had a large close-up photo of a mother with her baby and it said, “Love them both. Choose life.” and had contact information for Options Pregnancy Centre, a pro-life pregnancy Centre in downtown Victoria so that women who wanted to make that choice knew who to call or had a web address to look up. Overally, it’s pretty nice. Unfortunately, somebody (or some people) had painted over the word “life” and written above the word “Choice”, “the right to” so that the billboard effectively said “Love them both. the right to Choose.” They didn’t capitalise “the”. (I’m just saying, if you’re going to vandalise, at least use proper capitalisation.)
The funny thing is that the vandals completely missed the point. I don’t think I really need to explain that one, do I? Maybe so. It’s a beautiful image with a recommendation of a pretty darned good choice, one that so-called pro-choicers claim IS a choice . . . but they decided to (how do I put this?) exercise their choice to break the law, deface other people’s property, vandalise, and suppress freedom of speech. That speaks loud and clear that their cause isn’t pro-choice; it is pro-abortion.
If it was really about choice, they would have paid for their own billboard and let women choose between the two.
It almost made the news, but the vandalism was cleaned up too quickly for the news stations to get good footage. I was relieved, because they wanted to interview me in front of the billboard. Of course, interviews would have been good overall so that people could see the truth, but they required a pep-talk from Andrea. I just hope I’m not proven right and it’s not all swept under the rug because little things do matter.
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Update: It did make the news.
by 
“Love them both. the right to Choose.” Doesn’t even make sense out of context, and in context is just plain morbid. Love your child, so kill ’em? Love yourself so much it’s like you’re loving 2 people? How does that even work?
I get, however, that people who pull over on lonely highways to vandalize non-confrontational billboards should not be expected to have editorial skills. Volatile emotions, sure, but not editing skills.
Aside from it overall not making sense, unfortunately there really are people out there who seem to think that there are children who would be better of dead than alive (just look at Planned Parenthood’s motto, they think that if a child isn’t loved by his or her mother then they shouldn’t be alive). Very twisted lines of reasoning but I’ve had people actually tell me that.