Actively Obnoxious

There is no one quite so certain of themselves, so passionate about what they believe in, so assured that they are doing the right thing in imposing their beliefs on others, than the convert. Usually someone who has experienced the other side of the coin, and then experienced a personal epiphany that caused them to be 're-born'. That spiritual, insightful elevation inspires the convert to a life-mission to enlist everyone else to their newfound certainty.

Linda Gibbons, grandmotherly yet sprightly and righteously believing, feels that her certainty in the mission she has embarked upon should inspire all others to think and feel and act as she does. Nothing will detract her from her mission. Not the fact that she acts unlawfully, nor the criminal prosecution that escorts her to years in prison for maintaining her belief. She remains resolutely dedicated to saving the lives of unborn children.

Unborn they may be, but they are children in the eyes of the Lord, who has cautioned her that she owes Him a life she had herself sacrificed when she hadn't believed in the sacredness of human life. Isn't that completely typical and predictable? Women are always conflicted to some degree over such decisions. They feel compelled for their own reasons to terminate a pregnancy, and once committed, follow through.

But they are inevitably, at some time or other - close to the incident, or many years afterward - impelled to re-visit their decision, wonder if it was the right call to make. Obviously, at the time it seemed that it was, but in retrospect they wonder if things might have turned out differently. And then, most women simply carry on. Not Linda Gibbons, for she found God whom she had once carelessly discarded, and felt instructed to do His work.

She was no role model as a young woman; several children out of wedlock - common enough now; back then identifying her as boldly indifferent to societal mores. And a terminated pregnancy. For which act God later personally scolded her. Ms.Gibbons feels herself to have been unfairly, unjustly, and illegally disciplined by a justice system that has victimized her. She may be right, to a degree.

She has a right to rant and rave, in a sense. Leave her to it. On the other hand, other people too have their rights. And she has imposed her right upon theirs. There may be a more humane solution to avoiding these clashes of opinions, but they don't appear very obvious, for the most part. She is disturbing women who are vulnerable, and who simply do not wish to be more unhappy than they are due to circumstances they are attempting to deal with.

But the woman is a right royal pain in the buttocks. Far more than that, to the women who walk into an abortion clinic, having to reconcile themselves internally to what they have committed to, only to have her presence, insistent and compelling to deal with as well. She could have carried on had she simply recognized certain constraints, but she shrugged them off, feeling it her right, though it was not, to confront and antagonize.

An injunction that was meant to constrain protesters and 'pro-life', anti-abortion types like her from interfering with the processes and procedures that health care professionals and women in need carried on with as responsible, thinking individuals deciding how best to proceed with their own decision-making was summarily dismissed by her. So she was arrested, imprisoned, released, repeated her confrontations.

"I believe the injunctions do not represent proper law, that they do violence to the law, that they're a malconstruct, that they're there for political purposes", she insists. On the evidence it seems she will forever seek to impose her values and her interpretations of what society must unequivocally accept as needful to satisfy her willfulness.