Middle America's Worldview

The mother of a 12-year-old girl whose pro-life speech has become a hit YouTube video says her daughter's passion for the unborn is genuine.



Lia is a preteen from Canada who decided to speak out against abortion in her school's speech contest, despite teachers and school officials who encouraged her to pick a different topic.

"What if I told you that right now someone was choosing if you were going to live or die? What if I told you that this choice wasn't based on what you could or couldn't do, what you had done in the past, or what you would do in the future? And what if I told you [that] you could nothing about it? Fellow students and teachers, thousands of children are right now in that very situation," she says in her speech.

Kimberly, Lia's mother, says Lia was told by school officials that if she chose the topic of abortion, she would not be allowed to participate in the speech contest. But both were surprised when Lia's pro-choice teacher had a change of heart.

"Her teacher was really impressed by this speech and perhaps moved by it, and therefore her teacher kind of was a real supporter of [Lia] winning for the class," Kimberly notes. "And she had to go through a couple of hoops and get clearance from a couple of other teachers before she could be declared winner of the class."

Another controversy erupted when the panel of judges had a supposed big disagreement and one stepped down. Initially Lia was disqualified, but later the panel declared her the winner. She was asked to take out this portion of her speech: "[F]etuses are definitely humans knit together in their mother's womb by their wonderful Creator who knows them all by name."

Kimberly says after Lia was told to remove that portion of her speech, she took time to think about her decision and ultimately decided to leave it in. Lia also competed in a regional speech competition but did not win. However, her speech has been viewed by over 200,000 people on YouTube.

An author and critic of Islam says the recent decision by a Dutch court to prosecute a Dutch lawmaker for comparing the Koran to Hitler's Mein Kampf does not bode well for the future of free speech rights in the United States.



Dutch Freedom Party leader Geert Wilders made headlines around the world in March of 2008 with his film Fitna, which juxtaposed Koran verses against a background of violent film clips and images of terrorism by Islamic radicals.

The Islamic world complained, but last year prosecutors decided against launching a case against Wilders, saying his strident anti-Islamic statements were "hurtful to Muslims, but not criminal."

But now the Amsterdam Appeals Court has ruled that prosecutors will launch a hate-speech case against Wilders. Robert Spencer is the director of Jihad Watch, a project of the David Horowitz Freedom Center. He says this case is part of a larger effort to criminalize any discussion of Islam to which jihadists object.

"The Organization of the Islamic Conference, which is 57 Muslim governments around the world, is making a concerted effort at the United Nations to criminalize any discussion of the elements of Islam that jihadists use to make recruits and justify their actions," he contends.

Spencer says the Wilders prosecution shows that Europe is falling in line with the Islamic initiative to prosecute anyone who engages in what the Islamists say is hate speech. He adds that could affect the free speech rights of Americans as well.

"Especially at a time when the Obama administration has announced its intention to bring the United States into line with European sensibilities about this and closer to the U.N.," he points out. "And with both Europe and the U.N giving way on free speech at a rapid clip, that bodes ill for our freedoms in the United States."