Encouraging Poems
 

Excerpts from

Courage to Take a Stand

 A sad but heart-warming report by Professor Ian Hunter,

 

...this 63-year-old grandmother must be a very dangerous person: She has spent almost all of the last 20 years locked up in jail.

Linda Gibbons’ story began in 1994, when... attorney-general Marion Boyd obtained a Court injunction to prevent anyone from offering up a public protest within a 60-foot “bubble zone” around abortion clinics. The merchants of death must not be impeded...

So Linda Gibbons stands on the sidewalk outside abortion clinics and prays silently. Sometimes she goes further; sometimes she goes so far as to hold up a sign that says: “Why, Mom, when I have so much love to give?”

 

Free speech in Canada is not so robust as to withstand her conduct,, so Gibbons is immediately arrested. As a result, she has become Canada’s most obdurate prisoner of conscience, spending more time behind bars than most convicted robbers or rapists.


Gibbons is an exceptional criminal... She says nothing in her own defense. She refuses to acknowledge the jurisdiction of a court to prevent her from praying.... She makes few criticisms of her treatment in jail. She seeks no early release.

Now I do not go so far as to suggest that she is a model prisoner. Admittedly, Gibbons was a pain when she asked to have a Bible in her cell. And she sometimes leads her cellmates in prayer. In the past, prison guards have noted how jailhouse language markedly improves in Linda’s presence. Such, I suppose, is the nefarious control that one criminal mind is capable of exerting over other inmates.

Ten years ago she wrote to me about noise levels at Toronto’s Metro West Detention Centre where she was then incarcerated, piped-in music so loud and unrelenting that she considered it a form of “unnecessary torture.”

...she has written again, this time from the Vanier Women’s Centre in Milton, Ontario, regarding the cold in certain corner rooms located on the outside of the facility. She tells me that the women held in these rooms “suffer chronic colds with symptoms of hypothermia; blue nails with red, runny noses with often subsequent illnesses from being chilled.” When Gibbons herself spent two weeks in such a room, she estimated that the overnight temperature inside the room fell below 10C. ...

But why, you ask, does Ms. Gibbons not file a formal complaint with the proper authorities? She has [on behalf of other inmates].... But neither has produced any result. Well, no result in terms of heat, but plenty of hot air....

Ms. Gibbons is more charitable than I am. She writes: “I am confident it is not the purpose or intent of the Correctional Service of Canada to house women in rooms so cold they are prevented from sleeping.”

What a ministry she has to God's hurting people!


Dr. Ian Hunter is a Professor Emeritus in the Faculty of Law at the University of Western Ontario.

Please read his complete article at National Post.com

February 14, 2011


My goal is God Himself, not joy nor peace;

Nor even blessing, but Himself, my God.

'Tis His to lead me there, not mine but His...

At any cost, dear Lord, by any road.

See the rest of this wonderful poem here

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