Ruminations

Blog dedicated primarily to randomly selected news items; comments reflecting personal perceptions

Thursday, June 09, 2011

First Amendment Rights?

A woman has an affair with a young man. She becomes pregnant. She asks that he marry her. He refuses. She decides it might not be in her best interests to carry on with the pregnancy. She might like to have an abortion, but fate or fortune has decided for her. While she is out of town on a work assignment elsewhere she experiences a miscarriage.

On her return to the state where she and her erstwhile boyfriend live, he observes that she is no longer pregnant. He takes huge moral and very personal umbrage. How dare she? And he takes it upon himself to inform the world that as a once-prospective father, he now mourns the opportunity denied him.

He arranges for a billboard upon which is a photograph of himself, Greg Fultz, purporting to hold what is to be construed as a two-month-old infant, in lieu of the child that will not be born. The message reads: "This Would Have Been A Picture of My 2-month-Old Baby If the Mother Had Decided to NOT Kill Our Child!"

For her part, the much-put-upon former girlfriend, Nani Lawrence, has launched a suit under the New Mexico Family Violence Protection Act; her petition claims a pattern of stalking and harassment, "including posting intimate cyber shots of me from one of our cyber dates". The petition requests the billboard be removed, harassment stopped.

The response came in a hearing where the presiding judge ordered the billboard, which has been up since mid-May to be removed by mid-June. Mr. Fultz, who had no interest in marrying Ms. Lawrence, but insists on his inalienable right to be a father, is prepared to go to prison to keep the billboard in place.

Mr. Fultz had the support of New Mexico's Right to Life Committee which has since backed off in the wake of information from friends who explained Ms. Lawrence had suffered a miscarriage, not undertaken an abortion.

In view of these sad and sorry details, Mr. Fultz should have his wishes respected, and be firmly ordered to spend an appropriate length of time in jail.

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