And then there were five.
A day after the Arkansas Secretary of State shared a single design proposal for a monument to pregnancies that were ended by women who made that decision based on their own situations, four more proposals have appeared. A spokesman for the SOS said the four additional designs weren’t shared Wednesday because of a technical error, perhaps the glitch being that most of the proposals are an embarrassment.
Lakey Goff, whose original design was chosen in 2023 during the first round of submissions, is back with a reworked version. The cost for constructing her first vision came in at $900K, and the new one is less, $345K, but even that one would require more than $30,000 a year in maintenance.
And even the reduced-rate version from Goff is more awful than awe-inspiring, like something a child would produce in vacation bible school, complete with an outstretched-arm Jesus at the top that for all the world appears to be carrying a child himself.
Two other design submissions were just not serious, meaning they would be perfect for an unnecessary carve-out on the state Capitol grounds.
Our favorite, or rather the one that caused the most head shaking, was simply a letter from a woman who said she would offer to help guide the monument process, even though she is pro choice.
“That quandary being, if I may put it bluntly: how can we build a ‘monument’ to 50 years of dead fetuses that is fit for public viewing and doesn’t make the state look like an idol-worshipping birth cult?”
We’re not sure she can help the state enough to avoid that descriptor, mainly because that is exactly what it is.
Our next favorite proposal was one that the submitter said was AI-generated. Go, technology! It was a picture of a woman working at her desk, and in the background was the fuzzy image of a man with horns, or maybe he was wearing a viking hat. “A picture will do,” the creator said. “It doesn’t need to be a sculpture.” In whatever form the photo might take, it seemed more of an office HR issue than a monument to anything.
There was also a metal-looking plaque that featured a fertilized egg, although it could have been a monument to the moon, even without squinting.
For the two others, at least the applicants had put a bit of effort into the process, i.e., there was granite and carved images involved. One was a bit over $110,000, while the other was more than $1 million. And with only about $28,000 in donations raised in two years, well, maybe there’s some merit to the horned guy.
In terms of numbers of dead per monument, a more appropriate memorial would go to those killed in the United States by guns. In fact, it’s not even close. From 1973 to 2022 – the years covered by Roe v. Wade – there were 236,000 abortions. The number of people killed by gun violence over roughly the same period is 1.8 million. That includes homicides, suicides and other gun deaths, with guns being the leading cause of death for American children and suicides now outpacing homicides.
To put that into some perspective, if you add up all of the soldiers killed in the Civil War, the two world wars, the Korean War and the Vietnam War, it comes to less than 1.4 million, meaning there’s still room for a couple of more bad conflicts to reach the gun dead number.
But doing even the tiniest thing to reduce gun deaths would mean the embryo crowd is actually more interested in stopping people from dying instead of maintaining the deadly status quo. To do otherwise would be to run afoul of the book of Charlie, Chapter 1, in which St. Kirk said: “Having an armed citizenry comes with a price, and that is part of liberty,” and “I think it’s worth to have a cost of, unfortunately, some gun deaths every single year so that we can have the Second Amendment to protect our other God-given rights.” Not as eloquent as red-lettered Jesus passages, but point taken, even if Kirk did die by his own rule of life.
All hail the gun.
