Bart Stupak: “we all have the opportunity to make choices in our lives. We have the choice to take the easy route, to blindly follow…”

“we all have the opportunity to make choices in our lives. We have the choice to take the easy route, to blindly follow societal values no matter how false they may be. Or, we have the choice to take a stand and do what is right no matter how challenging the consequences may be. December 1st this year will mark the day 50 years ago when one brave, great American took a stand that, while resulting in many challenges, would spur a civil rights movement that shaped a growing country in a very positive way. In 1955, when Rosa Parks boarded that bus on her way home from work, she may not have been seeking to start a revolution; she may not have been looking to change the world; she may not have been hoping to lead a noble cause. Rosa Parks was presented with a choice: to accept the restrictions forced on her by false values or to take advantage of the opportunity to do the right thing. Rosa Parks, right then and there in Montgomery Alabama, decided she would not give up her seat that day because as a leader in the NAACP, she understood that by accepting the restrictions imposed on her under segregation she was only enabling it further. Although she was weary from a hard day at work as a seamstress, Rosa Parks found the strength to challenge that plague of conformity so that she and others might no longer have to endure another day under its agonizing credence.…”