From Hilary Jane Margaret White

I received this email from my friend Hilary. I encourage all my readers to do as it asks. Pray for LifeSiteNews, contribute whatever you can afford to keep this absolutely vital service on the 'Net and spread this message!

Hello everyone,

And I do mean everyone. As we can all see, I have sent this round to virtually everyone I have ever sent an email to in the last seven years.

Now, normally, knowing as we all do, my demure and retiring nature, one would not expect to be seeing a mass mailing like this from me, but this would be one of those unusual cases.

It's about LifeSite, the website that is more than a website. LifeSiteNews has been bringing the other side of the story on every imaginable aspect of the Life and Family issues, and the international Culture Wars since 1995. We never let anyone get away with anything. We've reported the under reported, stuck pins in the mainstream media's hot air balloons and become the online scourge of many a double-talking "media spokesman" in so many quarters even we've lost track of who we've annoyed.

In fact, I'll bet I have personally managed to irritate to distraction each and every person on this list at least once. And who wouldn't pay good money for that hey?

LifeSiteNews.com is the most effective, widely read, quoted and excoriated online pro-life information source going. We know that we're read in the White House (under Bush and Clinton, but for completely different reasons), at the UN and in the Europarliament, and in many a chancery office.

We have developed a network of readers, sources, tipsters and various informants that would make a Stalin-era KGB officer green and that makes us nearly impossible to scoop. We've made so much noise - especially about the international population control movement, the new reproductive technologies and the dangers of radical feminism - that we are coming to a point where these august bodies of international shennanigans are afraid not to answer our calls.

Have we informed you in the last five years? Have we irritated you to the point where you can't sit still? Have we opened your eyes to something you didn't know about before? Have we occasionally even entertained you a bit?

So what's not to love?

And it's free right? You just log on and click and it's all there in the LifeSite archive. Everything you ever wanted to know (and a bunch of stuff you would frankly have paid good money never to have heard of) at a touch. An archive of information that is now a chronicle of every major issue of interest to the Life and Family and Christian revival movment in every corner of the planet going back to 1995.

Not bad for a shoestring operation, mostly run by people working out of home offices. The wonders of technology!

But even shoestrings cost money and we are having a heck of a time getting the support we need to keep it all in the air.

People often think that the internet is free. But LifeSite's annual expenses for this online Empire of Truth are running to $150,000 Cdn a year and the online appeals get nowhere near it.

The problem, as far as we can see it, is a combination of the near impossible legal difficulties involved in getting a tax deductible status for donations and the fact that few people want to send in money for any service on the 'net. No doubt some of our readers have considered giving us money beyond our wildest dreams of avarice, only to scratch that impulse when it is discovered there is no tax advantage to donating.

It's the way of things in this fallen world, we understand.

We have doubled our page views in just the last year. We enjoy a rolling snowball of public influence and a global reputation, but the online appeals aren't working, so we're looking into a bunch of different options one of which is brazenly asking our friends for money.

Our success is actually our biggest problem. We've got an enormous web presence, but we can't get the donations we need to cover our expenses by the old fashioned online appeal method, so I'm moving on to the personal approach. Y'all are mostly the people who have dealt with me personally in the last five or six or seven years (yes, it's been that long and we're all still in one piece, so no complaining).

You've read my stuff on LifeSite and the blogs, you've taught me, corrected me, worked with me, yelled at me, disagreed with me, supported me, and prayed for me. Some of you have heard my confessions and even seen me with my hair down, so I know I am talking to people here who have invested something in the work I have been involved with, one way or another for nearly eight years.

The thing we need from y'all is two-fold...well, three actually.

Everyone on this list is a believer so we need you to pray for LifeSite. As you might guess, we ruffle quite a few feathers and a little prayer is a big help with that sort of thing. We're serious about this request, BTW, we have had some amazing experiences with people praying for us.

Second, we need your money. There, I've said it; thanks for waiting.

If you can make a big one-time donation that would be great. If you can, as Mother Angelica used to say, put us between your gas bill and Bell Canada, that's even better. But everything helps.

Third, we could use some help spreading this message.

I am sending this to everyone I can think of to whom I have sent an email to about anything interesting in the last five years. After this, it's up to you to spread it again to the next ring in the ripple.

Send this message to your friends and online aquaintances, post it to your blogs, and websites; stick it up on bulletin boards and list serves and whatever else you have to get the word out there.

We have been enormously successful in the last ten years, not quite toppling regimes, but certainly fiercely afflicting the comfortable and comforting the afflicted and causing big things to happen. We are hated and loved by all the right people and we need your help to get us out of a tight spot.

If LifeSite's kind of trouble is the kind you like to see going on out there, we need your help right now.

Donations can be made online at the site http://www.lifesite.net/contribute/

Thanks.

Hilary Jane Margaret White
LifeSiteNews.com
Toronto