A Westminster resident well-known for her vocal participation at City Council meetings is launching a Carroll County chapter of an international group of women devoted to stopping the Iraq war.
Rebekah Orenstein, of Pennsylvania Avenue, e-mailed local women Saturday, asking them to participate in Carroll?s first CODEPINK event.
“Our culture is really tired of this war,” she said Sunday.
CODEPINK is an anti-war grassroots movement started by women in 2002 to protest the United States? pre-emptive strikes on Iraq, according to the group?s Web site.
Founders say they named it CODEPINK, which boasts activist Cindy Sheehan and actress Susan Sarandon among its ranks, as a distinctly female dismissal of the Department of Homeland Security?s color-coded threat levels.
Westminster was recently added to the list of 250 local chapters worldwide, which also includes a chapter in Baltimore.
“There are some progressive people in Carroll County, and we need to know about one another because we sometimes feel lonely here,” said Sandy Wright, a Uniontown resident also helping to launch the Carroll chapter.
Orenstein said she is organizing CODEPINK?s first local event as a Fourth of July fast at the city park at the corner of Stoner Avenue and Center Street in protest of U.S. forces? occupation of the Middle East.
CODEPINK?s start-up makes it the second grassroots women?s anti-war movement to gain momentum in Westminster, following Women in Black, a group that meets twice a month in front of the Westminster branch of the Carroll County Public Library.
The “peace movement needs a place in Carroll big time,” according to Margaret Jones, another Westminster resident, who says she plans to avoid eating this holiday.
“It?s a play-on-words, ?Bring Troops Home Fast,? and it?s an old-standby for civil disobedience,” she said Sunday.
