What is it with liberals and candles?

I guess I just don't understand the fascination.

(Montgomery) A Vietnam veteran, mothers and young children were among the 28 people who stood silently Wednesday on the steps of the state Capitol and held candles in support of a mother protesting the war in Iraq.

The vigil was one of 1,627 across the nation to show support for Cindy Sheehan, the mother of Army Spc. Casey Sheehan of Vacaville, Calif., who was killed in Iraq on April 4, 2004, according to Moveon.org.

"I have a lot of empathy for her," said Ellen Griffin, organizer of the local vigil and a member of the Montgomery Peace Project. "I think it takes a lot of courage to do what she is doing."

Griffin and the Montgomery Peace Project have protested the war since it began.
Since Aug. 6, Sheehan has held a vigil outside President Bush's Crawford, Texas, ranch, where he has been vacationing.

"Our children and soldiers are over there dying for a bunch of lies and I hate it," Griffin said. (Montgomery Advertiser)

NRO's Byron York wrote today on a similar demonstration held in Birmingham:

Birmingham, Alabama — Jim Douglass is against war, period. As a young Catholic activist in the 1960s and 1970s he protested the war in Vietnam, once organizing a "resistance Mass" at the University of Notre Dame in which, according to an account in The National Catholic Reporter, he and a few other men "ripped up draft cards and placed them in the chalice as part of the presentation of the gifts."

Douglass founded an organization called the Ground Zero Center for Nonviolent Action, and for years he was a leader in anti-Trident demonstrations. But then, in 1989, after a Trident base opened in Kings Bay, Georgia, Douglass left the Pacific Northwest. He found another house hard by the railroad tracks — this one in Birmingham, Alabama, along a route that weapons traveled on the way to Kings Bay. There, in Birmingham, he became involved in a variety of causes but continued to protest the Trident program, which he once wrote "seemed to epitomize all the violence of our society."

In 1991, Douglass headed to Iraq, just after the end of the Gulf War. As part of the Catholic peace organization Pax Christi, he went three more times in the 1990s, opposing the sanctions imposed on Iraq by the United Nations. In 2001, he protested against the war in Afghanistan. And in 2003, he fasted in St. Peter's Square before heading back to Iraq with a "Christian peacemakers team" to be in Baghdad during the "shock and awe" attack. After each protest, he returned to Birmingham.

And it was there, on the city's south side, by a fountain in the Five Points neighborhood, that Douglass stood Wednesday night, a candle in his hand, in yet another antiwar vigil, this one in support of Cindy Sheehan, the woman who is protesting outside President Bush's ranch in Crawford, Texas.