Context is important. If a normal person said to you, “He alone, who owns the youth, gains the future,’’ it could sound like a reasonable notion about supporting kids.

It sounds a lot different when you realize it’s a quote from Adolf Hitler.

Life Savers Ministries missed the subtleties of context when it included that quote on an Alabama billboard.

According to East Alabama’s Ledger-Enquirer:

The billboard went up Friday and will be taken down Tuesday, per LSM's request. "We are pulling the billboard and certainly never intended to cause confusion. ... Herbert Hoover would have been a far better one to quote when he said, 'Children are our most valuable resource,'" founder James Anderegg told the Ledger-Enquirer. "We are a children’s organization and had honorable intentions and nothing less."

It’s not like the group was hurting for a pro-kids quote. They have one on the very same billboard. A bible quote, no less: “Train up a child in the way he should go. Even when he is old, he will not depart from it.’’


That’s a good, old-timey quote from Proverbs, but somehow it got second billing to the Führer.