Required reading

Go.  Read.

Yes, now.

Home improvement: glass house edition

Stephanie Gray is mad, and when someone who thinks it’s perfectly fine to drive around in a vehicle festooned with images of aborted fetuses gets mad, you know things will get ugly real fast. Or ugli-er.

Responding to a recent National Post article that accused anti-choicers of being hypocritical in their lame, mealy-mouthed denunciations of Dr. Tiller’s murder, Stephanie stomped her feet and held her breath ’til she turned blue:

Colby Cosh is completely wrong when he says, “If you believe that abortion is tantamount to murder… then you should be willing to stand up and celebrate the murder of Dr. George Tiller.”

Perhaps those who support violence (through abortion) in the face of difficult life circumstances don’t comprehend when other people don’t resort to violence in the face of difficult life circumstances (a society where abortion is legal). But nonetheless, that’s our point. Take a message from the pro-life textbook, Mr. Cosh: killing people isn’t the way to deal with problems. It’s the reason why we are more than just “anti-abortion.”

Can’t say I disagree with that — they are way more than just anti-abortion: they’re anti-contraception, anti-sex, anti-liberty, anti-freedom and anti-woman. And since some of those “people” she talks about “killing” are fertilized eggs, let’s add “anti-sane” to the list.

Stephanie denies that the anti-choice campaign of hate she and her ghoulish ilk gleefully indulged in played any part in Dr.Tiller’s death. But her last paragraph is a real groaner:

But since Mr. Cosh doesn’t seem to support that philosophy, I wonder if he’s willing to take responsibility for the consequence of his comments. Given that he’s named Jim Hughes and my organization’s parent affiliate, the Center for Bio-Ethical Reform (CBR), and implied that we were at least in part responsible for violence against Tiller, will he take responsibility for his rhetoric if advocates of legal abortion take it upon themselves and direct violence towards us?

Except that this is an extremely unlikely scenario, given the fact that we’re not, well, you know, completely fucking batshit insane.

Nice try Stephanie, but no cigar. (And don’t panic, the cigar is just a cigar.)

SNARKALICIOUS AFTERTHOUGHT: It’s interesting that Stephanie’s rant is confined to the illustrious “Lifesite” — since she’s been given a platform in the NatPo before when she objected to one of their columns, I’m a little surprised that the NP didn’t see fit to do the same this time. I’m pretty sure it probably wasn’t for lack of trying on Stephanie’s part.  Could this be the beginning of The Shunning? Know hope.

They just can’t stop

Un-fucking-believable:

Old habits die hard: it’s not easy to change after a relentless 3-decades-long campaign of twisted hate.  But is it really necessary to hound the man even beyond the grave they helped to put him in?

And the hate goes on

Via this-on-that, we learn that far-right-wing whackaloons really don’t get this “incitement to commit murder” thing.

Hal Turner… Hal Turner… Oh yeah, the Hal Turner that posted this on Sunday:

…and went on to suggest that another “target” has stepped up to the plate, referring to Dr. LeRoy Carhart, one of the last few doctors who provide late term abortions in the US:

But no doubt Turner is just an “extremist”, not a peace-loving fetus fetishist like Jill Stanek, who wouldn’t dream of doing something as incendiary as posting pictures of doctors and their clinics… err uh what’s that?

Nice license plate shot there… Operation Rescue probably already has this person’s name and address. But not wanting to focus on just one doctor the way they focused on Dr. Tiller, Stanek adds Dr. Warren Hern to the hit list err perfectly harmless “photograph album”:

Oh, what? What’s the problem? No dog whistles there! It’s nothing: just an entire post with pictures of doctors and their clinics, spiced up with provocative language about baby-killing “pro-aborts”. Because heaven knows nobody in Stanek’s spittle-flecked readership might be a fucking nutcase with an urge to make a name for himself by doing something like this. (And should the post go down the memory hole, well, cowardly, pants-pissing, murder-inciting anti-choice bloggers are why Google cache and screenshots were invented.)

(h/t JAB and cache link via little green footballs)

Law enforcement FAIL

This makes me feel sick:

Here’s a situation where police must be wishing for a do-over: The suspect in Dr. George Tiller’s murder was caught vandalizing a clinic the day before Sunday’s shooting. Scott Roeder wasn’t arrested or questioned; he didn’t even have a patrol car intimidatingly cruise by his house late at night. Instead, Roeder was left undisturbed while he allegedly planned his next-day attack on the Kansas doctor. This news comes on the heels of Kate Harding’s excellent post about how difficult it is for abortion providers to get law enforcement to respond to harassment from pro-life groups, and it raises an important question: Could Tiller’s assassination have been prevented by law enforcement?

Just sick.

While I wouldn’t recommend they go full-metal-Patriot Act on every fetus fetishist who stumbles by a clinic (or in the case of Tiller clinic protesters, crawls on their hands and knees), law enforcement clearly has to start taking these creeps more seriously. A lot more seriously.   Vandalism at a clinic — are you fucking kidding me?  That should set off alarm bells and screaming red alerts.  If they’d taken Roeder in and run a check on him, they would have found that he was arrested with a bomb 13 years ago and maybe put 2 + 2 together.  This was a law enforcement failure of epic proportions.

Armed marshalls are now guarding some clinics (and about fucking time), but there’s something else that needs to happen immediately: bubble zones around clinics.  Protests should never be allowed within high-powered rifle range of a clinic.  Clinic protests serve no purpose anyway but to whip the deranged into an even more feverish frenzy, escalating their madness and contributing to the kind of wretched violence that happened on Sunday.  It’s long past time that this ghoulish practice was ended — the fetishists can protest their shriveled little hearts out, 1/2 a mile away.

(h/t Bruce in the comments, via Antonia’s Twitter feed)

Someone else who gets it

The NatPo’s Colby Cosh understands why the anti-abortion “movement” and its ongoing campaign of protests and virulent, poisonous rhetoric that targeted and demonized Dr. Tiller for over a decade, shares at least some collective culpability in his death:

…Jim Hughes, president of our own Campaign Life Coalition, said that “Those of us in the pro-life movement do not want to see abortionists die, we want to see them convert.”

A charming, coy thing to say, no doubt, but the everyday rhetoric of the CLC would have us believe that abortion is murder, and that abortion clinics are therefore ethically equivalent to concentration camps. The Coalition strongly supports, for example, the so-called “Genocide Awareness Project” being run on Canadian campuses by the California-based Center for Bio-Ethical Reform. Are we to believe that if Mr. Hughes stumbled across Auschwitz, he would try to “convert” the guards first? Is he opposed to taking up arms against “genocide”? Can he consistently condemn someone who did so?

No: Like most pro-lifers, he is simply a purveyor of beliefs whose literal truth he does little or nothing to act seriously upon. (As I’ve pointed out in this space, you can make Henry Morgentaler a member of the Order of Canada, thus offering the grossest provocation imaginable to Catholics and evangelicals who have received the honour, and literally 99% of them will suck it up.) But, very occasionally, some ardent religious loner is confused enough to hear those beliefs, conclude they are true, and follow through. And a doctor somewhere ends up maimed or dead. And we blame only the individual who pulled the trigger.

When copy/pasting the link to this article, I noticed with some amusement that the original title of this post was “Don’t Blame The Shooter”.  I guess the editors considered that a little too hot for the socons in the audience.

Cosh is 100% right:  we are all influenced to varying degrees by external stimuli and input from our information sources.  If those sources repeatedly deliver the message that “So-and-so is a depraved maniac of a baby-butchering killer”, that will eventually flip someone’s batshit switch.  The worst thing is, these people know it.  Their hollow, weasel-worded denunciations of Dr. Tiller’s murder, always qualified with a “but he had blood on his hands” kind of statement, prove it.

Look at it this way:  if Dick Cheney ever kicks the bucket, the only people who’ll be talking about the “blood on his hands” will be the ones cracking open a bottle of bubbly to celebrate.

Now somebody go log in to the NatPo and tell them the news.

Operation Sweat

Shorter Operation Rescue: “We’re a totally non-violent, peaceful anti-abortion organization — we just employ people with a history of criminal convictions for anti-abortion-related terrorism.“

KMBC Channel 9 captured this shot of a phone number to anti-abortion group Operation Rescue inside the car of Scott Roeder, the man suspected of shooting and killing Wichita abortion doctor George Tiller Sunday morning at a Wichita church.

The phone number is written on an envelope with the name “Cheryl” and “Op Rescue.” Cheryl is Cheryl Sullenger, Operation Rescue’s senior policy adviser, who in 1988 was convicted of conspiring to bomb a California abortion clinic. She served two years in prison.

Sullenger tells The Pitch that she hasn’t spoken with Roeder recently.

Not since Sunday morning, I bet.

Oh dear. Does this qualify as “palling around with terrorists”? I’m thinking it might. Oooh… I smell “conspiracy”. Smells kind of like crispy hot wings… and sweat.

(h/t – birth pangs)

“Pro-life” is DEAD

Can we finally start calling the anti-abortion freaks what they really are?

The expression “pro-life” has always irked me. It’s a marketing tool, a pretty effective one, that originated in the 70s when the anti-abortion “movement” was trying to rid itself of the negative connotations of its name. (Not to mention the image that was starting to go with it, that of the brain-damaged religious zealot packing a pipe bomb into a clinic as he mutters incoherent spittle-flecked prayers to some loathesome deity.) It started with the term “Pro-Choice” (from the “right to choose” to carry a pregnancy to term or not), to which the anti-abortion movement responded “Choose Life”. From that they appropriated the more positive “pro-life”, and unfortunately, it stuck.

It’s time to un-stick it.

In the wake of the murder of Dr. Tiller, yet another in a long line of anti-abortion violence and terrorism, anti-choicers have lost the right to use the word “life”, so let’s stop playing their game. Stop using the term “pro-life”. When the media uses it, complain. Bitterly.

The sick, dysfunctional cultural zeitgeist that produces sickos like Randall Terry and Scott Roeder is anything but “pro-life”.

(thanks to Bruce for the nudge)

Damn fine rant

Bene D speak, you listen.

Demonization and Dog Whistles

EXHIBIT A – Demonization

If you even doubt for a second that anti-abortion hate rhetoric fueled the assassination of Dr.Tiller yesterday, I invite you to watch an Operation Rescue propaganda video about Dr.Tiller (fetus porn alert), an exercise in demonization that is absolutely depraved in its vileness.

And there’s nothing atypical about it, it just encapsulates the kind of rhetoric anti-choice extremists engage in on an ongoing basis, day in, day out, year in, year out.

Does anyone really believe that this kind of thing, on top of the constant hate rhetoric being puked out about Dr. Tiller every single day for years wouldn’t be enough to flip the batshit switch on someone who’s already unhinged?

EXHIBIT B — Dog Whistle

Courtesy of Alison at Creekside and TGB, here’s Randall Terry in the aftermath of yesterday’s terrorist killing, reiterating the “Tiller the Killer” theme and urging anti-abortion freaks to continue using the same tactics they’ve always used (including murder, one assumes):

It’s significant that in his delusional rant Terry seems far more concerned with the reaction of the White House than he does with the murder that one of his little army of terrorist freaks committed.  Make no mistake:  that’s a dog whistle, and I hope the Secret Service caught the play.

Predictably, anti-choicers are scrambling to “denounce” and distance themselves from the killing of a man they routinely demonized day in, day out, year in, year out, to just such an end.  They’re calling it the work of a “lone nutter”, an anomaly, a one-off, but nothing could be further from the truth.  In reality, Tiller’s murder is part of a long-standing pattern with ominous implications:

In March 1993, three months into the administration of our first pro-choice president, Bill Clinton, abortion provider Dr. David Gunn was murdered in Pensacola, Florida. That was the beginning of what would become a five-fold increase in violence against abortion providers throughout the Clinton years.

Today’s assassination of Dr. George Tiller comes 5 months into the term of our second pro-choice president. For anyone who would like to believe that this is a statistical anomaly, a coincidence that doesn’t portend anything, again, you are wrong.

During the entire Bush administration, from 2000-2008 there were no murders.

During the Clinton era, between 1994-2000 there were 6 abortion providers and clinic staff murdered, and 17 attempted murders of abortion providers. There were 12 bombings or arsons during the Clinton years.

During the Bush administration, not only were there no murders, there were no attempted murders. There was one clinic bombing during the Bush years.

One can only conclude that like terrorist sleeper cells, these extremists have now been set in motion. Indeed the evidence is already there. The chatter, the threats, the hate-filled rhetoric are abundant.

It’s true:  since Obama took office, the volume has been turned way up.  Add to that the fact that anti-choicers are not getting anything they want — their ballot measures failed, Obama’s appointments are sailing through congress, and their little protests of his speech at Notre Dame were ineffectual.  They know that their best chance to get their way, the Bush era, is history.  It should surprise absolutely fucking no-one that they’ve, once again, taken it to the next level.

While I am a staunch supporter of free speech even for douchebags like Randall Terry, there’s a fine line between legitimate free expression and  incitement to commit murder in the form of ongoing harassment and hate propaganda against an individual.  It’s time to look at whether organizations like Operation Rescue cross that line.