So how are conservatives reacting to the murderous assault against a Planned Parenthood abortion clinic in Colorado on Friday? Very badly, it seems.
On the conservative blog Red State, under the headline “Five Reasons No One Believes Colorado Springs Was Terrorism” (someone tell that to GOP presidential candidate Mike Huckabee), a writer calling himself “streiff” begins, “Nothing I have read thus far convinces me that Robert Lewis Dear, the guy arrested for the shootings in Colorado Springs, CO, knows or cares very much about abortion.” (See article here.)
This, in itself, is problematical because the portrait of Dear emerging in news reports very much points to this motive. But then “streiff” really goes off the deep end: “Violence is a tragedy and those who perpetuate violence, be they Dear or Cecile Richards — and let’s be serious, here, in terms of mere fatalities, Dear can’t hold a candle to Richards — should be punished to the full extent of the law.” Cecile Richards, if you don’t already know, is Planned Parenthood’s president.
Let’s tear this assertion apart, piece by piece, and examine the pieces to see if we can make sense of what “streiff” is trying to say. He (or she) essentially is calling Richards a mass murderer. There’s logic to this if you believe, as right-to-lifers do, that abortion is murder. But even if that premise were correct, unless”streiff” can prove that Richards has personally performed abortions, s/he is holding Richards vicariously responsible for all of the abortions her organization performs. Sort of the Adolf Eichmann theory of culpability, if you will. Well, okay, there’s a historical precedent for that in Eichmann’s case.
(If I remember correctly, Eichmann claimed he didn’t personally kill any Jews, and no one proved he did; rather, the prosecution case against him came down to semantics, i.e. how his work for the Nazi regime should be characterized. He called himself a clerk; the Israeli prosecutors called him a mass murderer. He lost that argument in the Israeli courts and on the gallows.)
Well okay, you can follow this blogger’s argument up to this point, even if you don’t agree with it. But here’s where s/he goes off the rails: “Richards should be punished to the full extent of the law.”
For what? Supporting something that’s already legal? What, exactly, is the charge against her? What “streiff” is really suggesting here is punishing free speech, and doing it ex poste facto, because to make Richards’ actions illegal you’d not only have to make abortion illegal, but also make advocacy for legal abortion a crime, and then apply these proscriptions retroactively.
I can’t see where a lot of thought — or any thought at all — went into this diatribe. Instead, it looks like an angry knee-jerk reaction by an overwrought abortion opponent who finds himself/herself on the defensive after another mass murder incident committed in the name of defending unborn lives.
Finally, “streiff” also said this: “I am long passed the point of caring what happens to either abortion clinics, anyone who works there, or anyone who supports abortion.” Now this also is free speech, and I would adamantly oppose criminalizing it. But that doesn’t mean we can’t judge people for the words they speak and write. And this comment is profoundly immoral, which, without a doubt, is completely lose on the sanctimonious moralizer who uttered it. The writer “streiff” made numerous other idiotic and offensive comments in his/her article, too, but I feel no compulsion to address them here.