William Saletan asks: Is it wrong to murder an abortionist? Stupid question. Of course it is wrong. I might as well ask if it is wrong to kill an opponent of single-payer health care.
About The Author
BooMan
Martin Longman a contributing editor at the Washington Monthly. He is also the founder of Booman Tribune and Progress Pond. He has a degree in philosophy from Western Michigan University.
stoopid journalists who ask dumbass questions?
Remember “There are no stupid questions”?
Well, there are.
But Saletan’s article is a lot more thought-provoking than its title.
And so the question arises, “If right-to-life killers are going to kill abortionists, is it time to recognize that we are in a war?” That the Armies of God should be taken at their word and be hunted down and gotten before they get us? Should their homes and meeting halls and churches, breeding places for hate and murder, be bombed flat? Should targeted assassinations be the order of the day? Should Randall Terry be hunted down like the murderous dog he is? Should Kansas be the place where the civil war starts, again?
Or should we embrace the Jesus of love that these bastards reject?
Just asking.
I have thought that tit-for-tat assassinations of Operation Rescue leaders might reduce these attacks.
the real question is “is it wrong to wish that william saletan’s wife finds herself needing a late-term abortion and that they’re unable to obtain one and find themselves the proud parents of a really expensive, incredibly unhealthy child”?
That’s the question.
I like bob in pacifica’s question too.
I suspect if someone put a bullet through Randall Terry’s merciless little scumbag heart that the killer would be surrounded and executed in moments. Justice against violent leftists just tends to be on a faster track than for most of the right-wing shooters.
But busting a cap into Terry would certainly expand the debate. Maybe Saletan can write an article on that.
the final paragraph of his article is
that seems useful to me.
part of what needs to happen to prevent the next Scott Roeber is to have the “pro-life” folks turn on the Randall Terry’s and Bill O’Rielly’s and cease the eliminationist rhetoric
to that end I think Saletan’s article might be helpful – but we’re going to have to go beyond headlines and bumber stickers…
Truly religious. Shooting your opponent in a church during services. Jesus must be smiling.
The question is, “How can we prevent more unwanted pregnancies?”
This absolutist B S over kill or be killed is just the same no matter which side of the equation we’re on.
Abortion isn’t murder, at least, not under our legal system, if only and until the laws ever change.
Any violence against licensed doctors, or anti-abortion activists, just derails any negotiation and reasoning.
It’s about teaching people who really don’t want babies how not to get pregnant.
But here’s the problem – even if we lived in a perfect world where every pregnancy was planned and every birth a desired outcome, that wouldn’t have stopped the need for Dr. Tiller to do what he was doing.
Look at the actual reports of the type of abortions his clinic was providing that made him such a hot-button figure – late term abortions where the life of the mother was threatened, where the fetus was already dead in the womb, where the child was going to be born with a serious defect that would lead it to be dead within weeks, and other critical cases. In general his clinic was providing medically necessary abortions to women who wanted to have their children but were faced by a tragedy where they decided that the least-worst decision was to terminate the pregnancy.
The right wing turned this man into a demon, but he was doing what already had to be one of the hardest damn jobs on the planet in an atmosphere where he was taking his life into his own hands every damn day that he went to work and did it. And if the magic pixie fairy waved her wand tomorrow and POOF no more unwanted pregnancies ever, someone would STILL need to do the job that Dr. Tiller was doing.
Right now I’m just still seething over this. I don’t even know if this post is rational. Grrr…
Not only is it rational, it’s very compelling.
You weren’t the only one seething. It really gets me when they call themselves pro-life and then turn around and murder. They Kill your friend and then say “God says it’s just.”
The path towards the ultimate defusion of the anti-choice argument is NOT in calling people who care about the rights of zygotes and fetuses “dumbass”, “idiot” or “fucktards.”
We have to get them to see themselves as “dumbass, idiot fucktards.”
We need to start with the Roe v Wade issue and work backward to where they (the DIF’s) are coming from. These people have gotten zero support for seeing Roe v. Wade as a PRIVACY ISSUE. They still see it as murder and morons like O’Reilly feed that ignorance so that it grows into cancer.
An infant who has been born and is considered, “medically viable,” has rights that are on par with its mother’s. Its a more liberal determination than I would have made (I’m with Bill Hicks on this issue), but I can live with it. Killing an infant is infanticide. Both sides are cool on this issue.
The problem comes in the determination of “medical viability.” Anti-choicers want this determination made up to and including conception. This is pure sentimentality or religious claptrappery at work here because, at some point in the nine month process, a woman has to transition from thinking of her pregnancy as an organ growing inside her body and to begin thinking of her fetus as a person. But it is the MOTHER who makes this determination because it is HER BODY through which the potential criminal will be born.
If men and women are to be treated equally under the law, they have to have the same rights. Men are not treated as “potential fathers” or as “baby factories” so women should not be treated in this matter, either.
Women have a right to privacy and a right to make their own decisions as to how their bodies will be used. Just like men. Period.
Does this mean that some women will use abortion as birth control? Sure. Disgusting, repugnant, but it’s a possibility. As righteous as the right gets about this issue, I don’t see any of them actually making hay as to the causative factors behind the genesis of these women’s decisions: rape, incest, abject poverty, no access to healthcare. Until the right addresses these issues to the satisfaction of the left, I think they should go away and not be given a seat at the table. They’re being jackasses.
speaking as someone who watched a partner got through abortion, i have always been highly doubtful of the pro-life idea that “women will use abortion as birth control”.
we caught the pregnancy early, and got scheduled quickly (this was in no-questions-asked new england). the procedure was uncomfortable for her (i got to hear all the details) and uncomfortable for me (because the staff kind of gave me the hairy eyeball).
Afterwards, her hormones went on a roller-coaster and she couldn’t stop bleeding: it was like a week or more of heavy flow (and my partner at the time had REALLY painful menses to begin with). I am convinced the emotional aftermath, a lot of it triggered by all the hormone fluctuations, led to our breakup a year late, at least in part.
if our experience was common, and I suspect it is from what I’ve read on the topic, the idea that women will use abortion as pregnancy is shaky at best, and probably closer to downright idiotic. And that doesn’t even begin to take into account the $400 price tag, which low-income women and families ALWAYS have lying around. not.
I had a cousin who was sexually abused by her alcoholic father. Repeatedly.
Though he never got her pregnant, her low self-esteem was something on par with the women who are said to live in the backwoods of West Virginia. All dressed up, but not all there.
She had several abortions. I’m sure they took their toll, but, the point is, she kept getting in trouble. I don’t see that as entirely her fault even though it is undoubtedly all her responsibility.
And that’s what wrong with the Right’s position on everything under the sun, imho. They want to hold the sick accountable for being ill WHILE THEY ARE ILL. This is perverse to the point of being idiotic. Why not just tell people, up front, “it’s your fault and your responsibility that you’re sick or disadvantaged. Deal with it. This is the ‘ownership society’ and that actually means, ‘you’re on your own.'”
Well, when somebody swinging a hammer over my head tells me that I’m on my own [or tells me one thing, but then does something different], my only shot at survival is neutralizing the fucktard swinging the hammer.
The hammer-slingers can think they’re safe inside their gated communities, but not for long. Very soon we’ll graduate to the point just before the Magna Carta was signed into law in 1215 AD…back when the poor would slaughter the children of the rich right in front of their parents before they slaughtered their parents. That, as Al Franken once said, is class warfare.
This game of five-card Monty is about to blow up in everyone’s face, just like any confidence game ever played. It has nothing to do with sexual pleasure or amorality, it has to do with oppression — who’s oppressing and who’s the oppressed.
And we know how these games always end.
Having spent large chunks of my life, especially my school years, around the sons and daughters of the privileged, I can certainly vouch for the delusion of invulnerability that they tend to possess. While I would rather not see it get that far, they need to be reminded of what happened to the Bourbons and the Romanovs. The rich, who by the very nature of economics are always a tiny, tiny minority, would be much more manageable if the middle and lower classes saw through the smokescreen and realized why the rich exist.
Because we permit them to.
its a bullshit game for saletan. He is having fun with words. The Dr was murdered. He was murdered in a country that continues to claim that itis the greatest, most democratic society on earth. Bullshit. We have raped, pillaged, lied, stolen, mudered, all in the name of Democracy!
Stop the g-d damned word games. the sick bastard that murdered the Doctor knew exactly what he was doing. He was comitting an act of terror, exactly like every single terrorist has done throughout the ages.
The “civil war” has begun. Wakeup and smell the cordite!
In a bar the other night, a guy I was talking to said what he wanted to do with Guantanamo detainees: Kill ’em all.
That’s when I stopped talking to him. Well, after saying, how would you feel if you were picked up in a foreign country and deemed a CIA agent and sentenced to death? His answer: I don’t travel.
You see why I stopped talking to him. Some idiots really aren’t worth the time.
there was a book written in 1996 or so about the Republican Freshmen from the Class of ’94. Almost none of them had passports. It was a telling fact.
at least one of them get it…a mea culpa…sorta…from frank schaeffer via huffpo:
it’s a start, albeit a small one, but a start of some acknowledgment of the dangers of the hate machine/ rhetoric nonetheless.