Fanaticism in the anti-abortion movement

Digby quotes at some length from a post be Ed Kilgore at The Democratic Strategist, Murder in a Church Foyer 06/01/09 about the ways in which the core assumptions of the real existing anti-abortion movement inevitably encourage violence. Go read Digby's post and Ed's, too. But here are two paragraphs she didn't quote:

It's important to remember that to sincere hard-core right-to-lifers, we are currently living in the moral equivalent to the Third Reich, happily conducting an annual Holocaust of murder; abortion clinics are death camps; Obama is Hitler; the Democratic Party is the Nazi Party; anti-abortion activists are the German Confessing Church or The Resistance; most Americans are either Nazis or complicit by laziness in monstrous evil. And if I shared their core premise that a fetus at any stage of development and under any circumstance is equivalent to a Jew being herded onto trains and sent to Auschwitz, and if I could somehow ignore the whole issue of the wishes and interests of that fetus' mother, I'd probably feel the same way--pretty violently.

There's a tendency of many pro-choice Americans to deny this "radicalizing logic," in favor of dismissive theories that people who say they oppose abortion in all cases are just lying, or are hypocrites, or are misogynists, or are just culturally reactionary, or are terrified by sexuality. Some of them may be all these things, but there's no reason to believe that many of these people aren't sincere in their position on fetal life, and on the goal of ending legalized abortion as the alpha and omega of their own civic life. And so long as that is true, there will always be a significant risk of violence, particularly right now, when it's beginning to sink in that the tantalizing possibility of overturning Roe v. Wade through Republican Supreme Court appointments is receding into the far distance. [my emphasis]

I like that concept of "radicalizing logic", which is a good way to distinguish the problem from a rhetorical "slippery slope" argument. He credits it to the New Republic blogger Damon Linker's post, A Question for Pro-Lifers 05/31/09. As Linker puts it:

To be a pro-lifer is to live with the equivalent of George Tiller's cold-blooded murder every day in clinics and hospitals all over the country -- only unlike Tiller, the victims of abortion are innocent and those who murder them are protected, not punished, by the law of the land.

We should consider ourselves very lucky that so few anti-abortion activists resort to violence. After all, as the pro-life Rod Dreher admits ..., it is merely "prudence" (and not principle) that keeps opponents of abortion from following the lead of John Brown instead of Martin Luther King, Jr.

Tags: abortion, christian fundamentalism, christian right, christian terrorism, fanaticism, george tiller, terrorism