Political violence in the US today

Even before Wednesday's shooting in San Bernadino , the very political attack on Colorado Springs Planned Parenthood last Friday had provoking a lot of discussion about the state of violent civil disoroder and political violence.

Bob Cesca, Wing-nuts have weaponized hatred: How the conservative echo chamber is making us all less safe Salon 12/01/2015 writes:

We’ve reached a tipping point in America’s political discourse. The shooting at a Colorado Springs Planned Parenthood facility is merely the latest in an increasingly alarming series of tragedies connected to political issues, each of which has been notably distorted by conservatives — or in the case of the Planned Parenthood shooting, almost completely ignored — throughout the past year and beyond. So far, attacks have occurred in relation to the following: immigration, Muslims inside the U.S., reproductive rights, LGBT equality and racial justice.

As far-right propaganda grows louder and increasingly divorced from objective reality, it seems as if incidents of violence have escalated accordingly. While there might not be a direct one-to-one correlation, it’s obvious to anyone paying attention that the GOP’s eliminationist rhetoric, intentionally or not, serves to inflame those who are already prone to radicalism and violence. [my emphasis]

Ed Kilgore writes in Extremist Republican Rhetoric and the Planned Parenthood Attack Daily Intelligencer 11/30/2015 about two strains of far-right rhetoric that have facilitated the current outbreak of violence. One strain involves the ways the antiabortion movement talks about their cause:

The first is the comparison of legalized abortion to the great injustices of world history, including slavery and the Holocaust. The first analogy helps anti-choicers think of themselves as champions of a new civil-rights movement while facilitating a characterization of Roe v. Wade as a temporary and disreputable constitutional precedent like Dred Scott. The second follows from the right-to-life movement’s logic of regarding abortion as homicide and treats the millions of legal abortions that have been performed in the U.S. since 1973 as analogous to the Nazi extermination of Jews and other “undesirables.”

Both the slavery and Holocaust analogies for abortion have become commonplace “truisms” in the right-to-life movement and in allied Christian-right organizations (where there is a natural tendency to take on the righteous mantles of religiously motivated abolitionists and of the German “Confessing Church” resistance to Hitler). Conservative politicians have been more circumspect in using these inflammatory comparisons — though George W. Bush pulled off a clever dog-whistle reference to Dred Scott in the 2004 presidential debates, leaving most watchers puzzled while anti-choice activists nodded knowingly. But the white-hot atmosphere of conservative “base” competition in the current Republican presidential nominating contest may be loosening the bonds of self-restraint.

Mike Huckabee is by far the least inhibited presidential candidate when it comes to American Holocaust rhetoric, despite repeated warnings from groups like the Anti-Defamation League. [my emphasis]

The other is the right-to-revolution rhetoric that the NRA and other players in the gun-proliferation lobby use:

But there’s a second element of contemporary extremist rhetoric from conservatives that brings them much closer to incitement of violence: the claim that the Second Amendment encompasses a right to revolution against “tyrannical” government. Again, Mike Huckabee, Ben Carson, and Ted Cruz have embraced this idea most avidly. ...

It’s not difficult to see how toxic these arguments become when combined. If legalized abortion (and its alleged extension into open infanticide via the “barbaric” practices of government-subsidized Planned Parenthood “baby-killers”) represents government-sponsored mass extermination and/or a perversion of the Constitution comparable to slavery, and there is a fundamental right to violent resistance against this and other acts of tyranny, then it could definitely cross the minds of conscientious gun-owning anti-choicers to emulate John Brown or the conspirators against Hitler. After all, the two greatest wars in American history were undertaken to destroy the Slave Power and Nazism. Why not a small individual war against their contemporary equivalent?

Our political vocabulary has been so poisoned by the kind of actors that Kilgore and Cesca discuss that it's difficult to make straightforward statements and judgments about political violence.

But political violence is a part of our political life. The current bogeyman (and reality) of Muslim terrorism is also political violence, even if religious motives play a large role in it. We need to understand the nature and roots of it. And we need to understand the larger roots as well as the technical law-enforcement issues.

But the analysis needs to be realistic. It also means keeping in mind that understanding isn't justifying, explaining isn't excusing. And a realistic understanding of causes and context may not lead obviously and immediately to a clear solution.

For instance, it's often observed that failure to effectively integrate Muslim populations into European societies produces conditions which make some of them open to violence and recruitment by jihadi groups. That doesn't justify resorting to violence or using violence directed at civilians. But it does give policymakers a framework to approach the problem of drying up the pool of potential violent jihadis. How well they approach it presents a whole new set of issues.

I like Kilgore's framing of the gun-proliferation argument that "that the Second Amendment encompasses a right to revolution against “tyrannical” government."

Historically, the purpose of the Second Amendment was to guarantee that critics of slavery would be unable to block the use of "slave patrols" in which white citizens were required to patrol for slaves who were somehow breaking the rules. It was a key institution in the slave South for gaining political and psychological commitment among nonslaveholders for the Peculiar Institution.

The right of revolution is not inherent in the Second Amendment, much less a specific right of armed revolution. No government is going to declare the right for it to be violently overthrown. The US Constitution obviously does establish good democratic/republican mechanisms for making changes, even radical changes, within the Constitutional framework.

The right of revolution is a conviction expressed in the Declaration of Independence. In that form, it was based on a concept of "natural law" which is now scarcely recognized. It was heavily influenced by English and French political theorist like John Locke and Rousseau. It is deeply rooted in American tradition, and it is not unusual for politicians to invoke it support of some cause. Remember the "Reagan Revolution"?

Apart from hair splitting and/or downright absurd arguments invoking the Second Amendment, the right to self-defense is also widely recognized in theory and in law. If a policeman is attacking someone without good cause, it would be legal to use lethal force against him. Defending oneself in court afterward would be quite a challenge in almost any imaginable circumstance.

But violence in politics should be a last resort. There have been times in American politics when unofficial violence was necessary to preserve democracy and freedom. The guerrilla between antislavery and proslavery forces in "Bloody Kansas" is one such instance. The proslavery side was definitely intending to use force to make Kansas into a slave state, legal or not. And the Southern-dominated federal government was not going to do its duty to prevent the slaveowners from imposing their will by force. We could moralize about whether people like John Brown should have taken a different approach. But given the stakes the slaveowners perceived in that conflict and the amount of illegitimate power they brought to it, it's unlikely that the antislavery could have prevailed without resorting to guerrilla warfare.

Labor unions in the 19th and 20th century often faced violence from company thugs, not infrequently hired from out-and-out mobsters. With the courts and Governors and many local officials willing to overlook criminal acts by the bosses and willing to employ the police and National Guard as well as court injunctions against unions, union activists did sometimes use violence, and not always purely in self-defense.

Civil rights activists and ordinary blacks, especially in the South, found it expedient on occasion to use guns in defense against Klan types. Even Martin Luther King, Jr., who was committed to a political strategy of Ghandian nonviolent activism bought a gun to defend himself and his family when he started becoming prominent and receiving death threats from white supremacists.

I've deliberately avoided trying to make an ethical point about those situations. Those are decisions that were taken in particular situations responding to particular threats and obstacles. Those were serious decisions with real risks. But I'm not going to make some blanket criticism or condemnation of the Abolitionists for fighting violence and aggressive slaveowners in Kansas Territory, or labor activists for defending themselves against violent opponents, or people using force to stop Klan thugs from hurting them or their families.

One influential kind of political violence that gained a significant amount of support in the 1960s and 1970s was the idea of the "foco," of starting violent actions in the hope and belief that the fact of armed resistance would draw others into the revolutionary struggle. In advanced countries, those were small groups like the Weather Underground in the US, the RAF ("Baader-Meinhof Gang") in Germany, the Red Brigades in Italy, the Japanese Red Army group in Japan. With a little help from their friends in the Soviet bloc, the RAF in particular managed to pull off some spectacular kidnappings and act of terrorism, typically directed against installations or individuals identified in some way with the power structure. But in terms of building a political movement around themselves and their ideas, they faded into history with an influence vague and ill-defined influence, at best.

In Argentina, the role of violent guerrilla groups was very different, because Argentina was in a very different situation than the US or Germany. And its politics were very different. After his violent overthrow by the military in 1955, Juan Perón worked for nearly two decades to get the Peronist party legalized again and democratic processes fully restored in Argentina. Whatever one thinks about his particular policies or personality, restoring democracy was his political goal, being fully aware as he was likely to be re-elected President in a genuinely free and competitive election. Which is what occurred in 1974.

One of the reasons that Perón's return didn't have an happy ending for the country had to do in part with the multifaceted strategy he used during the years between 1955 and 1974. At various times, he authorized and directed his supporters to use some classical resistance tactics like various kinds of sabotage and nonlegal actions. Most significantly was his encouragement of the Peronist guerrilla group, the Montoneros. In the early 1970s, it was one of the guerrilla groups that developed a significant degree of military capacity to make partisan war for real, including in urban areas. Their actions were a part of the successful pressure that lead to the legalization of the Peronist party and Perón's return to power.

The problem was that the Monteneros assumed that they could continue guerrilla warfare against the Argentine oligarchy with Perón's continued support. They were wrong. Perón expected them to stand down. And when they didn't, he green-lighted at different kind of political violence, the death squads led by his most dubious adviser of all, José López Rega. The continuing civil conflict became the justification for overthrowing the democratic government by the military junta that took power in 1976. They proceeded to practice a different kind of political violence by instituting a reign of terror in the old-fashioned sense, terrorism of the state.

All of this is to say that political violence is real and its effects both short-term and long-term are complex. And need to be understood in their real context.

Which brings us to the current state of political violence in the US. At the moment, it's almost all from the political right. And I include violence from violent jihadists in that characterization, even though the white right considers them deadly enemies. Because violent Islamic fundamentalists are not aiming to establish democracy or practical equality of all or democratic civil liberties. Much less a social-democratic state, radical or otherwise. Although super-conservative Saudi Arabia doesn't mind state ownership of oil resources.

But the violent white Christianist right, like the antiabortion bombers and assassins, are working on a model that resembles the Ku Klux Klan model of Segregation 1.0. They are in one sense independent operators, loose cannons even, in relationship to governments or political parties. But they also benefit from the support and encouragement of sympathetic politicians and officials. In the segregated South, it wasn't unusual for the local white shurff to be either sympathetic to the Klan or even an active member. So they could be counted on to look the other way at Klan violence, both before and after the fact. The extremist Oath Keepers group seems to be focused on developing that kind of sympathy in local law enforcement.

That's why it's important for people to pay attention to how those connections work. The infamous fradulent anti-Planned Parenthood video that made "no more baby parts" an emotional cause was prepared by a fringe, extremist group, the "Center for Medical Progress." But, as Digby Parton observes (Wing-nuts are impervious to tragedy Salon 12/01/2015:

You’ll recall that [former House Speaker John] Boehner had tried for months to appease the social conservative base which had been smarting from its loss on marriage equality and felt that it was being take for granted by the GOP. When the edited footage from the Center for Medical Progress was publicly released, it gave this faction a new focus for its energy and the GOP establishment was happy to help. Indeed, the activist filmmakers had consulted with Republican members of congress weeks in advance of the release and they appear to have coordinated the response. From the moment the edited tapes were made public, Republicans at all levels pulled out every rhetorical stop to condemn them, with Boehner himself saying “I could talk about the video but I think I’d vomit trying to talk about it. It’s disgusting.”

Knowing that the fervor for shutting down the government over this issue was growing — and also knowing that it would be lethal for Republicans in an election year — Boehner and other establishment Republicans worked overtime to mollify these zealots by throwing out the most incendiary rhetoric they could imagine, almost always including their patented slogan: “baby parts.” They convened a variety of committee investigations and held hearings with names like “Examining the Horrific Abortion Practices at the Nation’s Largest Abortion Provider.” Boehner even created a “Benghazi” level select House committee which they fatuously named the “Select Investigative Panel on Infant Lives.” All of this was done in the hopes that if they threw out enough vitriol and anger, they could somehow keep the angry social conservatives under control.

Boehner thundered to reporters, “the goal here is not to shut down the government, the goal is to stop these horrific practices of organizations selling baby parts!” [my emphasis]

If you light enough fuses, the fire will eventually reach some of the explosives on the other end. And when the Republicans howl long enough and loud enough that abortion is "murdering babies" and "worse than the Holocaust," some people are going to feel enticed to respond with violence to what the Republicans are constantly declaring to be mass murder.

And there's no intention that the antiabortion activists and their more prominent Republican reporters intend to stop. Neither the more clean-shaven versions nor the rest.

Rape, theology and the antiabortion movement

It's a very disturbing twist to the antiabortion movement that they not only oppose abortion in cases of rape and incest. But in pursuit of that goal, they actually wind up giving more-or-less explicit justifications for rape, as Senate candidates Todd Akin in Missouri and Richard Mourdock in Indiana have gotten publicity for doing.

Adele Stan gives a roundup of some of these absolutist positions in Republicans' Shocking Positions on Rape and Pregnancy Aren't Outliers -- They're Central to the GOP Agenda Alternet 10/25/2012. She makes an important historical point:

With the takeover of the G.O.P by the religious right, beginning in 1976, the party’s position on abortion has been on a slow and steady march toward deepening misogyny. Women are to be punished not just for choosing to have sex, but for being sexual beings at all -- for having vaginas, if you will.

Although evangelical Protestants, who now comprise 26 percent of the U.S. population, were not always so draconian in their views on abortion, the movement’s alliance with the Roman Catholic Church -- which prohibits any exception, even to save the life of the pregnant woman -- has led to the present-day, Dark Ages dictates of the religious right on matters of women’s sexuality and sexual vulnerability.

I would quibble a bit with the 1976 date; what we today know as the Christian Right didn't start emerging in the organizational forms we know today until 1977-8 when fundamentalist minister became outraged at the Carter Administration's denial of tax breaks to the racially segregated private Bob Jones University.

But the Protestant adoption of the absolutist Catholic fundamentalist viewpoint is an important historical point.

I noticed a while ago that there was an inconsistency in people saying that aborting a fetus that could not survive outside its mother's body was taking a human life but that exceptions for rape and incest were okay. I connected this with conversations in which people expressed their support for antiabortion politics by saying that if a woman/girl gets pregnant, she should have to pay the consequences. In other words, pregnancy was a punishment for the sin of having sex outside church-sanctioned arrangements. Or maybe even for having sex and all.

Democratic shyness at offending the sensibilities of men and women who think the church, the state and a husband should be able to dictate everything a woman does with her ladyparts has generally discouraged them from discussing the retrograde, mean-spirited, punitive moralism that lies behind the antiabortion movement.

We've reached a point in the development of this movement, though, in which guys like Todd Akin Richard Murdock and their supporters of both sexes are "desublimating" that underlying meanness. It's not so much that they actually care about the precious little Jesus fetuses they claim to be defending. They're mainly angry at women - or sluts and prostitutes as chief Republican Party ideologist Rush Limbaugh refers to them - "not just for choosing to have sex, but for being sexual beings at all -- for having vaginas, if you will," in Adele Stan's words.

This is not to discount the theological side of this. Though as so often happens with matters of sex, theology is tossed on the stormy waters of passion. (And hormones.) Jeffrey MacDonald writes about Richard Mourdock: the theology behind his rape comments Christian Science Monitor 10/25/2012:

In awkwardly wading into theological waters, Mourdock apparently aimed to affirm the belief – widely held in Evangelical circles, in particular – that God's sovereignty knows no limits. It is a concept that has strong ties to 16th-century Swiss religious reformer John Calvin, who saw in scripture and day-to-day events evidence of a hands-on God. Mourdock showed, however, how tricky it can be to apply the doctrine in discussing tragic events.

This is probably worth remembering when we hear discussions about the controversy over "New Calvinism" in the Southern Baptist Convention (SBC), still the largest US Protestant denomination.

David Van Biema reported for Time back in 2009 on The New Calvinism 03/12/2009:

Neo-Calvinist ministers and authors don't operate quite on a Rick Warren scale. But, notes Ted Olsen, a managing editor at Christianity Today, "everyone knows where the energy and the passion are in the Evangelical world" — with the pioneering new-Calvinist John Piper of Minneapolis, Seattle's pugnacious Mark Driscoll and Albert Mohler, head of the Southern Seminary of the huge Southern Baptist Convention. The Calvinist-flavored ESV Study Bible sold out its first printing, and Reformed blogs like Between Two Worlds are among cyber-Christendom's hottest links.

Like in other areas, President Obama's centrist politics and posturing prevent him from confronting this ideological nastiness as directly as the President and the head of the Democratic Party should, as Sarah Posner observes in Obama’s Wrong Answer on Leno Religion Dispatches 10/25/2012:

President Obama was on Jay Leno’s show last night, and the late-night host asked him about Richard Mourdock’s statement about pregnancy caused by rape as a “gift from God” and something “God intended.”

Obama responded, “I don’t know how these guys come up with these ideas. Let me make a simple proposition. Rape is rape. Rape is a crime.”

He doesn’t know where these guys come up with these ideas? I know he was trying to demonstrate the outrageousness of Mourdock’s views, but we all know where they come up with these ideas: fundamentalist Christianity.

Obama went on, “The second thing this underscores, though,” (and here is where I’m hoping he’d say, “this is exactly why we don't want to mix religion and politics.”) But no, Obama said, “is this is exactly why you don’t want a bunch of politicians, mostly male, making decisions about women’s health care decisions. Women are capable of making these decisions... for politicians to want to intrude on this stuff is a huge problem.”

Of course that’s a huge problem, but isn't there another huge problem: that Mourdock thinks that because he believes he knows what divine intentions are, that his religious views get to dictate policy? Wouldn't it be just as problematic if Mourdock were a female candidate?

The Democrats and pro-choice advocates have to get beyond the now-standard Democratic bromides about how they are individually personally against it but want it to be "safe, legal and rare", or something to that effect. They also need to insist that abortion laws need to be consistent with the medical fact that a fetus is biologically an integral part of the mother's body until the end of the second trimester, when it reaches a stage that it could possibly survive outside the mother's womb. That was a foundation of the Roe v. Wade decision in 1973. And despite the imaginary tales the antiabortionists constantly churn out about the alleged miracles of medical advances, that is still the case.

The belief that a fertilized egg becomes a human being at conception is a theological one, not a medical one. And in a secular society, laws about pregnancy, abortion and birth control should not be made on the basis of theology. There really is a freedom of religion issue and an issue of the establishment of religion in play with the abortion issue. The Democrats need to start making those points, and in the process remind people that freedom of religion is not just a fundamentalist slogan to justify enacting their theological beliefs into law for everyone else to have to follow.

Tags: abortion

Biden-Ryan debate: Iran and the Grand Bargain to cut benefits on Social Security, Medicare and Medicaid

Joe Biden's performance in Thursday evening's debate against Paul Ryan reminded me of Abe Lincoln's famous comment about General Grant: "He fights."

Bill Press picks up on that aspect of the debate in Bill says Vice President Biden saved the day 10/12/2012:

Since I can't offer a better analysis of what went right for Biden than Charlie Pierce, I'll refer you to his post from the early AM, VP Debate 2012: The Real Paul Ryan Is Bad for America 10/12/2012.

You know what's the difference between Sarah Palin and Paul Ryan?

Lipstick.

There were some substantive problems with what Biden had to say, much as I enjoyed his clobbering the Ayn Rand fanboy. They were points on which the Romney-Ryan ticket is worse than the incumbent President's trajectory. But for those of us who don't look at national policy as purely a binary partisan matter, they're worrisome. (See the transcript for text.)

Biden used the Republicans' bluster against them on the subject of Iran. Biden said, "The last thing we need now is another war." And, "War should always be the absolute last resort." Peace is good politics. He also did a good job of debunking the scare talk about an Iranian nuclear weapon. I like that he said in this connection, "facts matter."

But he also said of the Iran sanctions, "These are the most crippling sanctions in the history of sanctions, period, period." That sounds an awful lot like being only one short step from war. The US policy toward nuclear nonproliferation is dangerously one-sided in the Middle East. Nuclear nonproliferation is extremely important. But it doesn't justify an unprovoked attack on Iran. "Aggressive war", aka, preventive war, is a threat to peace, international law and nuclear nonproliferation. The Obama Administration's Libya policy can also be faulted in that regard. Muammar Ghaddafi's regime had cooperated with the United States on nuclear nonproliferation and gave up their nuclear weapons program. Then the US sided military with rebels against that government.

The other big concern was Biden's weasily-worded comments on Social Security and Medicare. People following the grim negotiations on the "Grand Bargain" to cut benefits on Social Security, Medicare and Medicaid, what Biden said wasn't entirely reassuring, though he drew sharp and necessary contrasts with Ryan. David Dayen looks at those moments in VP Debate: The Constrained Discussion on Social Insurance FDL News Desk 10/12/2012:

... the myth that Biden didn't confront sprung from the very premise of the question.

"Both Medicare and Social Security are going broke and taking a larger share of the budget in the process," said Martha Raddatz, marring an otherwise good moderating performance. Social Security has nothing to do with the federal budget. It has a dedicated funding stream from the payroll tax, and is fully funded for the next two decades, which is more than you can say about pretty much any other government program. A good portion of Medicare comes from its hospital insurance tax, another dedicated funding stream. That Medicare is taking a larger share of the federal budget is an artifact of higher health spending in the United States generally, and Medicare is the least important driver of that. In fact, the antidote for higher health spending is more Medicare, a single payer program that can bargain down these higher costs. ...

But he didn’t challenge this premise, this idea that these vital programs are “going broke,” and that the role of government is just to hang onto them rather than design them in a more adequate way to increase security for older Americans. We need a Social Security system that increases benefits to those who need it. We need a Medicare program that covers really everyone, but certainly more people, to increase its bargaining power. But Biden, inside the contours of the question, and determined to maintain the wiggle room the President clearly wants, could only say that he opposed a voucher system for Medicare and privatization for Social Security. I agree, but that’s not the only answer.

The Obama Administration created a (still relatively small) exception to the very useful argument that Social Security does not draw on the General Fund budget. He and Congress financed the temporary payroll tax reductions by having the General Fund reimburse the Social Security Trust Fund for the cost. This always bothered me from the standpoint of defending Social Security. If it's supposedly going broke, why would we cut the taxes that pay for it? Well, the answer is that the General Fund is reimbursing Social Security. But that opens the program up for the Republicans to call it a "welfare" program that draws down General Funds. The obvious alternative would have been to provide those subsidies in the form of refunds coming directly to payroll tax payers.

Here's what Biden said:

Look, I was there when we did that with Social Security, in 1983. I was one of eight people sitting in the room that included Tip O'Neill negotiating with President Reagan. We all got together, and everybody said, as long as everybody's in the deal, everybody's in the deal, and everybody is making some sacrifice, we can find a way. We made the system solvent to 2033.

We will not, though, be part of any voucher plan eliminating the voucher says, Mom, when you're when you're 65, go out there, shop for the best insurance you can get; you're out of Medicare. You can buy back in, if you want, with this voucher, which will not keep pace will not keep pace with health care costs, because if it did keep pace with health care costs, there would be no savings. That's why they go the voucher they we will be no part of a voucher program or the privatization of Social Security. ...

Quickly, the bottom line here is that all the studies show that if we went with Social Security proposal made by Mitt Romney, if you're 40 in your 40s now, you will pay $2,600 a year you get $2,600 a year less in Social Security. If you're in your 20s now, you get $4,700 a year less. The idea of changing and change being, in this case, to cut the benefits for people without taking other action you could do to make it work is absolutely the wrong way.

These look, these guys haven't been big on Medicare from the beginning. Their party's not been big on Medicare from the beginning. And they've always been about Social Security as little as you can do. Look, folks, use your common sense. Who do you trust on this? A man who introduced a bill that would raise it $6,400 a year, knowing it and passing it, and Romney saying he'd sign it? Or me and the president? [my emphasis]

This formulation clearly leaves the door open for cuts in benefits to Social Security, Medicare and Medicaid in a post-election Grand Bargain.

The politics on this is kind of twisted. Because the Republicans got away in the Congressional campaigns of 2010 with claiming that projected savings to Medicare that do not reduce benefits to recipients were actually cuts to Medicare, they've recycled it in 2012 with the "$716 billion" meme. Instead of attacking Obama on the cuts he actually proposed in the debt ceiling negotiations last year and clearly intends to propose again in the lame-duck session this year, the Reps are attacking him with a phony claim. Shameless prevaricators that they are, even they don't seem to have found a way to attack him on the Grand Bargain proposals o cuts benefits on Social Security, Medicare and Medicaid because they are actually down with that program.

Biden repaired some of the damage Obama did to their campaign in the first debate when he said there were no real differences between him and Romney on Social Security. But there's still a Grand Bargain fight coming after the November election between supporters of Social Security, Medicare and Medicaid on one side and Obama and the Republicans on the other.

Finally, Biden's answer on abortion was a strong variation on the standard Democratic politician's position - to say they're personally against it but support choice for women - and it very effectively made the point that the Democrats are pro-choice and the Republicans anti-choice. And that helps the Democrats.

But given the success of the fanatical anti-abortion movement in passing restrictions to access to abortion services, their newly visible front against contraception more generally, and their success in framing the issue to the point that violent and even murderous attacks against abortion clinics and providers aren't even called "terrorism" by politician or the government or the mainstream news media - the I'm-personally-against-it-but-support-a-woman's-right-to-choose really isn't good enough any more. Advocates of choice, including Democratic politicians, need to be making a case on the medical facts central to the Roe v. Wade decision: that a fetus cannot survive outside its mother womb until the third trimester and is therefore medically a part of the woman's body. The mushy, subjective dodge just doesn't work well enough any more. Law needs to be based on medical realities. Because "facts matter."

Tags: 2012 election, abortion, joe biden, paul ryan

Todd Akin and rape: Obama's cautious politics are showing again

President Obama's has been surprisingly aggressive the last few weeks against the Romney campaign. But the last few days we've also seen some discouraging signs of his cautious politics, which are still confounding in someone who certainly showed personal boldness in becoming the first African-American President.

But personal boldness in Obama has always been melded with his relentlessly centrist approach to politics. The National Review Online quoted Romney on Monday as saying this about Todd Akins ugly comment about how rape supposedly rarely produces a pregnancy (Robert Costa, Romney: Akin's Comment 'Inexcusable' 08/20/2012): "Congressman’s Akin comments on rape are insulting, inexcusable, and, frankly, wrong. Like millions of other Americans, we found them to be offensive. I have an entirely different view. What he said is entirely without merit and he should correct it." (my emphasis)

Several hours later, Obama had the following to say (Remarks by the President to the White House Press Corps 08/20/2012):

Q[uestion:] Thank you, Mr. President. Thank you for being here. You’re no doubt aware of the comments that the Missouri Senate candidate, Republican Todd Akin, made on rape and abortion. I wondered if you think those views represent the views of the Republican Party in general. They've been denounced by your own rival and other Republicans. Are they an outlier or are they representative?

THE PRESIDENT: Well, let me, first of all, say the views expressed were offensive. Rape is rape. And the idea that we should be parsing and qualifying and slicing what types of rape we're talking about doesn’t make sense to the American people and certainly doesn't make sense to me.

So what I think these comments do underscore is why we shouldn't have a bunch of politicians, a majority of whom are men, making health care decisions on behalf of women.

And so, although these particular comments have led Governor Romney and other Republicans to distance themselves, I think the underlying notion that we should be making decisions on behalf of women for their health care decisions -- or qualifying forcible rape versus non-forcible rape -- I think those are broader issues, and that is a significant difference in approach between me and the other party.

But I don’t think that they would agree with the Senator from Missouri in terms of his statement, which was way out there.

Q[uestion:] Should he drop out of the race?

THE PRESIDENT: He was nominated by the Republicans in Missouri. I'll let them sort that out. [my emphasis]

Now, in terms of the "horse-race", Obama did take good advantage of the opportunity. But Mitt Romney's statement was a more clear repudiation of Todd Akin's statement. And I don't think Taylor Marsh is parsing words too closely when she says the following:

That Pres. Obama joined [the anti-abortion Republicans'] language yesterday by invoking it in his press conference wasn’t picked up by any outlet or new media site anywhere. To remind, after saying "rape is rape," he said: "... or qualifying forcible rape versus non-forcible rape, I think those are broader issues ..." It was likely said to find common ground and since Republicans are so extreme no one is going to pick gnat crap out of pepper. In fact, to my knowledge, I was the only one to even question its outrageous utterance. Readers around here didn’t even find it very shocking, because compared to what Republicans are intending for women at least Pres. Obama has put the largest expansion of power in U.S. history in women’s hands by making contraception free, as well as a host of other reproductive health care options. The forgotten detail is he also chose politics over science on Plan B. These are inconvenient facts that are ignored when looking at Romney-Ryan in the White House. But it’s part of why women continue on this tread mill of individual freedoms.

Until a strong Republican pro women’s freedom and self-determination coalition develops inside that party our country will remain unable to solve the larger issues facing us.

Until Democrats refuse to compromise and coddle their own religious conservatives on matters of women’s fundamental rights of freedoms we’ll keep talking about this subject election after election. [bolding and italics in original]

Marsh's complaint is justified. Even though it's a horse-race plus for Obama, both he and Romney treated Akin's comment, which expressed the ugly viewpoint of the anti-abortion House Republicans on rape that Paul Ryan shares, as a gaffe that was "offensive." But Obama didn't use the opportunity to highlight the kind of examples that Marsh lists of what his Administration has actually contributed to "women for their health care decisions". He didn't tie it to the House measure that would have redefined rape in order to restrict access to abortion for rape victims, which Ryan supported. He didn't highlight anything about the crackpot radicalism and medical misinformation being promoted by the anti-abortion movement. The word "abortion" didn't even appear in his statement. Nor did he make it a point about women's rights, but rather about the bad manners of "a bunch of politicians, a majority of whom are men, making health care decisions on behalf of women".

(Update 04/10/2013: Taylor Marsh's quote is from Top Story: What’s the Matter with Todd Akin? 08/21/2012 and she amended it to modify her comments about Obama that is at the first of the section quoted here.)

Classic Obama minimalism, in other words. Even in the transcript, his careful choosing of words is evident, and more so in the video. As Marsh points out, his garbled reference to the House Republicans attempt to redefine rape ("qualifying forcible rape versus non-forcible rape") steps on his "rape is rape" comment. And, rather than try to hang that albatross on the Republicans' necks, he basically gives the Republicans a waiver by saying, "But I don’t think that they would agree with the Senator from Missouri in terms of his statement, which was way out there." He pepper-sprays his own message within a couple of sentences, in other words.

But this isn't just a matter of style. Obama has shown, especially in the health care debate, that he is willing to easily concede to the Blue Dogs when it comes to restricting abortion rights. His statement quoted above gives female voters a quotable quote, "rape is rape". But it says nothing about his commitment to abortion rights. He's leaving an opening for more "bipartisan" compromises on women's right to abortion.

It reminded me a lot of his response to the mass gun shooting in which Congresswoman Gaby Giffords was almost assassinated. That gave Obama a great opportunity to highlight some popular measure to promote some specific proposal to limit gun violence, or to highlight the way irresponsible, lying rightwingers are creating a climate of hatred and violence. He did neither. Instead, he offered up general pablum about civility, and established the bad precedent of the President treating mass gun murder murder events as occasions to play Pastor-in-Chief and invite the country to join in a sentimental moment of national unity in mourning.

Obama wants to be the great conciliator, the man who achieves postpartisan harmony with a Republican Party that is in a continuing process of radicalization. His response to Todd Akin's rape comment shows him very much in his Postpartisan Conciliator mode. It appears that Obama will try to use just enough partisanship to get re-elected and no more. He's not interested in building a mandate for Democratic policies.

Tags: 2012 election, abortion, barack obama, todd akin, women's rights

Old Hickory vs. the forced-pregnancy Republicans

Brian McGowan explains why Andrew Jackson would be against a "personhood" amendment proposed by two Mississippi Republican state legislators to criminalize abortion, birth control and miscarriages in The Attack on Republicanism Jackson Free Press 03/07/2012.

Sounds right to me.

Tags: abortion, andrew jackson

Republican war on reproductive freedom

Digby has it right on the current Republican drive not only against abortion but against birth control in Laying out The Case Against Birth Control Hullabaloo 02/27/2011:

This is what it's all about kids, whether anyone wants to admit it or not. The war on women (in this case being waged by a woman) is about the fear of female sexuality. This is powerful, primal stuff -- eve and apples and all that -- and it should be taken seriously. Just because it sounds patently absurd today doesn't mean that it can't be a serious "debate" tomorrow. Happens all the time.

Tags: abortion, birth control, women's rights

Violence and the anti-abortion movement

Mississippi's Republican Sen. Roger Wicker spoke to the big anti-abortion protest in Washington this week, as reported by Human Khan and Amy Bingham, Activists at March for Life Rally Demand Tougher Abortion Laws, Overturn of Roe v. Wade ABC News 01/24/2011:

"We are here because Roe v. Wade is bad law. We are here because we believe it was wrongly decided," said Sen. Roger Wicker, R-Miss. "We believe Roe v. Wade has led to a three-and-a-half decades-long holocaust in the United States of America, and it amounts to a stain on our national conscience, and it's time for it to end."

The last elected official to compare abortion to the holocaust was heavily criticized. In 2007, former Arkansas governor Mike Huckabee told a gathering of conservatives that "we have aborted more than a million people who would have been in our workforce had we not had the holocaust of liberalized abortion under a flawed Supreme Court ruling in 1973."

Most recently, anti-abortion activist Randall Terry launched a 2012 presidential bid in front of the Holocaust Museum in Washington, D.C., but received little attention.

Wicker, who for years has attempted to pass his "Life at Conception Act," today announced that he will reintroduce the bill in the Senate Tuesday. The legislation would establish that human life begins at conception and calls for legal protection for fetuses.

"It's time for the 14th Amendment protection to be afforded to the unborn," he said. [my emphasis]

Randall Terry acquired a national reputation as head of the radical-right Operation Rescue. In the early 1990s, he played an important role in promoting the Patriot Militia movement. he has not changed his basic political course since then.

I doubt very seriously that Huckabee is the only elected official who used the abortion-as-Holocaust metaphor since 2007! Because it seems to have become common as dirt among anti-abortion activists and has been for years.

This is a real problem presented by the antiabortion movement. Even apart from the emotionally-charged Holocaust comparison, the "abortion is murder" framing of the issue can't avoid giving validation to people who attack abortion clinics and medical providers. As Vicki Saporta reports in Violent Rhetoric Has Consequences—Just Ask Abortion Providers Women's Media Network 01/21/2011:

While some people purposefully use violent rhetoric to incite others to action in order to advance their own agendas, others do so without considering the consequences of their actions. In a civilized society, there is no room for political rhetoric or imagery that encourages and incites others to commit acts of violence. Those in politics and the media have a responsibility to use their influence to foster civil dialogue and debate.

Ed Kilgore wrote about this aspect of the antiabortion movement last year in Abortion and the Tea Party The New Republic 09/16/2010:

Perhaps because the national media tend to be secular, we are persistently underestimating the role that abortion plays in right-wing politics.

... it is worth remembering that the RTL [right-to-life] movement considers abortion analogous to the Holocaust, and pro-choice pols to be enablers of monstrous evil—at worst conscious advocates of genocide.

... For all the endless and interminable talk about "constitutionalism" on the right, it's rarely acknowledged that lurking in the background is wrath about Roe v. Wade. The same is true with the rage about health care reform; if you read a lot of right-wing blogs, as I do, you'd note that fear about Obamacare producing a massive expansion of publicly-funded abortion was a major motivator of right-wing opposition.

More generally, the anger associated with the entire Tea Party movement is, I suspect, traceable among many activists to endless frustration of its desire to end the "genocide" of legalized abortion, to which the GOP "establishment" has given little more than lip service. [my emphasis]

There are alternative ways that the antiabortionists could frame the issue. But they're not likely to listen directly to my suggestions.

Still, as long as they present abortion as "murder" and even as a Holocaust against innocent babies, as long as they attack abortion providers and counselors as "baby-killers", that rhetoric will encourage the more violent and fanatical in their circles of influence to follow the examples of Dr. George Tiller's assailants by Shelley Shannon and Scott Roeder. That would be the man that Bill O'Reilly called "Tiller the Baby-Killer" on his FOX News show.

Tags: abortion, domestic terrorism,, radical right

Hope but verify: Health care reform, historic moments and the Democratic Party

The passage of the health care reform by the House of Representatives is an historic and important moment. Josh Marshall gives the safe and convention take on it in One Vote on Health Care Reform TPM 11/08/09. But the Stupak Amendment taking another step toward banning women's right to decide on abortion is a reminder that it's not done until it's done. Tbogg calls the Stupak Amendment the Vagina Added Tax. So my new personal slogan for health care, Obama and the Democrats generally is "hope but verify".

Health care has to pass the Senate and be signed by the President. Obama's leadership in those last crucial days before the House vote was aimed, so far as we know from the news reporting, at pushing the liberal Democrats to still make concessions to the corporate Blue Dogs, even on something so essential as the public option, without which the bill would be a corporate gift that wouldn't provide adequate coverage and would actually be an unpopular program for consumers. And on the Stupak Amendment, the White House apparently cared not the least if women's rights had to be sacrificed to make a last-minute concession to Christian Rightists who will never support Obama anyway.

To be respectable in the Beltway Village, Democrats always have to slap a hippie (i.e., vote for something conservative even though they'll never get conservative votes for doing so)

Digby in The Lesson Hullabaloo 11/08/09 anaylzes the Stepak Amendment as reflecting the leaden insistence of the Beltway Village consensus that progressive political ideas cannot be validated as such. We call call the mainstream left-of-center position "liberal" in the United States in a usage going back to the post-First World War era that would be eccentric is pretty much the whole rest of the world. In the new "center-right" coalition in Germany, the conservative part is "center" and the liberal party (that is actually one of the parties in the Liberal International) is the "right" part of the coalition.

But in the US, it's perfectly acceptable thinking within the Republican Party to conflate left and liberal and communist and fascist and socialist and Nazi into one undifferentiated image of evil. So the best improvement in generic political labeling we can probably hope for in the US right now is to have more Democrats and progressive activists legitimize the basic concepts we call progressive or liberal in the US, such as defending the people against anti-social exercises of corporate power like the current insurance industry attempt to block health care reform.

Digby in her piece is addressing one of the peculiarities of the current political moment. The need for New Deal, Great Society, "liberal" types programs and political leadership is more clear and urgent and potentially very popular now than at any time at least since 1964 and possibly since 1932. We're in the middle of what Jerry Brown might call a "democratic moment", in which popular pressure is focused on having government respond realistically to real needs. These moment can last for months or years. But they don't last forever.

So in the abstract, it seems that raw ambition and opportunism would be inspiring Democratic politicians to sound like latter-day Franklin Roosevelts and Bob La Follettes. Instead, we've got the Democratic Party having to be pulled kicking and screaming into health care reform, which is not only popular and necessary but has the obvious potential to provide the basis of Democratic Party political dominance for decades.

Obviously, the dependence of our political system on huge amounts of corporate money is part of the explanation. But there is also a psychological-ideological aspect of the dilemma that can't just be explained by cynically assuming that big money dominates politics and always will, a favorite position of "concern troll" commenters at leftie blogs. The collapse in quality of our national press is a huge factor in this, as well. The fact that Rupert Murdoch has such an enormous presence in news media in the Anglo-Saxon world is no small matter when it comes to having a corporate-friendly spin on the news. But again, the dysfunction of our star journalists can't be explained by some rational corporate lobbying function. Their groupthink is just too bizarrely weird to be fully explained that way.

Digby gives a good description of how the current political environment in Congress, despite the national popular mood, is heavily weighted toward shafting the "liberal" position in exactly the way we say play out with the Stupak Amendment:

Universal health care is something any decent, wealthy society shouldn't even have to think twice about. It's a global embarrassment that the United States, the chest thumping superpower, is even having this debate at this late date. It's equally embarrassing that we have put together a Frankenstein of a system [for health care reform] because our democratic government is in league with wealthy interests which are exploiting its people. It's hard to believe that anyone would call that system liberal, much less socialist, but as you can see every day on Fox news, it's set off a tantrum among a vocal minority that would hardly be less hysterical if aliens from a foreign planet landed in Washington. (And that hysteria is also a tool of the permanent establishment, funded by big money, and used as a way of keeping the debate focused on the right, even if it's taking on an absurdist quality.)

Any legislation such as health care reform must therefore be tempered by a liberal sacrifice, something real, a principle that will make them hate themselves and loathe each other for having done it. It cannot be a clean victory, lest they come to believe they can do more. In the end, the "moral" must always be that you cannot go too far left. [my emphasis]

"The one consistent characteristic" of policy victories for liberal/progressive Democrats over the past 20 years, she writes, "is that they are never unambiguously positive for the left."

Ann Friedman at Tapped talks about the implications of the Sestak Amendment vote in Whose Health Care Victory? 11/08/09.

For Obama's next "historic achievement", can we not make reducing women's rights part of it?

Tags: abortion, democratic party, health care reform, obama administration

Finding "common ground" - on trashing women's rights

It looks like the Democrats are going to be able to pass a solid health care reform through the House, i.e., one that includes a meaningful public option.

But also one that throws women's right to choose out the window. As Jane Hamsher writes in NARAL and Planned Parenthood: Ineffectiveness Anti-Choice Democrats Can Rely On Huffington Post 11/07/09:

Democrats in Congress have just proudly signed a deal with the Catholic bishops which allows a bunch of old men who have spent the better part of the last century avoiding their own sexual issues to dictate access to abortion services in the House health care bill.

This is what comes of decades of mealy-mouthing on Democratic principles, including the rights of women and the rights of poor people. The Stupak Amendment would block private insurance plans participating in the insurance exchanges that are key to health care reform from covering most abortions.

I hope the Progressive Caucus votes it down because of this. Force Stupak and the anti-choice Blue Dog Democrats Blue Dogs to face killing health care reform in order to trash women's basic rights.

It's disgraceful that the large Democratic majority let this amendment go through.

But this is a success for the "common ground" theocrats who wanted anti-abortionists and the pro-choice majority to find common ground on issues to cooperate on. They've gotten on the only one that was ever an option for them: the "common ground" of working to wipe out women's right to choose on abortion.

"Liberal" Frank Rich may call them "Stalinists" for doing so. But the Republicans are willing to mount primary challenges against Republicans they think are insufficiently conservative. It's long past time the Democrats make a habit of mounting primary challenges at least against Democrats who won't defend the basic principles of the Party.

Tags: abortion, health care reform

Far-right violence and "mainstream" extremism

Don't miss this video featuring Dave Neiwert, Sara Robinson and Rick Perlstein on The Deadly Results Of Right-Wing Extremism OurFuture.org 06/02/09.

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

The Republican Party and the anti-abortion movement

This story, Kline spokesman says timing of letter was ‘unfortunate’ in light of Tiller’s death by Steve Kraske Kansas City Star 06/04/09, is about a former Kansas state attorney general, Republican Phill Kline, who sent out a fundraising letter late last week that mentioned Dr. George Tiller, who was murdered by an anti-abortion Christian terrorist last Sunday. The story is framed as how the coincidence made that seem like exceptionally bad taste.

But I was more struck by the content of Kline's fundraising appeal:

In the letter, Kline, a long-standing abortion opponent, said he is seeking donations to offset $200,000 of attorneys’ fees “billed to me personally” that stemmed from a December 2007 trial ordered by the Kansas Supreme Court. ...

The letter cites Kline’s long-running legal battles against Tiller and Planned Parenthood.

Kline, a Republican, also noted that he likely faces charges that he violated legal ethics. That complaint may be tied to his conduct in the investigation of Tiller and Planned Parenthood.

“This (disciplinary) board has already investigated me for five years due to frivolous and continued complaints by the abortion industry,” Kline said. [my emphasis]

A lot of attention has been focused on how the rhetoric of Republican media figures like Rush the OxyContin Man contributed to a climate of violence against Tiller in particular. I've written here about how the framing of the issue by the "mainstream" anti-abortion movement - abortion being seen as the murder of innocent babies in the clear understanding of God Himself - will inevitably continue to encourage those activists of a more violent inclination to commit acts of violence against abortion providers.

But Kline's letter highlights another aspect of the problem: the ways in which overzealous Republican officials pander to the anti-abortionists by pushing sometimes frivolous legal actions. (I'm not making any judgment here on the nature of the possible complaints that might be filed to which Kline's fundraising letter refers.) On the one hand, it's important to recognize that the anti-abortion movement in the US has plenty of legally legitimate methods to press their cause, including the legal right to advocate positions that have the effect of indirectly encouraging violence. But when prosecutors bring charges against abortion providers, it adds a legitimacy to the notion that the providers are doing something that requires punishment. And, when an ill-founded prosecution then loses, it gives hardline activists that the legal system is actually incapable of protecting "innocent babies" being "murdered" by the thousands.

For instance, this news article about charges filed against Dr. Tiller appeared in the Christian Post on 06/29/07, Notorious Late-Term Abortionist Faces 19 Criminal Charges by Ethan Cole:

The infamous late-term abortionist who revels in his notoriety for providing women easy abortions had 19 misdemeanor charges filed against him on Thursday.

Kansas Attorney General Paul Morrison announced that he has dismissed 30 previous criminal charges against abortionist George Tiller, and in their place filed charges against Tiller for failing to obtain a second opinion for late-term abortions from a doctor financially separate from his practice. ...

“While we are happy that charges are being filed against Tiller, we are guarded about this because we believe that these charges are the weakest against Tiller,” said Troy Newman, president of the Christian pro-life activist organization Operation Rescue.

The 30 original criminal charges were filed by former pro-life Attorney General Phill Kline before leaving office. The allegations accused Tiller of performing illegal late-term abortions outside the boundaries set by Kansas laws. [my emphasis]

The same conservative evangelical site reported on the outcome earlier this year, Tiller Acquitted; Faces More Charges by Audrey Barrick 03/28/09:

Late-term abortionist George Tiller was acquitted on 19 charges of illegal abortions.

A jury of three men and three women reached the not guilty verdict on Friday in less than an hour, disappointing pro-life groups that were closely watching the trial of one of the nation's few late-term abortion practitioners. ...

Operation Rescue president Troy Newman noted that the 19 charges Tiller faced this week were "only a small fraction of the illegal activity" that believe occurs at Tiller's Wichita abortion clinic. Moreover, those 19 were "the weakest charges that could have been brought by the state."

"On behalf of the pre-born children wrongly killed by Tiller and his associates, we vow to press on until Tiller is finally held accountable to the law and his late-term abortion mill is permanently closed," said Newman, who attended the trial. [my emphasis]

The Christian Post is not a fringe outlet within the evangelical world. Al Mohler, the leading Southern Baptist theologian, publishes a regular column there. Jimmy Carter has published at least one op-ed piece there.

But this "respectable" evangelical news service quotes the president of the far-right Operation Rescue, which played a leading role in highlighting Tiller as a target of the anti-abortion movement using extreme rhetoric like "Tiller the Killer". Amanda Terkel looks at that group's dubious record in Operation Rescue Tries To Distance Itself From Roeder’s Activities On Behalf Of The Group Think Progress 06/01/09. Operation Rescue has so far managed to avoid legal culpability in violent attacks, as Dave Neiwert reported in Attacking the providers Orincus blog 06/03/04. But it's clear that other violent anti-abortionists besides Scott Roehmer, the accused in Tiller's murder, have found Operation Rescue's ideology and militancy appealing. One might think an evangelical Christian news service like The Christian Post would give its readers a bit more information when highlighting Operation Rescue as a legitimate representative of the anti-abortion movement.

But it's yet another example of the real existing anti-abortion movement. Because of the way in which the movement defines abortion, and because much of the organizational background and donations for anti-abortion groups come from people who have hard-right views across the board, not just on abortion, in actual practice it's nearly impossible for the "mainstream" of the movement to unambiguously distance itself from the violent terrorist fringe. They have to fear that clearly labeling murderers of abortion providers as terrorists, or even condemning the murder of George Tiller straightforwardly without stating at the same time their view of Tiller as a mass murderer, would suggest to anti-abortionist activists a lack of true Christian commitment to the cause of stopping the "murder" of "innocent babies".

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

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

Christian terrorism and the real existing anti-abortion movement

This column by Tony Beam, Tiller's Murder Points to the Death of Civility in Public Discourse Christian Post 06/02/09, is a good example of the inability and/or unwillingness of the "mainstream" of the real existing anti-abortion movement to distance themselves from Christian terrorist violence against abortion providers.

As much as I admire the media analysis of Bob "the Daily Howler" Somerby, an issue like this one is one in which his positivist approach makes him miss some essentials. (Not be pick on Bob; I haven't seem him comment yet on anything related to the George Tiller murder.) One of the things I've learned from reading him for years is how important it is to pay careful attention to how partisans are often all too quick to play mind-reading games with those taking a different position. While both fairness and accuracy require taking full account of what people actually say when they state their positions. It's especially important since our broken-down national press corps has been letting that practice atrophy in their ranks for two decades or so.

But political speech is very often symbolic and suggestive. And in the case of long-established movements, like the anti-abortion movement which became a favorite cause of what was then called by the press the New Right in the 1970s, words and symbols can acquire well-established meanings for participants that are not immediately apparent to those not steeped in the movement's ideology. That's especially true for groups that consciously project a very different image to the general public than they do to their activist base, which is very much the case for the anti-abortion movement in the US. While this is an intriguing linguistic phenomenon in itself, I'm more focused in this post on how people like Tony Beam go about distancing themselves from Christian terrorists and terrorist acts like the Tiller murder.

Flying into the cloud level of abstraction for a moment, let's start with the recognition that very few Americans are actually pacifists. Most American Christians recognize some form of a Just War concept, although in dealing with fundamentalist and Pentecostals, their theology tends to ignore the notion of just war as such, however much they may invest wars religious import. Most American Christians would also assume that it's morally legitimate to use violence to defend oneself or protect the innocent, and even most of the very few full-blown pacifists would recognize a right of personal self-defense.

When we read a column like Beam's, we have to keep in mind not only the plain meaning of his words to the general public but also how fundamentalists, movement conservatives and anti-abortion activists interpret the words. I have no reason to doubt Beam's sincerity when he condemns Tiller's murder as wrong. But does he present a framework for his opposition that is likely to present any challenge to the thinking of those who might be inclined to support or commit acts of violence against abortion providers? That's a whole different question. Here's how Beam opens his column:

The brutal murder of George Tiller inside the foyer of the Reformation Lutheran Church in Wichita may signal the end of reasoned discourse concerning controversial issues. Without doubt, George Tiller was a symbol of all that is wrong with the pro-abortion position in America. He performed late term abortions with some bordering on infanticide. While his actions were inexcusable, they certainly didn’t warrant the execution of vigilante justice doled out by a misguided crusader for the unborn. If our culture is going to survive we must all agree to adhere to the rule of law and keep our disagreements, no matter how passionate or critical, within the boundaries of reasonable protest and civil discourse.

Tiller symbolized "all that is wrong with the pro-abortion position in America", he writes. Tiller was a guy who not only killed what anti-abortionists consider to be innocent unborn babies with at least some close to outright "infanticide". The Christian terrorist who allegedly carried out "the brutal murder" of Tiller was "a misguided crusader" delivering "vigilante justice" and sticking up for the "unborn", however "misguided" he may have been.

The bottom line on his introductory paragraph, which is sure to be read by more readers than the entire column, is that "a misguided crusader" executed "justice" (albeit of the vigilante variety) against a man responsible for killing innocent unborn babies in a way that bordered on "infanticide" in the most literal sense. It's impossible for me as a non-sympathizer with the anti-abortion movement to read that as anything but at least a partial defense of a terrorist murder. For those who do sympathize with the movement, only those who want an excuse to use in mixed company with non-sympathizers are likely to persuade themselves it's anything other than a partial defense of the killer. And for those who might be in some way inclined to instigate or carry out violent action, no way is that going to be taken as anything but encouragement.

That last sentence of the paragraph also strikes a weird note in the context: "If our culture is going to survive we must all agree to adhere to the rule of law and keep our disagreements, no matter how passionate or critical, within the boundaries of reasonable protest and civil discourse." Actually, democratic culture can survive a substantial amount of law-breaking. And any healthy democratic culture will have more than a little unreasonable protest and uncivil discourse. Do cable stars like Bill O'Reilly and Glenn Beck, or Web favorites like Michelle Malkin and Mad Annie Coulter, have even the vaguest aspiration for "civil discourse"? Please.

And, for that matter, a democracy can survive even horrific terrorist attacks like the Oklahoma City bombing and the 9/11 attacks without tossing out the rule of law and going nuts with fear, although as we saw during the Cheney years, those latter options are certainly possible ones. I read that strange appeal of Beam's as a preliminary scolding of pro-choice critics of the anti-abortion movement than as any discouragement to the violently inclined among the anti-abortion activists, who would surely brush off any such mildly worded caution as fluff or weak-mindedness among the faint of heart.

He follows that opening with ritual boilerplate about how George Tiller deserved the chance to get off his certain path to Hail before he died:

George Tiller’s murder illustrates the irony of ironies. The taking of a life in the pursuit of the sanctity of human life is absurd. It falls in the category of someone who would set fire to a forest to bring attention to the importance of trees. If life is precious it is precious inside and outside the womb. The life of George Tiller was precious because he was created in the image of God and he carried the possibility of redemption ... until Scott Roeder, allegedly acting as judge, jury and executioner removed that possibility. [my emphasis]

This post is already longer than Beam's original column, so I won't try to "fisk" the whole thing. But his column is a good example of the problem faced by the real existing anti-abortion movement when they try to distance themselves from terrorist violence in support of their cause: they are proceeding from a set of essentially fanatical assumptions. They define the deliberate termination of a pregnancy at any point after the moment of conception as the murder of a human being, of an innocent baby. And they assume that this definition is a clear message from God Himself that should dictate both law and personal conduct.

Someone can be a political or religious fanatic without being violent. And someone can engage in political or religious violence without being fanatical. But political and religious fanaticism can and does breed violence and terrorism. Until the "mainstream" anti-abortionists of whom Tony Beam is presumably one can frame their opposition to abortion in a non-fanatical way, their agitation on the issue is inevitably going to encourage violence. Whether they invite hard-right Patriot-militia types like Randall Terry to speak at their churches or not.

And as long as their ideology remains what it is today, their attempts to discourage terrorist violence in the name of their cause will be stuck with highly ambiguous, blame-the-victim formulations like this one of Beam's:

Other than an act of barbarity (and yes, I realize Tiller was guilty of barbaric acts against unborn children) I fail to see what the murderer of George Tiller hoped to accomplish. [my emphasis]

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

The politics of fanaticism

Dr. George Tiller's murder on Sunday in his church, almost certainly by a Christian terrorist, has the Republicans in a tizzy trying to distance themselves from that time of crime.

It shouldn't be hard. "That's terrorism and murder and it's wrong. Period." should do it.

But, as the invaluable Dave Neiwert puts it, "Right-wingers have a problem admitting that there's such a thing as right-wing terrorism." And that's one thing that makes it difficult for them to distance themselves clearly from the murder of Dr. Tiller.

The Sedgwick County, Kansas, district attorney has filed charges in the case: Scott Roeder charged with first-degree murder in George Tiller shooting death by Stan Finger and Ron Sylvester The Wichita Eagle 06/02/09.

Perhaps ironically, one of the more human responses I've seen came from the Roeder's ex-wife in Man likely to be charged with killing Tiller had history of mental illness, family says by Laura Bauer and David Klepper Kansas City Star 06/01/09:

Lindsey Roeder’s focus now is on her son.

"It’s been an absolutely devastating 24 hours," she said late Monday afternoon. "I haven’t slept. My son can’t sleep. ... I can’t imagine, if it’s been like this for us, what it’s been like for the Tiller family."

I'm not criticizing Lindsey Roeder or her son in saying this, but they aren't doing Roeder's defense any good by talking to the press about him. I seriously don't mean that as a criticism; I can imagine more than one good reason why they would want to do so.

But they convey in that article the distinct impression that they pretty much accept that Scott Roeder did the shooting.

I'm sure it's partially because I've watched just about every episode of the Perry Mason show, including the TV movies, and came away with distinct images of how many people who appear unquestionably guilty of murder, e.g., caught standing over the body with the murder weapon in their hand, turn out to be Innocent. And in the real world, from Whitewater to Wen Ho Lee to the Olympic bombing to the anthrax attacks of 2001, I've seen cases where the authorities and/or the press were convinced someone looked good for a crime and their "evidence" later turned out to be misleading or frivolous. Remember the "dirty bomber" that John Ashcroft arrested and turned over to the Navy to be tortured with extreme isolation for years but was never charged on any such count, probably because the evidence came from someone being tortured to make false claims?

But this crime was almost certainly committed by a Christian terrorist of Roeder's reported political orientation. And the circumstantial evidence looks strong here, and it isn't based on torturing people or super-top-secret government documents or fabrications by segregationist redneck scammers from Arkansas. See also Roeder’s anti-abortion activism scrutinized by Laura Bauer and Judy Thomas Kansas City Star 06/03/09.

The headline writer of that Kansas City Star article picked up what rather bizarrely has become the knee-jerk conventional wisdom in rightwing terrorism cases, that the alleged perpetrator was a lone nut. Laura Bauer and David Klepper don't fall into that trap in the article. They do report that Roeder is said by his family to have had mental health problems in the past but they also report clearly his involvement in far-right fanaticism, which has been already documented in court proceedings. Near the end they write:

Scott Roeder’s beliefs also came up in a custody battle in Pennsylvania. In 2003, Roeder sued for the right to visit a girl born the previous year. Roeder said he was the girl’s father.

The girl’s mother and her husband told the court they felt Roeder would not be a good influence on the child.

According to a court ruling filed in 2005, Roeder was earlier diagnosed with schizophrenia “for which he takes no medication, which may pose a clear and present danger to the female minor child.”

The child’s mother also brought up Roeder’s affiliations.

“… Past conduct and association with anti-government organizations is ongoing and poses a risk to her daughter,” the records said.

The child’s mother and her husband — who has raised the girl as his own since her birth — “feared that (Roeder) would kidnap and hide their daughter since he threatened to do so with his son.” [my emphasis]

Dave Neiwert caught reporters on Monday already singing the lone-nut tune. I'm sure I'll have more to say about this case. But here, I want to mainly focus on the how the words and actions of non-violent rightwingers, in this case essentially the entire base of the Republican Party, relate to a case like Tiller's murder.

I'm actually a little more hesitant than, say, Keith Olbermann on Monday evening's Countdown, to hang this around the necks of media blowhards like Bill O'Reilly. Decades ago, cult leader Charles Manson (in)famously took the fun, eclectic, mostly nonsensical lyrics to a Beatles song, "Helter Skelter", and took it to contain a prophetic calling for him to kick off a race war by taking his cult to go murder a pregnant actress (Sharon Tate). It would be crazy to blame the songwriters (the late John Lennon and Sir Paul McCartney ) or performers for that crime. But, then again, that song didn't explicitly say, "Sharon Tate has killed thousands of babies and is like Adolf Hitler."

Olbermann is a bit too much of a blowhard for my taste, and also too careless with facts and too weak on news judgment. I do feel much more comfortable with the analysis along those lines that Dave Neiwert does at his blogs and in his latest book, The Eliminationists: How Hate Talk Radicalized the American Right (2009). Not least among his accomplishments is that he took the "eliminationism" concept from Danny Goldhagen, who applies it in the shakiest of ways on behalf of a neoconservative policy outlook, and made it into something actually useful.

But I think abortion opponents are stuck with a real dilemma if they are serious about minimizing the chances that their rhetoric will encourage acts of violence. One columnist that O'Reilly has criticized by name on that issue is Mike Hendricks of the Kansas City Star who writes (Incendiary language creates climate that kills 06/02/09), "Language like that creates a climate for violence. When it becomes accepted parlance in the anti-abortion movement, we shouldn’t be surprised that some nut job might feel justified in picking up a gun to intervene." But the problem is deeper than a matter of word choice.

Not being sympathetic at all to the cause of outlawing abortion, I'm sure my advice on the subject would not be welcome. But there certainly is an outlook by which one can oppose abortion but be in favor of laws allowing women to choose whether or not to have an abortion within the legal boundaries of Roe v. Wade. Consumption of cigarettes or alcohol are behaviors that are proven in many cases to have deadly effects. It's an empirical fact that smoking causes many deaths and that drunk drivers cause a lot of fatal and debilitating accidents. Yet banning them altogether has proven to be unfeasible. It doesn't stop individuals, churches, governments, medical providers or other kinds of private groups from discouraging irresponsible behavior with tobacco and alcohol. I'm a major skeptic of the idea of decriminalizing the use of narcotics. But it's also true that banning them has scarcely been an unmitigated success story.

An abortion opponent could believe that abortion is wrong, immoral, against the will of God, even a "mortal sin", which is the Catholic Church's position, and still take that kind of position on legal regulations.

But that's not the real existing anti-abortion movement. In fact, that's pretty much a description of the position of pro-choice politicians, who typically say they personally are opposed to abortion but favor women's choice along with sex education and other "abortion reduction" strategies.

That's not how the anti-abortion movement as it actually exists approaches things, though. Obviously, we have to use care in generalizing about an entire movement. I believe, for instance, that one can still be considered a "pro-lifer" in good standing in the movement and advocate abortion exceptions in the case of rape or incest.

But the movement generally considers a fetus, even one moments old, to be a human being and that killing that fetus/human being/baby is murder. When you proceed from that premise, then how does an abortion not appear to be "baby-killing"? And when you look at a record of millions of abortions performed, isn't it perfectly reasonable to compare that to the Holocaust? Isn't it an unavoidable conclusion that a government which allows such mass killing of babies to go on is as bad as that of Hitler's, if not worse?

To me, a good rule in detecting fanaticism is that when your premises require you to adopt conclusions that are obvious bullshit, then it's time to look at things in a different way. To imagine that democratic government in the United States, or Spain, or Germany today, is worse than that of Nazi Germany because the laws in those countries allow a woman to choose to abort a fetus that cannot survive outside her own body, is a false and fanatical conclusion. Because that is a comparison that is equally true if you switch the subject and the object, i.e., Hitler's government was better than democratic government today in the US, Spain and Germany. Anybody who doesn't wanted to be conned by some really nasty fanatics had better develop a bullshit detector that goes off loudly when such conclusions are insisted upon.

Mine goes off also when I hear people saying that the number of abortions that have been performed in America since Roe v. Wade (1973) is worse than the Holocaust. That means that aborting a fetus that cannot survive outside its mother's body is at least as bad as killing a real live Jew. If not worse, because an unborn baby is considered to be perfectly innocent of anything wrong. Again, it seems to me if your inner bullshit alarms don't start going off loudly when statements like that get tossed around, then you really don't have sense enough to even begin to understand the theology of when a fetus becomes human.

Yet those kinds of claims are as common as dirt in the anti-abortion movement, yes, including the vast nonviolent majority of anti-abortion activists, including high officials in the Catholic Church and some of the most popular Protestant ministers in the US. Jamison Foser takes William Saletan to task in Slate's Saletan plays with fire County Fair blog 06/02/09 for this column, Tiller's Killer: Is it wrong to murder an abortionist? Slate 06/01/09, and Duncan "Atrios" Black labels Saletan his "wanker of the day" for it. In that piece, Saletan argues along something of the same lines I do here, which is that given the premises of the real existing anti-abortion movement, killing an abortion provider may be a crime but not a sin. "If abortion is murder," he writes, "the most efficient thing you could have done to prevent such murders this month was to kill George Tiller." He does conclude with saying:

If you don't accept what he [Tiller's assassin] did, then maybe it's time to ask yourself what you really believe. Is abortion murder? Or is it something less, a tragedy that would be better avoided? Most of us think it's the latter. We're looking for ways to prevent abortions—not just a few this month, but millions down the line—without killing or prosecuting people. Come and join us.

Saletan's argument is so flabby I don't like it either. He makes a far better case on why the principles of the movement justify murdering abortion providers than he does to say what's might be wrong with their thinking. As we're seeing in practice, people who think they are doing the Lord's work by saving innocent "babies" from being "murdered" aren't going to be moved by dippy appeals to support sex educations programs. A great many of them are against honest sex education programs, for reasons on which I won't speculate here.

I think his basic point is correct, though. but I don't see that as grounds for appeal for anti-abortion zealots to sit down and let's reason together. They don't need invitations to polite dialogue. They need to snap out of their fanaticism. Because even though most anti-abortion activists may be too moral or too straight-laced or too repressed or too cowardly to actually murder an abortion provider, as long as they promote an ideological framework that equates abortion with murder, their propaganda is going to encourage some people to consider acts of violence against abortion providers.

And as long as they are willing to accept ideological constructions that make Nazism morally superior to democratic government and that equate aborting a fetus that has no possibility of surviving outside its mother's womb with murdering a living, breathing Jew just because you feel like killing a Jew, then their activism and propaganda is going to encourage far-right violent extremism.

To put their alternatives another way, it's theoretically possible for anti-abortionists to recognize that until very recently in history, i.e., a century or so ago, Christianity didn't see reason any reason to assume that a zygote was a full human being. And that abortion in the United States was first banned around the turn of the 19th to the 20th century because even medical abortions were dangerous to the lives of the women carrying the fetus. Both Christianity and Judaism in medieval times had some notion that "ensoulment" (the point at which the soul enters the body of the fetus) occurred at some time during the first months of pregnancy. But they didn't get that directly out of the Hebrew Bible or the New Testament, because it's not there. And that absence is signficant, too. Because in Jesus' time, a form of abortion was practiced in the Roman Empire. And neither Jesus (so far as we see in the Gospels) nor the writers of the canonical books of the New Testament thought it necessary to even mention it.

So a little Christian humility in this matter could go a long way in getting anti-abortionists out of a fanatical mindset. Maybe God isn't speaking to them quite so unambiguously on the subject as they might think.

And more plain honesty would help, as well. Yes, miracle premature births have been around for a long time. Lots of babies that were conceived on or soon after a couple's wedding night have been born four or five months later perfectly healthy, as the incomparable Miss Manners once pointed out. But that is a purely social "reality". Roe v. Wade was based on a medical reality that hasn't changed, despite all the prenatal and postnatal care advances since 1973: a fetus cannot survive outside its mother's body until the end of the second trimester. So in medical terms, the fetus is part of its mother's body until that point. And government should rely on that medical reality when it comes to abortion laws. According to Roe, US Constitutional law requires it to do so.

Still, it would be entirely possible to reconceive the issue as a fetus being potentially a human life or spiritually human and to campaign for laws and/or Constitutional amendments against abortion, but doing so without resorting to fanatical constructions that equate aborting a fetus to murdering a living breathing human or to view a democratic government that protects women's rights as worse than Nazism.

Theoretically. But that's not the real existing anti-abortion movement in America. And until they break with their fanatical framing of the basic issue, they are going to continue to encourage the kind of fatal extremist practice that ended Dr. George Tiller's life this past weekend.

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