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
Showing posts with label george tiller. Show all posts
Showing posts with label george tiller. Show all posts
Saturday, June 06, 2009
Friday, June 05, 2009
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:
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:
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
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. ...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.
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]
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.The same conservative evangelical site reported on the outcome earlier this year, Tiller Acquitted; Faces More Charges by Audrey Barrick 03/28/09:
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]
Late-term abortionist George Tiller was acquitted on 19 charges of illegal abortions.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.
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]
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
Wednesday, June 03, 2009
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.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:
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]
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.Tags: abortion, christian fundamentalism, christian right, christian terrorism, fanaticism, george tiller, terrorism
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.
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 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:
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:
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:
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:
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:
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
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.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.
"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."
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.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.
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]
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
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