Read it on Salon
Join HULU, SEINFELD and SALON to celebrate Festivus!
Sponsored Post
Monday, Nov 30, 2015 10:59 AM UTC
Sorry, conservatives, but there is nothing surprising about anti-choice terrorism
Conservatives are trying to spin the Planned Parenthood shooting, but anti-choice attacks are entirely predictable
Topics: colorado springs shooting, planned parenthood shooting, robert dear, anti-choice movement, Erick Erickson, Adam Kinzinger, Domestic Terrorism, anti-choice terrorism, Abortion, Editor's Picks, Media News, News, Politics News
We still don’t know much about the motives of Robert Lewis Dear, the man who shot up a Colorado Springs Planned Parenthood, killing a reported three people, including a police officer. There are reports he told police “no more baby parts” in an interview after his arrest. But there still is no confirmation that he’s an anti-choice fanatic, a Christian, or a conservative and in this absence of that, many on the right are desperately clinging to the slim hope that this act was not anti-choice terrorism. As the situation was ongoing, Fox News pushed a rumor that the shooting was somehow a bank robbery gone wrong, and conservatives on Twitter started tripping over each other, eager to argue they’re the real victims here of, what else, liberal media bias.
“Left upset the only people dying at Planned Parenthood today are babies,” Erick Erickson tweeted. “They were hoping for Christian shooters to narrative shift Paris.” When it became clear that nope, Dear was clearly targeting that Planned Parenthood that bravely offers abortion despite being surrounded by a community that’s been dubbed a “mecca for evangelical Christians,” Erickson quickly deleted the tweet and replaced it with pablum about praying for the victims.
Obviously he doesn’t mean it, because he has since continued the conservatives-are-the-real-victims-here tweeting, whining that “RedState was getting emails blaming conservatives for a shooting at Planned Parenthood” and retweeting the typical right-wing drivel about baby-killing.
Victim-blaming and avoiding responsibility was the norm on the right, with Rep. Adam Kinzinger going on CNN while Dear was still holding the clinic hostage and ranting about “these barbaric videos,” in reference to the hoax videos falsely accusing Planned Parenthood of “selling” fetal tissue that were released over the summer and that all Republicans are apparently duty-bound to pretend are somehow meaningful despite being thoroughly debunked. He also pushed the idea that there’s a chance that Dear’s choice of a target is random and not rooted in anti-choice ideology.
Since then, of course, conservatives’ slim hope that Dear was somehow just a random psycho instead of an anti-choice nut has grown slimmer. Sources spoke about the “baby parts” line and that Dear mentioned Obama in his statements to police.
Ever since the Paris attacks, we’ve been hearing from the right how there is no excuse for religious fundamentalists using violence to terrorize people for the making life choices the fundamentalists don’t approve of. I do wish they would take their own advice on this front.
This whole display is especially bizarre when you consider that there is nothing new about anti-choice terrorism, which has taken the lives of eight clinic workers prior to this attack. That this would happen was entirely predictable. Since the release of those hoax videos, there’s been a rash of arsons and bombings of Planned Parenthood clinics across the country, a story which has received a surprisingly small amount of media coverage.
In other words, this is what everyone in pro-choice circles has been dreading would happen any day now. As recently as October 29, an abortion provider in Washington, D.C., penned an op-ed in the Washington Post about how her life is being rather unsubtly threatened by anti-choicers who put her picture and address online. You know, for “information.” Answers about who would need that, except someone who was intending to harm her, are not offered.
Anti-choice demagoguery is fruitful politics for the right. There’s a lot of fear out there about women’s changing social roles and increasing independence, coupled with a ton of resentment over other people’s sex lives. The anti-choice movement has created a perfect cover story—it’s about “life” and “babies”!—that allows conservatives to indulge these ugly urges while pretending to have noble intentions.
Most Read
