For all the debate over abortion and especially late-term abortion, until recently there were only three doctors in the country who would perform an abortion after the 21st week of pregnancy. Now there are two such doctors, because George Tiller was murdered yesterday. He was shot in his church while his wife was watching from the choir.
The blogs are in a frenzy over this, and for good reason I suppose. John Cole says what I thought almost immediately thought when I heard the news. A little while back the Department of Homeland Security put out a report warning of the dangers of the increasing risk posed by domestic violence from right-wing extremists. I’m not going to bother linking to all of it, but basically everyone at The Corner – the premier conservative group blog around – went nuts over it. The report was outrageous, politicized, unjustified, execrable, designed to attack political opponents and veterans, etc.
Since then, what has happened?
A man in Pittsburgh murders three cops because he thinks Obama is going to take his guns. (Obama has no such plan, as if that matters).
And now a doctor in Kansas is murdered.
Tiller was the subject of verbal abuse for many years, from local protests to Bill O’Reilly broadcasts. He was also the victim of violence, from a 1986 bombing on his clinic, to a 1993 shooting that hit both his arms, and now his murder.
If I were in Tiller’s shoes, and bleeding out while lying on the floor of my church, I wonder if I would have the time to think that the man who killed me doubtlessly describes himself as “pro-life.”
Let me make it clear that I am not conflating pro-lifers with murderers. But when you describe abortion as the murder or Holocaust of 40 million babies in the last several decades, as well as describe Tiller as running a death-mill, then killing doctors can seem like the logical conclusion to that argument.
Rhetoric matters. A lot. And the leaders of factions need to cool it. And if that DHS report hurt your feelings, too fucking bad.
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