Yes, Extremist Rhetoric Lead to the Planned Parenthood Terror Attack

This should end the debate about whether or not anti-choice rhetoric lead to last Friday's Planned Parenthood shooting-

COLORADO SPRINGS, Colo. (AP) -- The man who police say staged a deadly shooting attack on a Planned Parenthood clinic that offers abortion services said "no more baby parts" after his arrest, a law enforcement official said Saturday.

The official could not elaborate about the comment by the 57-year-old suspect, Robert Lewis Dear. The official spoke on condition of anonymity because the official was not authorized to speak publicly about the ongoing investigation.

Planned Parenthood said late Saturday that witnesses said the gunman was motivated by his opposition to abortion. An official who has been briefed on the investigation told The Washington Post that the attack was "definitely politically motivated."

This should end the debate over this terrorist's motivations. He was motivated by anti-choice beliefs. He cited a doctored anti-choice video that was meant to invoke reaction from the pro-life movement. It did. There are now some more dead bodies from a supposedly "pro-life" person.

Let's be clear here, the pro-life movement is not guilty of murder, Robert Dear is. It takes a lunatic to decide to go shoot up a clinic. It's also important to not absolve the right-wing of this maniac. When you preach anger and fear as your politics, people hear that. When you preach that the "enemy" is soul-less, and doing awful things, people hear that too. Some people who hear these things are not sane or normal. Robert Dear is one of them. They hear these statements in ways that normal people do not. They react in ways that normal people do not. This doesn't make you a murderer for their reaction. It also doesn't mean you're absolved of talking this way. It's important we don't forget the history.

The rhetoric of “killing unborn children” and “murder” was soon emanating from conservative religious leaders and their political emissaries, with the highly charged issue becoming a regular topic for figures such as Pat Robertson, Ralph Reed, James Dobson and countless others. Preachers and politicians alike found that emotional appeals on abortion resonated with large swaths of the public, providing a reliable issue for mobilizing support. Thus the rhetoric would only escalate. “If you believe abortion is murder, act like it’s murder,” urged Operation Rescue founder Randall Terry, another religious conservative who has made a career of antiabortion activism.

And the flock was listening. Within a few years of the founding of the Moral Majority,antiabortion violence became commonplace. Although a few property crimes had been committed previously, the first serious act of antiabortion violence against individuals came in 1982, when the appropriately named Army of God kidnapped the director of an Illinois abortion clinic and his wife. The couple were released unharmed, but future targets of antiabortion violence wouldn’t be so lucky.

The Moral Majority and other conservative religious groups would keep up the antiabortion rhetoric throughout the 1980s, and the violence directed at abortion providers would escalate. By the 1990s, as the number and size of Christian right groups increased rapidly, the antiabortion movement became more lethal. Florida doctor David Gunn, whose image had been placed on a “Wanted” poster by Operation Rescue, was fatally shot in 1993, and another Florida doctor, James Britton, and his bodyguard were killed the next year. More murders soon followed and, as we saw last week in Colorado, have continued.

Some people do crazy things. It's important to consider them when spewing vitriol.