It's sickening that a health care provider servicing largely poorer individuals is being singled out for attacks based on a stupid hoax. It's downright appalling that the hoaxers encouraged terror against Planned Parenthood and their clientele, with an able assist from many high profile politicians, including GOP presidential candidates. I know Ted Cruz is proud of his endorsement from Operation Rescue's Troy Newman, who no doubt thinks this is a great thing. (Let's see if this link endures, shall we? Otherwise, the Troy Newman endorsement is right here.)
So basically, enough of the GOP "family values" stalwarts pitched in to demonize the lawful surgical practice of abortion engaged in by some Planned Parenthood locations, which also participated in a program where fetal tissue donation occurred, which is not terribly different from organ donation (Do you have a donor card? Thank you. I appreciate your willingness to be harvested for your body parts.) to make some people boiling mad about the itty bitty baby body parts and whether someone was profiting from them.
Gosh. It might be true that we all benefit from vaccines and other technologies that have been developed by these means. But then again, that's just the heathen "science" talk. But there's a serious flaw in the antichoice argument--that the pregnant person's life and choices matter regardless of their opinion that the existence of a fetus overrides them. And this has been legally upheld just recently. And what we should also learn from recent history is that laws against abortion don't stop abortion. They just make them illegal and less safe.
Basically, I don't know all the details, and maybe this was a random lone nutter who didn't know where he was--but I think the odds of that are vanishingly small. I think this was a deliberate act.
As for me, my thoughts are with the victims of this terror attack and their families, and regardless, I stand with Planned Parenthood.
6 comments:
Oh no Vixen, Congressman Adam Kinzinger of Illinois declared it's not the gun's fault, the Director of Planned Parenthood needs to apologize, and even if it was an attack on PP it's because of barbaric videos and mental illness, so Totally Not Domestic Terrorism.
Plus former NYPD Dick Bo Dietl was on Faux News blaming President Obama so I think the right-wing media has done enough to deflect this incident and refocus their conservative drones towards the real enemy of America.
Isn't it amazing how the media is so committed to the Both Sides creed that they will have someone who is objectively pro-domestic terrorism on? (That evaporates when the subject is women's birth control--then, somehow, women become very hard to find.)How edgy! So we'll hear the PP videos being referred to as "controversial" and not "a deliberate hoax intended to stir up violence" and Planned Parenthood referred to as an "abortion clinic" even if that's about 3% of what they do.
All very fair'n'balanced at not at all a huuuugge part of the problem!
Here's the thing. If you believe, TRULY believe in your heart and soul, that abortion is nothing other than mass murder, then a violent response makes sense. If there truly were identifiable people at known locations murdering thousands of people every year, we'd all be fully prepared to fight them to the death to protect our community. The fact that these attacks are not daily occurrences exposes the anti-abortion right as the liars and opportunists they are. They don't believe it any more than you and I, and they're damn glad their daughters have access to discrete legal abortion services.
But at the same time, this kind of absolutist, religiously tinged rhetoric will be taken as reality by a portion of the population, and some of them will be angry and fearful and isolated enough to act on it. This is unquestionable, obvious and it is an utter certainty that it will happen again. One of the ironies of the Jihadist mass casualty attacks such as Mumbai and Paris is they are teaching OUR extremists how to do that kind of gun/bomb attack to kill a LOT of people.
Oh. And don't forget that in the near-term future they're going to have access to thousand dollar autonomous aerial drones with the capacity to deliver a kilogram of high explosive to a precise set of GPS coordinates without any human guidance whatsoever. The world is just going to get harder, and uglier...
Sadly for the media they can no longer fill air time with 'oh my goodness whatever might this persons motivations be???' I wonder if Mr right-wing terrorist believes he will be freed by the evangelical conservative lunatics in Colorado.
Yeah, I'm with Grung e Gene, I had to turn off the radio news when they kept repeating, 'We have no idea what the shooter's motives were.' It's like they're pre-emptively 'working the refs' while the forced birthers work on an alibi. Right now, their narrative is that it was a bank robbery gone awry. In a few days, they'll be saying that Planned Parenthood put him up to it to derail the upcoming congressional hearings.
I wonder if we should demand Congressman Jason Chaffetz investigate this shooting at Planned Parenthood as thoroughly as he did Planned Parenthood itself?
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