On July 2, Live Action wrote about the pro-abortion criminals who violently vandalized the home of Personhood USA’s Keith and Jennifer Mason. On July 4, two more instances of pro-abortion violence came to light.
On July 4, LifeNews reported on Gary Boyle, a Tennessee abortionist who pulled a gun on pro-life protestors, getting his charges reduced to a misdemeanor.
On July 5, Live Action blogged on 69-year-old Everett Stadig, who suffered a broken hip Saturday after being assaulted by an angry pro-choicer while collecting signatures for Ohio’s Personhood Amendment.
Neither side of the abortion debate promotes or condones violence committed against the other side. Pro-lifers understand that the blame for these crimes rests with the individuals who committed them, not Planned Parenthood, NARAL, NOW, Jezebel, or the Democrat Party.
So why don’t pro-choicers extend the same basic decency to the pro-life movement? Why is it that when a pro-life activist is murdered, American Life League responds by warning all parties not to jump the gun in guessing the killer’s motives, but when an abortionist is murdered, the guilt-by-association floodgates are opened on ALL, the National Right to Life Committee, Personhood USA, and the Republican Party?
Again, it all goes back to the abortion lobby having no choice but to go on offense. No matter how you slice it, it’s impossible to keep hold of the moral high ground while defending the proposition that human babies should be legally killable for convenience. So they have to change the subject from the harm abortion does to the harm abortion opponents allegedly do, be it horror stories about college girls going broke or trumped-up charges of inciting violence.
The narrative is that, even if there’s no actual evidence of pro-life organizations and leaders promoting or facilitating violence, they deserve the blame anyway because our rhetoric about abortion makes people angry enough to snap. We’ve discussed before how you can’t blame the messenger for accurately describing horrific things, but in light of the stories listed above, there’s another point to be made: if heated pro-life rhetoric is responsible for violence against abortionists, then wouldn’t heated pro-choice rhetoric be responsible for violence against pro-lifers?
After all, our opponents’ arguments are no more civil (far less so, in fact). You’re sexists, religious fanatics, tyrants, rapists, theocrats, misogynists; you’re waging a War on Women, you hate the poor, you don’t care about people after they’re born, you’re trying to deceive pregnant women and keep kids ignorant about sex, you want girls to die in back alleys, you want to control people’s sex lives, you shoot doctors and blow up clinics…do those sound like good-faith attempts at reasonable debate to you?
Simply put, the standard pro-choice line is that pro-lifers are bad people with bad motives who are going to cause massive suffering, up to and including death. It’s obvious that such a narrative has the capacity to inspire intense anger, hatred, and fear toward us – feelings that sometimes manifest as violence. Again, I believe that individuals are the ones who choose to act on such feelings and therefore have sole responsibility for their actions. But it’s pro-choicers who have set the guilt-by-association standard, so it’s perfectly reasonable to ask: how about a little consistency?
