Onion News

The Dish was all over yesterday's big story - the assassination of George Tiller by a crazed Christianist. We traced O'Reilly's troubling rhetoric here, here, and here, and readers checked my reaction here. We chronicled the disturbing role of Operation Rescue here, here, and here, and commentary from the far right here, here, here.  A noteworthy voice on the far-right was Robert P. George, who struck the perfect chord. We also aired personal accounts of abortion here and here.

A traumatic Sunday, to say the least. For the right approach to religion, listen to Bob Wright.

How Canadian can you get?

The Finance Minister understates the deficit by $16 billion. Do we get mad?

Nah. The guy's doing his best. Let's give him another chance.

Canadian Press:

OTTAWA - Canadians appear to be willing to cut Finance Minister Jim Flaherty a little slack over his deficit shocker.

A Canadian Press Harris-Decima poll shows few Canadians think the
finance minister should resign just because he made a $16-billion
mistake on his deficit projection.

The survey of 1,000 people finds only 28 per cent who want Flaherty to
step down, while 59 per cent think he should stay on the job.

Even among Liberal supporters, 54 per cent don't think he should lose
his position because the budget deficit has ballooned to more than $50
billion - not the $34 billion predicted in the budget four months ago.

Last night at about 8 p.m., the Associated Press’s Roxama Hegeman became an early purveyor of the myth that abortion clinic-related violence has been a frequent and consistent occurrence during the past two decades when she wrote the following about the murder of Kansas abortionist George Tiller (saved here at host for future reference; bold is mine):

There was no immediate word of the motive (of) Tiller’s assailant. But the doctor’s violent death was the latest in a string of shootings and bombings over two decades directed against abortion clinics, doctors and staff.

A look at the actual history of such violence accumulated by a pro-abortion group demonstrates that Tiller’s murder is correctly seen as a horrible, isolated incident following a long, sustained, and not-reversed period of decline.

Here is the “History of Violence” accumulated by the National Abortion Federation (NAF), broken down into five categories:

• Murder and shootings — There were none since 1998 until Tiller was murdered on Sunday. From 1993-1998, seven abortion doctors or abortion clinic employees were killed, and 12 others were injured, many very seriously. One cowardly killing after 11 murder-free and shooting-free years following a period of seven in six years does not signal a trend by any reasonable definition.


• Arsons and bombings — Starting in 1976, NAF lists 13 such crimes during the remainder of that decade, over 75 during the 1980s, over 100 during the 1990s, and 16 since the turn of the century. Only six arsons took place from 2004-2008. The last arson listed at NAF’s site occurred in December 2007. It should also be noted that arsons set by business owners in general to collect insurance money are not all that infrequent.


• Butyric acid attacks — Butyric acid is a clear, colorless liquid with an unpleasant, rancid, vomit-like odor. According to NAF, this clinic attack method was used “about 100″ times from 1991-1998, and has not been employed since.


• NAF lists over 650 antrax attacks and fake anthrax attacks from 1998-2002, and none since then. Over 550 of these occurred in 2001.

Overall, an “Extreme Violence” page at NAF listing activity from 1997-2007 lists the following number of incidents per year:

As you can see, Rebecca Hegeman’s “string” has been broken twice in the past three years.

Abortion clinic violence and violence against abortionists has generally been on such a steep decline during the past decade that MSNBC stopped updating a web page dedicated to the topic in the late 1990s.

Without recounting already-known details, the unique specifics of Tiller’s situation also supports the idea that his murder, which should of course be and I’m sure will be prosecuted to the full extent of the law, will more than likely not be a part of a new “string” of similar ones throughout the country.

Not that the establishment media types like the AP’s Hegemen, the ever-opportunistic Obama administration, or far-left blogs will particularly care about these facts.

There’s one more thing Ms. Hegemen forgot to note: The pre-born babies that George Tiller murdered were not available for comment.

Cross-posted at BizzyBlog.com.

Walter Shapiro: "Dodd, who is one of the last of the old-style Ted Kennedy liberals in the Senate, still has the potential to eke out another term. Connecticut is such a Democratic state that its last orthodox Republican senator was (it is worth waiting for) Prescott Bush, the father of one president and the grandfather of another. (To be technical, erratic liberal Lowell Weicker was also a GOP senator, but certainly not an orthodox one.) Attorney General Richard Blumenthal -- the one powerhouse Democratic statewide official who could theoretically challenge Dodd in a primary -- is apparently prepared to wait and hope that Joe Lieberman (remember him?) does not run for re-election in 2012."

I tried to respond to Publius and Hilzoy at their place, but the comments system wouldn't let me.  So I'll have to carry the debate on here.

Why the analogy to slavery, or Hitler?  It's inflammatory, and rarely advances the debate.  Such analogies too often degenerate into "Hitler was a vegetarian too, you tofu-eating Nazi!!!*"

But in this case, I think the analogy to slavery is important, for two reasons.  First of all, it was the last time we had an extended, society-wide debate about personhood.  And second of all, as now, there were structural political reasons that it was much harder--nearly impossible--to change slavery through the existing political process.

Listening to the debates about abortion, it seems to me that really broad swathes of the pro-choice movement seem to genuinely not understand that this is a debate about personhood, which is why you get moronic statements like "If you think abortions are wrong, don't have one!"  If you think a fetus is a person, it is not useful to be told that you, personally, are not required to commit murder, as long as you leave the neighbors alone while they do it.

Conversely, if Africans are not people, then slavery is not wrong.  Or at least it's arguably not wrong--if Africans occupy some intermediate status between persons and animals**, then there is at least a legitimate argument for treating them like animals, rather than people.

The difference between our reaction to the two is that now we know Africans are people.  It seems ridiculous to think that anyone ever thought they might not be people.  They meet all the relevant criteria for personhood in twenty-first century America.

But of course, those criteria are socially constructed.  The definition of personhood (and, related, of citizenship) changes over time.  It generally expands--as we get richer, we can, or at least do, grant full personhood to wider categories.  Except in the case of fetuses.  We expanded "persons" to include fetuses in the 19th century, as we learned more about gestation.  Then in the late 1960s, for the first time I can think of, western civilization started to contract the group "persons" in order to exclude fetuses.

But that conception was not universally shared.  And rather than leave it to the political process, the Supreme Court essentially put it beyond that process.  Congress, the President, the justices themselves, have been fighting a thirty-five year guerilla war over court seats.  Presidents try to appoint candidates who will support their theory of Roe, Congress strategically blocks change, and the justices refuse to retire until they know they will be replaced by someone who supports their side.  To change the outcome, a pro-life political coalition would have to gain a supermajority in Congress for twenty years--long enough for a few liberal justices to die in office.

It is theoretically possible that this could happen, just as it was theoretically possible to come to some political accomodation over slavery.  But a combination of supreme court rulings and the peculiar federalist structure of American meant that the only way for either side to gain decisive results was violence.  At every turn, the pro-slavery forces no doubt slyly congratulated themselves on their political acumen, while also solemnly and sincerely believing that they preserved an important right.  But they made war inevitable.

If you interpret this murder as a political act, rather than that of a lone whacko, than this should be a troubling sign that the political system has failed.  So why do so many people think that the obvious answer is simply to more firmly entrench laws that are rightly intolerable to someone who thinks that a late term fetus is a person?

I am accused, in the comments of Hilzoy's post, of loving violence and terror.  Well, call me a terrorist sympathizer, but I believe that most terrorists do what they do because they, at least, genuinely believe that there is no other way to seek justice.  Indeed, they are usually right, for all that I radically dissent from both their idea of justice, and their right to seek it through violence.  But I am also humble enough to recognize that my own morality on a topic like abortion is constructed in context of two important facts: virtually all my friends are pro-choice, as is the social milieu in which I was raised, and a lack of access to abortion would significantly restrict women's autonomy.

These are not bad arguments in favor of abortion--I think modern America is more right than not about most moral questions, and the right to bodily integrity is important.  On the other hand, in the face of fetal personhood, they are not very good arguments either.  My parents significantly restrict my autonomy by continuing to be alive--if they died, I would inherit some money, which would increase my choices.  But I still shouldn't be allowed to kill them in order to collect my inheritance--a moral insight which seems to be much more obvious and fundamental, I might add, than the wrongness of slavery or the rightness of abortion.  Every society I know of forbids slaughtering your parents.

(Not that I want to, I hasten to point out.  Hi, Dad!  We're pricing out a nice GPS for father's day!)

I am aware that I have constructed my beliefs about personhood in the face of these things--like any good undergrad, I know the answer I need to reason to in order to ensure both social comfort and maximum personal freedom.  I like to think that I am too rigorous a thinker to be seduced by such ephemera.  But I am also aware that a lot of very fine thinkers were seduced into reasoning that Africans weren't people.  Whatever evidence they thought they had, we're pretty sure how they arrived at their conclusions:   African personhood would have caused enormous personal and social upheaval.  Thousands of their friends and family would have personally suffered enormously without their slave wealth.  Ergo, slaves weren't people!

And if I look at my own reasoning, well, frankly, it's not even reasoning.  I've never sat down and thought, "how do I know that Africans are human beings?"  I know.  And I'm enough of a Chestertonian to be okay with that way of knowing.  But presumably if I'd been raised in 1840 Alabama, I'd know just as certainly that they weren't.

Perhaps I find the certainty of the pro-choice side so disturbing because it feels a lot like the certainty of the warbloggers in the run up to the Iraq invasion.  As some of Hilzoy's commenters point out, I was myself too caught up in it, which makes me cautious of getting caught up again.  The pro-choicers seem to be acting as if people who shoot abortion doctors are some weird species of moral alien, whose actions can only be understood in Satantic terms, and who cannot and should not be negotiated with, because they only understand raw displays of power.  Yet it seems to me that if I were in a society that believed fervently in the personhood of a fetus, I would very possibly agree, and view Tiller's murderer the way I'd view someone who, say, assassinated Mengele.

I realize that this opens many other questions, like "What does it mean to have access to the political process?" and what constitutes personhood.  But I remain stuck with a fundemantal problem:  I can understand their moral logic.  When someone whose moral logic I can understand, even endorse  (without endorsing the underlying judgement about the personhood of the fetus) is driven by that moral logic to kill, I think there may be a problem that society needs to solve.  When more than one kills for the same cause, I assume that there's a structural problem in the political process that needs to be fixed.  I'm not saying the violence is okay--I think Tiller's murderer needs to go to jail.  But like many contributors to Obsidian Wings, I can understand the structural forces that contribute to Palestinian terrorism without believing the terrorism is legitimate.  Unlike them, apparently, I don't find it all that hard to transfer that understanding to the fringes of our own democratic system.

*  Sadly, I'm not even joking--see my old vegan threads
** Go ahead.  I triple-dog-dare you to quote me out of context

by Amanda Marcotte

Because fuckheads who don’t know what they’re talking about are beginning to blather about how they think they know better than actual doctors about the realities of late term abortion, I thought I’d put up a video that we made explaining the facts.

RH Reality Check: Late Term Abortions from RH Reality Check on Vimeo.

It’s interesting that Republicans have used the occasion of a new Supreme Court nomination to denounce the quality of empathy.  You know, the quality that genuinely decent and brave people like Dr. George Tiller had in spades, while moral cowards like Megan McArdle suffer a massive deficit.

Rewatching that, I feel particularly weird about the line I wrote about how using late term abortion as a political football is dangerous.  In my head, I was thinking about the women who need to have safe abortion available for dangerous pregnancies.  Now I realize that it’s also dangerous in terms of riling people up so they commit hate crimes.