The news:
President Obama said this afternoon that he was "shocked and outraged" by the killing of abortion doctor George Tiller, who was shot while attending church in east Wichita.
Tiller's clinic was often a target of abortion protesters. His clinic was blocked by protesters during the 1991 "Summer of Mercy" and bombed in 1986. Tiller himself was shot earlier in 1993 by an anti-abortion activist.
The suspect in this case - Scott Roeder - is an anti-tax extremist who was convicted and sentenced for building bombs, and was a member of Operation Rescue. I'm guessing Tiller was killed for political reasons, which pretty much is the definition of "terror." In fact, as Jon Perr points out, "Tiller's suspected assassin Scott Roeder is a poster child for precisely the kind of the anti-government extremism detailed in the recent DHS report on right-wing terror threats..."
Hey Dan McGee, is this your idea of "civil war"?
NARAL has a fact sheet on violence against abortion providers (pdf), and there hasn't been a murder since 1998, when Dr. Barnett Slepian was killed in his home by James Kopp. Anti-abortion terror was at a pretty high level during the 1990s, during the Clinton administration. Let's hope another Democratic administration doesn't re-up the terror activity of anti-abortion extremists.
Matthew Yglesias wrote a smart thing about this kind of right-wing extremism:
Random murder of civilians in order to coerce political concessions doesn't have a great track-record. But direct action terrorist violence against abortion providers has, I think, proven to be a fairly successful tactic. Every time you murder a doctor, you create a disincentive for other medical professionals to provide these services. What's more, you create a need for additional security at facilities around the country. In addition, the anti-abortion protestors who frequently gather near clinics are made to seem much more intimidating by the fact that the occurrence of these sorts of acts of violence.
In general, I think people tend to overestimate the efficacy of violence as a political tactic. But in this particular case, I think people tend to understate it.
Absolutely true. If you've ever been in a clinic that does family planning services, you know what he means. Security, bulletproof doors, etc & co. I know that clinic workers face an unrelenting barrage of threats and intimidation on a near-daily basis. And that's not even considering how intimidating it is to go into one of these places, especially when there's a pack of protesters outside.
Very few anti-abortion activists are violent. But the violence in the movement makes even peaceful demonstrations threatening. Especially when you read stuff like this:
I can't escape the conclusion that killing Tiller was the right thing to do. I am uncomfortable with this conclusion because it's dangerous. But nevertheless, it was the ethical thing to do. Tiller would have continued to take numerous lives. Nothing was going to stop him. So someone did stop him. And now fewer lives will be taken. |
