Wednesday, December 2, 2015

Republi-CON Fear, Anger and Hatred = Violence, Again

UPDATE:  "Forget Syria. The most dangerous religious extremists are migrants from North and South Carolina."

Read Slate, The Terrorists Among Us.

"The antiabortion movement did not kill those three people in Colorado Springs. The one responsible is the deranged gunman himself. But it’s a different matter to ask whether the often-violent imagery used by conservative leaders on abortion is unwittingly giving the unhinged some perverse sense of justification to contemplate the unspeakable.

Just days before the shooting, Cruz trumpeted an endorsement from an antiabortion activist who once called killing an abortion doctor a “justifiable defensive action” and who leads a group, Operation Rescue, where a colleague did prison time for a conspiracy to bomb an abortion clinic.

The activist whose endorsement Cruz celebrated, Troy Newman, is also on the board of the Center for Medical Progress, which made the surreptitious Planned Parenthood videos that prompted Cruz and many other conservatives to accuse the organization of selling “baby parts” — the phrase Dear allegedly used. The videos, including footage from a Planned Parenthood in Denver, not far from Colorado Springs, were followed by a wave of threats and smaller attacks on the organization’s facilities.

There will always be the irrational and the unstable. But when political leaders turn disagreements into all-out war, demonize opponents as enemies and accuse those on the other side of being subhuman killers, the unbalanced can hear messages that were never intended."

Read the Washington Post, Antiabortion rhetoric unwittingly unleashes the unhinged