Onward Christian . . bus drivers?

Don’t laugh, they’re dead serious about this lawsuit. They are striking a real blow for ‘religious freedom.’ From their perspective, a Christian bus jockey reserves the right to refuse service to anyone they figure out is about to receive an abortion courtesy of their driving.

What? Yeah:

Bus driver claims abortion views led to his firing
By Steven Kreytak | Friday, July 16, 2010, 10:20 AM

A former bus driver has sued the Capital Area Rural Transportation System, charging that the nine-county transit service discriminated against him based on his religion when he was fired for refusing to drive a woman to a Planned Parenthood clinic in January.

Edwin Graning, who was hired as a driver on April 1, 2009, was “concerned that he might be transporting a client to undergo an abortion” when he was assigned to transport two women to Planned Parenthood, according to his lawsuit, filed this week in U.S. District Court in Austin.

Graning is seeking re-instatement, back pay and undisclosed damages for pain, suffering and emotion distress. He is represented by lawyers from the American Center for Law & Justice, founded by evangelical Christian leader Pat Robertson.

He was hired to drive people on the bus. When he refused to do it, he got fired. So he’s suing because he should have the right to quit his job but keep getting paid because he’s a Christian. Don’t know, maybe the issues escape me.

Graning had asked his wife to call the facility; she heard a recording directing callers to call 911 in case of abortion complications. “I said, dear God in heaven, this woman’s gonna have an abortion,” he said.

So he refused to drive the bus there.

His supervisor, who is not named, responded by saying “Then you are resigning,” the suit said.

Graning denied he was resigning and was later told to drive his bus back to the yard and he was fired, the lawsuit said.

So he ain’t exactly Dr. King. He’s not willing to accept the responsibilities and consequences of his actions — ‘yes I’m refusing to do my job because of my beliefs, and don’t you dare touch me.’

Therein lies the rub. Graning is another victim of Robertson and other high-profile pastors who have been pushing the flock to throw tantrums. They’re convincing normal folks to turn into big-headed, pig-headed Christianists who should press Americans to do their will.

Why — even though the Constitution clearly supports personal freedom and abhors the abuses of power that come with religious extremism? Because it’s your Constitutional right, people! You can do whatever you want, whenever you want, to whomever you want because it’s your religion. This is the sort of behavior the Founding Fathers, wholly conservative Men of Jesus, would have demanded of them if only they were still around, sure.

When they spoke of freedom, they really meant Christian freedom. When they spoke of rights, they meant Christian rights. And if, legally, some liberal opens up the interpretation to outsiders, just know that the Founding Fathers were all conservative evangelicals and *wink-wink* I don’t need to say another word, do I?

This is the utterly laughable fantasy that’s been leveled like a double-barrel shotgun at ordinary folks like Ed Graning. He’s fallen for it completely.

“I’m not out for revenge or anything like that,” said Graning, who said he felt obligated to stand up for his beliefs.

“I pastored years ago, and I’ve done a lot of things – and normally I wouldn’t have made any issue out of this – but you know, I’m really getting tired of Christians getting kicked around,” he told LSN. “I mean, we see other things as going on in this country, and somebody somewhere along the line is just got to quit bending the knee to Baal and letting this government run over us.”

So, to be clear: applying for, getting and carrying out the responsibilities of the government job of bus driver, a job Ed got without telling his superiors that certain situations would force him to refuse service to riders as a matter of religious belief, is “letting the government run over” him. Never mind that very few people go to Planned Parenthood on any given day to get an abortion, and he certainly had no clue why the woman went there, Ed’s “getting tired of Christians getting kicked around.”

Rational thought, logic, science and technology, modern philosophy, the legacies of the Age of Enlightenment — these things are not essential. Not universal, not cultural, not American, any more than your haircut is. They are the private beliefs of the secular humanists who hold too much sway in the public domain. It’s time for Christians’ private beliefs, Christianity, to eject that pop culturalism and to hold unilateral power.

Freedom, you say? Freedom isn’t some government stab at public transportation. Real freedom is about the practice of closely-held religious beliefs. A government serious about operating in a free society wouldn’t provide buses for the profane to trample those sacred tenets. Get it?

Yet another anti-abortion screed lacking in accuracy or civility:

Tuesday, May 25, 2010

As Morally Serious as Root Canal
by Mona Charen

“. . Debra Haffner, of the Religious Institute, wrote, “In more than 30 years of working with women struggling with the question of continuing a pregnancy to term or having an abortion, I can think of fewer than a handful who approached the decision lightly. Almost every woman wrestled with what would be best in her individual circumstances, and with what her faith taught her.”

This is fatuous moral reasoning…

Mona Charen

We’ve heard it many times. Abortion is a an “agonizing personal choice.” Women struggle with the decision. Well, some doubtless do agonize, but, let’s face it, many do not. Feminist writer Naomi Wolf admitted in 2004 that, “I used to think of abortion as being somewhat trivial; the moral equivalent of serious root canal dentistry.”

OOPS. Definitely the wrong feminist and tract to single out. Let’s let Wolf continue:

“I had something of a conversion when I was pregnant in my mid-thirties with a baby we wanted. I found I could not square the enthusiasm my husband and I were expected to show for the wanted foetus in the adorable ultrasound — and the marvelling we were supposed to do at each stage of its development — with the casual attitude to an unwanted baby at the same stage that was the norm in debates about rights to abortion. Finally I was amazed to discover, when I actually listened to anti-abortion activists instead of demonising them, how much common ground both sides had.

A true feminist, I believe, sees women as being moral adults. She does not encourage women to sink to the fainting-couch and reach for the smelling salts when faced with the outcome of her decisions.”

That sounds like the real-life issue — and the people who face it first hand, at least to my ear. It’s not a trivial thing, and liberals are not trivial people. But, hey, never mind that old argument:

But, in any case, agony is irrelevant. If, before robbing a bank, the thief agonizes about the act, does that make the decision a moral one? Is it a “very personal choice” whether to libel someone? Shall we say that making insider trading illegal compromises people’s “moral autonomy”? These terms are designed to obscure the issue rather than clarify it.

You don’t even care! ALRIGHT, fine, you care too much. But your little feelings are irrelevant, you bleeding hearts — have America’s babies and STFU.

Oh, you thin-skinned lefties — what’s the big deal? So what if she’s bleeding and broken? So what if her family were humbly praying that she’d live? So what if people are shocked and saddened by the tragedy? She’ll probably be out of ICU soon.

Look, Conservative bloggers just don’t come equipped with empathy, tact or class circuitry. Those would be self-defeating features. They only recognize a hilarious bit of news after they download and scan it.

Forget worrying about Landra Reid, witness instead the wonders of right-wing technology; it’s time for backslapping internet political comedy, courtesy of the Spazman Chuckletwat 3000, Dan Riehl:

Isn’t It Time To Euthanize Reid’s Wife?

I’m not sure I quite understand this, given that cost is so important as a burden to taxpayers when it comes to health care. If Democrats want so badly to abort babies because of it, why are we bothering with someone who has a broken neck and back at 69? It sounds to me like she’s pretty well used up and has probably been living off the taxpayers for plenty of years to begin with. Aren’t we at least going to get a vote on it?

Vote on her? Comical. Okay, alright — *ahem* NO he DIH-HIN’T, or however you spell that. Oh Snap, they said.

I realize her crook of a husband and his pals in Congress have excluded themselves from the mess they’re going to compel everyone else to join, but we’re still paying the bills, are we not? I don’t see that she’s worth it at this point, frankly. I can’t recall her ever doing anything for me.

You know how you can tell this is sophisticated satire and not opportunistic sadism? Because he calls Reid a “crook.” C’mon, that’s completely out of Riehl’s wiring character. Or, alternatively, in the sense of ‘reality’, that’s Dan to a ‘T’, a feckless Tool.

Oh, Lenny Bruise-bot, how you challenge us . . to recall this post when something bad happens to someone you love, because it surely will.

Come on, Harry – do your civic duty. The nation’s broke and counting on you guy. Pull the plug and get back to work. And don’t bill us for a full day today, either. This is no time to be sloughing off. Air freight her home, you can bury her during recess on your own time and dime. Or are you going to bill us for that, too?

Send her body back by air freight? Oh, Dan, you are rich. Sleep now. Beep.

‘WTF?’ whackjob Ken Blackwell carves another gem.

Perhaps this mess can be read, only for a moment or two, — don’t waste your precious time — as a way to try to understand how the strange-brained right wingers manage to think themselves in knots.

Because I certainly don’t understand how giving people healthcare is in any way a Third Reich Tactic!, or how stimulating the economy with government spending is Unconstitutional!, so I certainly wouldn’t mind knowing how the discussions ever got there. Anywhere near there, really. I’m mystified as to how these people figure the world out.

Anyhoo, let’s listen in on excerpts of the careening Ken and his rangy diatribe . .

Do Liberal Editors Read Their Newspapers?

Circulation for the New York Times is way down. Some people are seriously speculating that the days of America’s great newspapers are over. They may be replaced by Kindle, or iPad, or some other newer technology . .

Liberalism, media and technology? Odd. Not exactly the usual ‘Liberals and their stupid evil stupidity.’

. . Recall these lines from a tender Simon & Garfunkle song of the 1960s. This poignant story of a mother’s anguish and her son’s lethal leap might not have been considered part of “all the news that’s fit to print” by the editors of the great Gray Lady, the Times.

– “Good God! Don’t jump!”
– A boy sat on the ledge.
– An old man who had fainted was revived.
– And everyone agreed it would be a miracle indeed
– If the boy survived.

– “Save the life of my child!”
– Cried the desperate mother

WOW. Where the hell is he going?

This is a horrible story — a woman in Virginia gave birth to a child, then cold-bloodedly smothered it in blankets before calling 911. Ten hours later.

Around eleven Friday morning the Campbell County Sheriff’s Office got a call that a woman in her early 20′s was in labor. When deputies arrived at a home in the 12 hundred block of Lone Jack Road in Rustburg they discovered the baby had actually been born alive ten hours earlier, but was dead by the time they were called out there.

“I believe everyone was upset, except for the person who should have been upset, the mother” said Investigator Tracy Emerson.

Emerson says that’s because the mother suffocated the child under bedding. He can’t charge the mother, because of a loophole in state law.

This happened two weeks ago, and still it gets no notice by the national press. You could understand if it were only the godless liberal MSM, but even the values-oriented Fox News seems to have no interest in a story that looks like it should fire up their demographic of prudes and scolds far more than Kathy Griffin saying “fuck” on CNN.

I wouldn’t even be aware of this horror story if it weren’t burning up the tubes among the Christian Right, and I can’t understand why it isn’t getting any traction. There is enough juicy moral outrage to make Jerry Falwell come back from the dead:

“In the state of Virginia as long as the umbilical cord is attached and the placenta is still in the mother, if the baby comes out alive the mother can do whatever she wants to with that baby to kill it,” said Investigator Tracy Emerson. “She could shoot the baby, stab the baby. As long as it’s still attached to her in some form by umbilical cord or something it’s no crime in the state of Virginia.”

But nobody cares about this wasted life:

If there were any way to charge this mother and put her in jail, investigators say they would. In fact, they work (sic) to try to get the state law changed after another similar incident in Campbell County. Talking to two delegates and one state senator, asking them to take this issue up with the General Assembly, but they say those three refused because it’s too close to the abortion issue.

Which is odd, seeing as how Virginia politicians normally seem to see little downside to pro-life electioneering. That’s even odder than a sheriff’s investigator acting as judge and jury to acquit a nameless and faceless murderer while making political accusations against the laws and lawmakers he’s on-duty working for.

“Simply because the mother was there, and the baby had not taken its own identity allegedly at this point, it makes the baby not its own person,” Emerson said.

According to a law – not according to Emerson who believes the little life deserves justice.

He believes the innocent babe deserves justice, but doesn’t bother to mention the killer’s name, much less bother to arrest her and everyone else in the house? In a state that six months ago won an appeals court battle to ban a legitimate medical procedure?

Virginia Abortion Restriction Is Upheld
U.S. Appeals Court Votes 6-5 to Back ‘Partial Birth’ Ban
Thursday, June 25, 2009

A sharply divided federal appeals court ruled constitutional yesterday a Virginia law banning “partial birth” abortion that was overturned four years ago, bringing the state in line with a federal ban on the controversial procedure.

Why don’t any of these low-lifes have names? As I said at the beginning, this is a truly horrible story, and I can’t understand the lack of interest in it by anyone but forced pregnancy networkers. I don’t pretend to have any journalistic training, but it seems obvious to me there is a story worth telling here. Does anybody have a rational explanation for why that isn’t happening?

Right-wing scrapping from Dung Fu Chuck:

What if Mother Mary Had Obamacare?

…as we near the eve of another Christmas, I wonder: What would have happened if Mother Mary had been covered by Obamacare? What if that young, poor and uninsured teenage woman had been provided the federal funds (via Obamacare) and facilities (via Planned Parenthood, etc.) to avoid the ridicule, ostracizing, persecution and possible stoning because of her out-of-wedlock pregnancy?

He who pulled off the immaculate conception can dodge a Jesus abortion.

I’ve mentioned Mike Adams before, he’s extremely angry and dumb. And this is an exceptionally bizarre effort. The ‘participants’ in his bloody 45th birthday celebration: PETA (though I don’t know why), unwanted cats, spray paint, the local Women’s Resource Center, power tools, an industrial vacuum, blood-letting, skull drilling, sucking out cat’s brains, and maybe The Black Student Union.

This is a ludicrously abysmal post, even by Adams’ standards:

Mike Adams :: Townhall.com Columnist
Felines, Nothing More than Felines

Dear People for the Ethical Treatment of Animals:

This Friday, I will turn 45 years old. I’m planning to celebrate my birthday by arranging a small demonstration in front of Randall Library on the campus of The University of North Carolina at Wilmington. I realize this is short notice but I need a favor. Since we’re old friends I figured you could do this for me as an early birthday gift.

I’m looking for three cats that have been discarded by their owners because they were either unable to afford them or because they were just generally inconvenienced by them. It is my preference that you provide me with two white cats and one black cat. If you cannot accommodate me I would ask that you also provide me with spray paint – the kind your members spray on women wearing mink coats. For example, if you can only provide three white cats I will want to spay paint one of them black. I’ll explain that later.

I intend to take the three cats over to Randall Library at about ten in the morning. The Women’s Resource Center is located in Randall. I will call their staff beforehand and ask them to meet me out front. I don’t want my demonstration to disturb anyone who might be studying.

And since you’re so obviously sane, you and your long list of enemies and penchant for Mengele-birthday fantasies, I’m sure they’d be glad to meet you.

I can supply all of the other materials needed for the demonstration: a Black & Decker drill, an industrial vacuum cleaner, two clipboards, two pencils, and some paper. I might also need a water hose and three plastic garbage bags.

By now you may have guessed that it is my intention to perform – on all three cats – a procedure similar to “partial birth abortion.” I will use my Black & Decker drill to make a hole in the head of each cat, which will be large enough to accommodate the hose of an industrial vacuum cleaner. I will then use the vacuum to remove the brain matter from all three cats. Just as in “partial birth abortion” no anesthesia will be used on the object of the procedure.

I don’t get it. Why wouldn’t you just argue trying to do this with some newborns, for maximum effect, Mike? Other than you’re just a strange, angry human being? Why rope PETA into your abortion protest? They neither want to hurt cats nor write the abortion laws. I don’t understand the switch.

I understand that you may object to this demonstration as being illegal.

Wow, now that’s odd–that’s where he wants to start? Not that it’s hideously violent and obscene, and society will try to lock him up in a penitentiary? Is this supposed to be cool-headed satire?

But that objection does not have merit coming from you. You routinely destroy private property in order to make political points. Of course, these cats are no longer anyone’s private property. They have been discarded because they are too inconvenient or because they would be too much of a financial burden on their previous owners.

Oh, I see. Because the PETAs damage private property, you will torture and destroy and suck the brains out of helpless cats. So, somehow, the brutality of PETA’s lawlessness is equal to what Mike is going to do. It’s the law he’s desperate about, typical weirdo Conservative. I woulda thought by now he’d have at least hinted about the ‘evil’ nature of abortion, but, okay: for now, it’s raining cats and laws.

BTW, nobody is better at damaging private property than the military, but I somehow doubt that Mike’s going to maim recruits in front of the campus ROTC office.

Nor will the Women’s Resource Center be able to object on the basis of the illegality of my conduct. In March, they displayed pictures of nude children in Randall Library. People raised legal objections to the public display of pictures showing the breasts and pubic hair of these children. The feminist rebuttal was a simple First Amendment claim. Now, I’m claiming a right under the constitution to terminate life by removing brain matter.

‘Naked girl pictures’ equals ‘drilling holes in cat’s heads and forcibly removing their brains’. But strictly legally speaking. Of course, it’s so simple.

Incidentally, what Adams is so angry about here is The Century Project: the chronicling of individual women’s lives with nude photos from their births into their old age. Read about the head-scratching banning of the venerated show here. No wonder he wants to slaughter animals in front of the Women’s Resource Center–women are moved by the exhibition.

Finally, there will be objections that the blood of these cats will create some sort of health hazard. I’ve got that one covered, too. I debated a Ph.D student from UCLA on Fox News once in relation to a similar issue. His Professor of Theater was HIV positive and cut himself on stage so that his infected blood spilled out in front of the audience. He also relied on the First Amendment to defend his dramatic (literally) demonstration. We don’t have to worry about HIV positive cats. Once again, I am claiming a constitutional right to terminate life by removing brain matter.

Once again, because these people are non-lawmaking advocates of things he doesn’t like, Mike BREAKS THE LAW by drilling and killing helpless things.

After this little demonstration is over I will use the two clipboards, two pencils, and paper to create two sign up sheets. One will be used to sign students up for the student PETA chapter at UNC-Wilmington. The other will be used to sign students up for the student pro-life chapter at UNC-Wilmington. It will be very interesting to see which organization gains the most members in response to the demonstration.

After you do that to cats, can’t imagine anyone would join People for the Ethical Treatment of Animals. Mike Adams is obviously too right-wing overwrought to be remotely sentient at this point.

The Black Student Union might even want to recruit students at this event. After all, the one black cat is a symbol of the fact that 1/3 of those aborted in America are black. This is despite the fact that blacks are only 1/8 of the total population.

Finally, I will use the water hose and three plastic garbage bags to clean up any mess I might have made. I hope there will be no lasting trauma following my demonstration. After all, they are only cats. It’s isn’t like they’re human beings.

Wow, finally a mention of humans, in the last two words. He never even got to ‘babies’.

Maybe Charles Manson should have done the same thing, auctioned off a few pieces of jailbird art. Maybe drawn a ‘David and Goliath’ scene, where Goliath’s head is inscribed with the name ‘LaBianca’. Maybe Mark Chapman, too, with Goliath then ‘Lennon.’ Why shouldn’t they make money for their own legal defenses? By selling penitentiary art to their fawning admirers that brags about the killings?

Online auction to raise funds in Scott Roeder case

An Army of God manual. A prison cookbook compiled by a woman doing time for abortion clinic bombings and arsons. An autographed bullhorn.

These are among the items that abortion foes plan to auction on eBay and other Web sites in a fundraiser for Scott Roeder, the Kansas City man charged with killing Wichita abortion doctor George Tiller.

“This is unique,” said Regina Dinwiddie, a Kansas City anti-abortion activist who will sign the bullhorn. “Nobody’s ever done this before. The goal is that everybody makes money for Scott Roeder’s defense.”…

Among items that will go on the auction block, Dinwiddie said, are three drawings she received in the mail Wednesday from Roeder. Two drawings were done by another inmate at his direction, but Roeder autographed all of them.

“They’re wonderful pencil art drawings,” she said. “They were done in jail.”

One is a sketch of David and Goliath.

“It has David with a slingshot in one hand and the head of Goliath in his other hand and the name ‘Tiller’ on Goliath’s forehead,” she said. “On the corpse on the ground, it says ‘child-murdering industry.’ ”

Leach said he was continuing to collect items.

His own donation: An Army of God manual, an underground publication for anti-abortion militants that describes dozens of ways to shut down clinics, including bombing. Leach published a reprint of the manual in 1996 in his magazine, Prayer and Action News.

“I plan to cover up the offending eight pages of bomb recipes and instead insert a note saying that in order to avoid legal problems, we advise our bomb-loving friends to seek their bomb recipes in a U.S. Army Manual, which is approved by the Justice Department,” Leach said. “I will also enclose my April 1996 issue, which contains bomb-making excerpts from a declassified U.S. Army Manual widely available in Army surplus stores.”

Another item to be auctioned, Leach said, is a collection of recipes compiled in prison by Shelley Shannon, the Oregon woman who shot and wounded Tiller in 1993 and was later convicted in a series of abortion clinic arsons and bombings.

—————————————————————————————————————————————————–
UPDATE: eBay stopped the auction.

Not a Death Panel, a Death Mandate
by Terry Jeffrey

If you are someone who believes killing unborn children is a right that should be legally protected…

…as if this guy were acting legally? Well, except for shooting his girlfriend in the head?

…and made available to all pregnant women, and that the government should eventually take over the U.S. health care system, then you must believe that the government should get into the business of killing unborn babies.

What the Hell?

And if you believe that, then you believe that the law must compel certain government officials to cooperate in the killing of innocents.

In a government-run or government-funded health care system that guarantees access to abortion, there must be people in government responsible for making sure unborn babies get killed…

No, idiot, the ‘public option’ doesn’t fund abortions. Period.

This is a classic case of being completely blinded by the passion for a single political issue. By the time they’re done, the ‘Suzy Bs’ come closer to making the case for legalized abortions to save women from harm. Very poorly thought out and badly argued…

Man Kills Pregnant Woman After She Refuses to Have an Abortion
by LifeForAll on Tue 29 Sep 2009 10:34 AM EDT

In an instant, one man took two lives. The heartbreaking story out of Tennessee confirms what we know and the abortion industry refuses to admit: abortion does NOT help women.

Okay, let’s back this up. The woman was eight months pregnant, so there wasn’t going to be any abortion. That’s why he was charged with a second murder, the baby:

“School teacher Tonya Johnson was eight months pregnant. From the looks of it, her boyfriend Tarence Nelson didn’t want to have the baby. Deputies in Shelby County, Tennessee say the couple was arguing over whether she should get an abortion. But Nelson made the final call when police say he shot both mother and unborn child.”

Now just how is abortion’s legality relevant to this tragic story?

The problem with legalized abortion is that it creates a culture in which life’s value is only in its utility and life itself is completely dispensible [sic]. Today, a woman can dispose of her unborn child in an instant. Sadly, what this man did is not too different.

Can any of you get this argument? It seems like complete nonsense. Life either has value ‘only in its utility’, or ‘life itself is completely dispensible’. One or the other, you can’t have it both ways (unless you weirdly assign value to things in order to throw them away). Our culture de-values unborn babies’ lives, but the mother didn’t because she wanted the baby, but then the father didn’t want the baby, and what again does this have to do with legal abortions?

But abortion also devalues the woman.

Take for example, the countless women who are coerced into getting abortions by their boyfriends or husbands. Serrin Foster, of Feminists for Life, notes, “Domestic violence against single pregnant women at the hands of a boyfriend is being reported with greater frequency. Coercion crosses all socio-economic classes.”

How about that, did you get that? Abortion causes domestic violence. The legal opportunity for an abortion creates violence out of nothing, really? When it was illegal, pregnant girlfriends never got hurt, or beaten up, or killed. And better yet: women who they themselves did not want the baby never got hurt, or beaten up, or killed. And never killed themselves. Or died from back-room abortions. Or badly complicated childbirths. Or post-partum depression.

Abortion does not empower women. Rather it provides an escape route of sorts for men who do not want to take responsibility for a child. Those men who see abortion as a way-out will try to obtain it at any cost.

These are very weird arguments: abortion doesn’t empower women, hey everybody let’s talk about men. Actually, the way men are described here sounds like they’re the ones who feel powerless. As in ‘who allowed these damn women to have minds of their own?’

The abortion industry argues that if abortion was illegal, women would die. Wake-up everyone. Abortion is legal and women are being killed NOW.

Do the folks over at SBA List even bother to come up with a coherent group of talking points for their people? These arguments are terrible, completely from the far side of planet pro-life.

Incidentally, this is a picture of the guy, Tarence Nelson, from his MySpace page. I’m sure if abortions were illegal, he wouldn’t have had any reason to shoot his girlfriend.

Gawd knows why Megan McArdle thought we wanted to hear any of her thoughts on the Tiller assassination, which isn’t controversial in the least–unless you think terrorism is terrific. But some people will talk to the cracks in the sidewalk.

The War on The War on Abortion
01 Jun 2009 01:46 pm

Let me start off, in the obligatory way, by announcing that I am pro-choice. I don’t think abortions before, say, eight months weeks are even arguably murder.

Forget the arguing, are they actually murder? Chuck the pretenses, just gimme the truth. And charming chickenshit use of the ‘strike’ function, Megan.

Moreover, I don’t think many other people believe it’s murder, either, for all that they profess to. They mostly don’t, for example, want fourteen year old girls who have abortions hauled off to lengthy juvie terms, which is what we’d do if they’d committed infanticide. They wouldn’t turn their own daughters, sisters, or friends in if they found out they’d had an abortion, as I hope they would if said dear ones had murdered their own baby.

WOW, let me think about this one……hmmm, okay. You can count on me. I, too, would turn in any ‘dear one’ who ‘murdered their own baby’. PHEW. Wait, how the hell did we get here, incidentally? Last I remember, some poor doctor got shot dead in church. Confusing.

I don’t think that this is an obviously crazy belief–I can see the argument for life beginning at conception. But ultimately I don’t think it works, even for most people who profess it.

So. Now I can move onto the observation that if you actually think late-term abortion is murder, then the murder of Dr. Tiller makes total sense.

Toohhhhdddaaaalllllllyyy. *juicy fruit gum snap*

Putting up touching anecdotes about people he’s helped find adoptions, etc, doesn’t change the fact that if you think late-term abortions are murder, the man was systematically butchering hundreds of human beings a year–indeed, not merely butchering them, but vivisecting them without anaesthetic. I’m sure many mass murderers have done any number of kind things over the course of their lives, to which the correct response, if you’re trying to stop the murders, is “so?”

For The ‘murder stop’ Win: “……So?” *raises eyebrow* and *crosses leg* and *slowly slugs tongue in cheek* It’s Over!

Imagine a future in which the moral consensus has changed, and our grandchildren regard abortion the way we regard slavery. Who will the hero of history be: Tiller, or his murderer? At the very least, they’ll be conflicted, the way we are about John Brown.

I do not say such an outcome is particularly likely, although the more we know about fetal development, the more support for abortion seems to drop. But I don’t think that it’s particularly novel to note that our “instinctive” reaction to these things is partly, even largely, socially conditioned, not the product of deep rational thought.

Eerie. It’s like watching one of those You Tube clips with the audio slightly out of sync.

We accept that when the law is powerless, people are entitled to kill in order to prevent other murders–had Tiller whipped out a gun at an elementary school, we would now be applauding his murderer’s actions. In this case, the law was powerless because the law supported late-term abortions.

Holy shit–she’s right. The law is utterly powerless to stop what the law allows! We need laws to address the law, and laws to address those addressinalia, and then we must all be buried in penal code spaghetti smothered in estoppel marinara. Maybe then terrorists will leave church goers alone, or harmlessly slurp their shoelaces.

Moreover, that law had been ruled outside the normal political process by the Supreme Court…

The Supreme Court is alien to the ‘normal’ ‘process’? Politics is what’s ‘normal’ for the law? I want this woman’s gig, I promise you, I can be this dumb. It’s easy, watch: “The world’s tallest female econoblogger delivers her opinions on economics, business, and other moral hazards.” Boing!

..As I say, I think their moral intuition is incorrect. The fact that conception and birth are the easiest bright lines to draw does not make either of them the correct one. Tiller’s killer is a murderer, and whether or not he deserves the lengthy jail sentence he will get, society needs him in jail for its own protection.

Still, I am shocked to see so many liberals today saying that the correct response is, essentially, doubling down. Make the law more friendly to abortion! Show the fundies who’s boss! You know what fixes terrorism? Bitch slap those bastards until they understand that we’ll never compromise!

Well, it sure worked in Iraq. I think Afghanistan’s going pretty well, too, right?

Good point there. We should give in to the terrorists everywhere, and then all the petty troubles will go away. Incidentally, Megan, I want your iPod. Now, schnell.

Using the political system to stomp on radicalized fringes does not seem to be very effective in getting them to eschew violence. In fact, it seems to be a very good way of getting more violence. Possibly because those fringes have often turned to violence precisely because they feel that the political process has been closed off to them.

In America, who would this be? Poor people. But you’re not remotely talking about them, Megan, you’re talking about the ‘outlaw all abortions’ minority. Who occasionally become ‘shoot the usher while his wife is singing in the choir’ activists. Do you really believe that anyone’s beliefs, deeply and violently enough held, should be accommodated? Should we have taken a meeting with the KKK after the lynchings began?

We do not punish murderers by changing large sections of American law. We certainly don’t punish them by, in essence, shouting “nya, nya, nya, we’re killing more babies!!!!”* We punish murderers by sending them to jail, where they belong. If any of these changes to current law are justified, they’re justified on their own merits, not because they’ll piss off Tiller’s nemesis.

* I understand that those advocating such changes do not perceive themselves to be saying this. But if you’re trying to punish the gunman, and deter others, it’s their perception that matters. And what bothers them is that they think you’re killing more babies.

That was totally a good blog. Thanks, Megan!

Watch his ratings climb. Thanks to Jed Lewison at Daily Kos.