Congress passed, and President Obama has signed into law, a four-year extension of some controversial non-permanent provisions in the PATRIOT Act including roving wiretaps (authorized for a person rather than a communications line or device ) of court-ordered searches of business records and of surveillance of non-American “lone wolf” suspects without confirmed ties to terrorist groups. Sen. Rand Paul held up the bill until he was given a vote on an amendment that would have restricted powers to obtain gun records in terrorist investigations. It was defeated 85-10 after lawmakers received a letter from the National Rifle Association stating that it was not taking a position on the measure.

After narrowly defeating a measure to attach a timetable for withdrawing troops from Afghanistan, the House of Representatives passed a $690 billion defense bill. President Obama has threatened to veto it over its languaging expanding the president’s war authority beyond going after those behind the 9/11 attacks, preventing any funds from being used to transfer detainees at Guantanamo Bay, undermining the repeal of “don’t ask, don’t tell,” and reaffirming the Defense of Marriage Act. The bill also bars any U.S. ground forces from Libya, but the House is ignoring the Obama administration’s call for a vote on authorizing our current involvement there.

House Republicans also continued their anti-abortion crusade by banning health centers from using federal money to train doctors on how to perform abortions. But at least they finally made time for that jobs agenda.

At the same time, most Senate Republicans decided to follow their counterparts off a cliff by voting in favor of the Ryan plan to turn Medicare into a voucher system. Among the Republicans that voted against it were Sens. Scott Brown and Olympia Snowe who face reelection next year. This helps them both in the general, but Snowe in particular faces a tea party challenge and this adds fuels to the fire. Sen. Richard Lugar, also facing a uphill primary battle, voted in favor, hopefully giving Democrats an opening if he makes it out. Sens. Susan Collins, Lisa Murkowski, and Rand Paul also voted against it, though in Paul’s case, it was because he didn’t think he went far enough. His own budget plan, along with Sen. Pat Toomey’s and the White House proposal, also failed.

And before leaving for Memorial weekend, Senate Republicans also set up a “pro forma” session to block President Obama from recess appointing Elizabeth Warren to the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau.

Republicans in the U.S. House of Representatives have passed a bill that shows their priorities:

H.R. 3, also known as the “No Taxpayer Funding for Abortions Act,” would go beyond making the Hyde Amendment, which has already banned federally-funded abortions for the past 30 years, a permanent federal law. The legislation, sponsored by Reps. Chris Smith (R-N.J.) and House Speaker John Boehner (R-Ohio), would also enact strict procedural requirements for private insurance companies that cover abortions and deny tax credits to small businesses that purchase health insurance plans offering abortion coverage. Eighty-seven percent of private insurance plans currently include such coverage.

Further, H.R. 3 would eliminate privately funded insurance coverage for abortion in the state-based exchanges set up by the Affordable Care Act. The policy team at NARAL Pro-Choice America estimates that 13.5 million women who receive health coverage through Medicaid and other government-sponsored programs would permanently lose access to abortion coverage if the measure, facing a floor vote Wednesday, passes.

But it hardly stops there:

Some of the more extreme ramifications of the bill, which have attracted a great deal of negative media attention since its introduction in January, include a provision that could subject victims of rape and incest to abortion audits by the IRS. Mother Jones reported in March that H.R. 3 could turn IRS agents into “abortion cops” tasked with determining whether a woman used any kind of tax benefit to pay for a procedure not precipitated by rape or incest.

Marcus Owens, a former longtime IRS official, told Mother Jones that if a woman received a tax credit for medical costs related to abortion, “on audit [she] would have to demonstrate or prove, ideally by contemporaneous written documentation, that it was incest, or rape, or [her] life was in danger. It would be fairly intrusive for the woman.”

H.R. 3 has achieved further notoriety through its attempt to narrow the definition of “rape” as it relates to abortion. Lawmakers pulled language from the original measure that allowed federal funding for abortions only in the case of “forcible rape” after drawing widespread public criticism, but Mother Jones reported on Tuesday that House Republicans are using a backdoor legislative maneuver to ensure the bill achieves the same effect.

But this what they ran on and promised during the campaign, along with spending tax money to defend DOMA. Oh wait, no? Of course, this legislation isn’t going to get through the Senate, and even if it did, the White House has said it would be vetoed.

Meanwhile, Republicans in the Texas House and Senate have reached an agreement on the bill that would require women seeking abortions get sonograms of the fetus conducted via a trans-vaginal probe and at least listen to a description of the resulting image:

State Rep. Sid Miller, R-Stephenville, said he and state Sen. Dan Patrick, R-Houston, had agreed on “the cutout” exempting victims of rape and incest from undergoing the sonogram procedure and on an exemption requested by state Sen. Carlos Uresti, D-San Antonio, for women living more than 100 miles from the nearest abortion provider. The bill would require them to have the sonogram at least two hours before the abortion instead of 24.

Once passed it will be signed into law by Governor Perry whom had laughingly designated it as “emergency legislation.” Conservative lawmakers are also pushing bills to create “pro-life” license plates and defund Planned Parenthood (then even left a little time for the budget).

Oh well, at least they haven’t gotten “campus-carry” through.

On the heels of that deceptively edited video we’ve all heard about, House Republicans voted to defund NPR (violating their own pledge to provide 72 hours for consideration of a bill in the process) - but it is a symbolic move given that it will not make it through the Senate, let alone the President’s desk. It was mainly an effort to restore party unity after fifty-four conservatives defected Tuesday to vote against a second short-term spending bill that would forestall a government shutdown for three more weeks. That bill passed with the help of Democrats and then cleared the Senate.

Also, all Republicans on the House Energy and Commerce Committee voted against an amendment that states that global warming exists, regardless of cause. Next on their agenda? I’m not sure you want to know:

Under a GOP-backed bill expected to sail through the House of Representatives, the Internal Revenue Service would be forced to police how Americans have paid for their abortions. To ensure that taxpayers complied with the law, IRS agents would have to investigate whether certain terminated pregnancies were the result of rape or incest. And one tax expert says that the measure could even lead to questions on tax forms: Have you had an abortion? Did you keep your receipt?

Oh, and let’s not forget they also want to rollback Wall Street reform.

Here in Texas, the “campus carry” gun bill passed in the House Homeland Security and Public Safety Committee and is all but assured to pass the full House and be signed into law (it already passed the Senate). A public hearing on the bill was suspiciously scheduled during spring break week, when many students were unlikely to be around to make their voice heard (many, if not most, college administrations and student communities have come out the legislation, including conservative Texas A&M). A good letter in opposition by three respected medical scholars and administrators, two of which are published experts on campus mental health, was published in the New York Times yesterday.

Over on the Senate side, a  finance subcommittee voted Thursday to put $6 billion more into public education than budget writers included in their proposal. $5.6 billion would go to direct aid to school districts and $389 million to textbooks and other classroom materials. And Gov. Perry finally relented on using some of the $9.4 billion Rainy Day Fund, but only $3.2 billion for the Fiscal Year 2011 budget gap. He continues to oppose using any of the funds to help close the 2012-13 biennium budget shortfall.

From the Texas Tribune:

The controversial abortion sonogram bill has passed the Senate 21-10. Sen. Dan Patrick, R-Houston, got the two-thirds vote needed to bring it to the floor, effectively ensuring it would pass… 

Under Patrick’s legislation, a doctor would have to describe to a woman the details of a sonogram hours before performing the abortion. The doctor would show the woman the sonogram and play the heartbeat audibly, unless the patient opts out. Even if the patient opts out, the doctor would have to describe the development of the fetus, including its dimensions. Women with fetal abnormalities, or who have been a victim of rape or incest, are given an exception.

Patrick got some much-needed assistance from Sen. Carlos Uresti, D-San Antonio, who agreed to give the measure his support if Patrick accepted his amendments. Uresti’s amendments include changing the sonogram time from 24 hours in advance to two hours in advance. 

The change from 24 hours to 2 is good since many women have to travel to the few places one can still get an abortion in Texas, but this bill is still an unnecessary impediment with little scientific evidence that it will change any minds. The purpose is simply to make obtaining what is still (technically) a legal medical procedure that much harder.

Anyway, since this ”emergency” legislation is set to breeze through the Texas House, maybe they’ll find time to address our budget problems before the session ends?

It’s been a bad week:

In the meantime, House Republicans are in for a world of hurt on the public relations front — the floor action this week has created an image of a party that doesn’t have things completely under control.

The latest problem came Wednesday afternoon, as Republicans failed to pass a mostly cosmetic measure that would attempt to recover $180 million in U.S. funding from the United Nations.

Homeland Security Committee Chairman Peter King (R-N.Y.) lobbied against the bill, with the backing of New York Mayor Michael Bloomberg’s police chief. The Congressional Budget Office deemed that the bill “would have no effect on the federal budget,” despite being part of House Majority Leader Eric Cantor’s signature “YouCut” program.

A day earlier, more than two dozen rank-and-file Republicans defied their leadership and defeated an extension to the PATRIOT Act despite frantic lobbying by GOP Whip Kevin McCarthy of California and committee chairmen on the House floor. GOP freshmen were so poorly informed about the legislation, Republican insiders said, that they were calling the office of class president Rep. Austin Scott of Georgia to inquire about the bill. The new lawmakers simply needed more information from their leadership, none of which they were given previously, freshman lawmakers told POLITICO.

And just hours before that debacle unfolded, the Ways and Means Committee yanked a trade bill from the floor because of concerns from conservatives in the party, while knowing that Democrats would be unlikely to support it.

There have also been internal concerns about the GOP messaging operation and the inability of the party to tout job-boosting legislation — much of the oxygen in the House has been sucked up by the health care repeal and the debate over spending cuts. The message that cutting spending creates jobs has not totally taken hold.

Perhaps because that message has no basis in reality? And it’s clear that the Republican majority would rather spend most of their time trying to redefine rape and further restrict abortion than put any legislative effort forward to create jobs (much like Republicans in the Texas legislature). And GOP troubles aren’t showing any signs of letting up soon:

The learning curve has been exacerbated by the lofty promises House Republicans made in the run-up to their taking over the chamber.

For example, Boehner and his top leaders suggested they would move bills through committees and allow an open, transparent amendment process.

But at this point, not a single bill has been sent through a committee in regular order, and Republicans held the PATRIOT Act vote open beyond its 15-minute window Tuesday night. Open rules have morphed into “modified open rules.” (see: House to pass Patriot Act extension)

The political road ahead will only get tougher for Boehner in coming weeks. House Republicans have a narrow window to pass a government funding measure — it is slated to come to the floor next week — and are vowing to do so with a freewheeling, open amendment process that could backfire if critics on the right or the left offer politically tough amendments.

Boehner also has to wrestle with a solid bloc of GOP lawmakers concerned about raising the $14.3 trillion debt ceiling, a target that will be hit in coming weeks. The Ohio Republican has vowed to pair that bill with legislation calling for deep spending cuts, a position that has been roundly criticized by the White House and Democrats as risking a financial catastrophe if it fails to pass.

What an embarassment these clows are.

Last month I wrote about the “Manhattan Declaration”, wherein a unified front of Protestant, Catholic and Orthodox leaders got together to petulantly whine that nobody pays enough attention to abortion and who’s sleeping with who anymore. This NY Times Magazine article profiles Robert George, a Princeton professor who was one of the lead authors of that declaration and is touted as the “conservative Christian big-thinker” by the article (that’s actually the title of the article.) What challenging and novel ideas does George bring to the table?

Last spring, George was invited to address an audience that included many bishops at a conference in Washington. He told them with typical bluntness that they should stop talking so much about the many policy issues they have taken up in the name of social justice. They should concentrate their authority on “the moral social” issues like abortion, embryonic stem-cell research and same-sex marriage, where, he argued, the natural law and Gospel principles were clear. To be sure, he said, he had no objections to bishops’ “making utter nuisances of themselves” about poverty and injustice, like the Old Testament prophets, as long as they did not advocate specific remedies. They should stop lobbying for detailed economic policies like progressive tax rates, higher minimum wage and, presumably, the expansion of health care — “matters of public policy upon which Gospel principles by themselves do not resolve differences of opinion among reasonable and well-informed people of good will,” as George put it.

In the American culture wars, George wants to redraw the lines. It is the liberals, he argues, who are slaves to a faith-based “secularist orthodoxy” of “feminism, multiculturalism, gay liberationism and lifestyle liberalism.” Conservatives, in contrast, speak from the high ground of nonsectarian public reason. George is the leading voice for a group of Catholic scholars known as the new natural lawyers. He argues for the enforcement of a moral code as strictly traditional as that of a religious fundamentalist. What makes his natural law “new” is that it disavows dependence on divine revelation or biblical Scripture — or even history and anthropology. Instead, George rests his ethics on a foundation of “practical reason”: “invoking no authority beyond the authority of reason itself,” as he put it in one essay.

Huh. Well, it seems to me like this guy isn’t so much a “big-thinker” as he’s the smartest guy who thinks the same stupid, moralizing and paternalistic crap as people like James Dobson. Different road, same result I guess, only everybody thinks you’re smarty-pants if you constantly refer to “natural law” and name drop Aquinas.  Here’s the always-worthy-of-a-read Fred Clark on this “doctrine” and it’s proponents:

Their own awesomeness is a topic the authors address with relentless relish. Everything else in the document is merely a foil for this central subject. The threat of The Gay is grave, ominous and potentially world-altering, they warn, repeatedly, before reassuring us that their heroic resolve and moral superiority will save the day. Even the passages in which they luxuriate in their own massive humility are saturated with this swaggering self-regard.

This all-consuming self-absorption coupled with an utter lack of self-awareness plays like something from a Christopher Guest movie. I’m only half-convinced at this point that Robert George is even a real person and not a Fred Willard improv run amok. The authors possess that same remarkable knack for straight-faced seriousness while making uproariously ridiculous assertions.

And at one level it’s impossible to view these pretentious peacocks, these Malvolios grimacing and strutting in their yellow stockings, without succumbing to the derisive laughter they deserve. Such self-inflation demands deflation. And anyway it can’t be helped. I mean, just listen to them:

We pledge to each other, and to our fellow believers, that no power on earth, be it cultural or political, will intimidate us into silence or acquiescence.

The whole thing is like that — like a bad parody of the St. Crispin’s Day speech from Henry V. Except of course that Henry was outnumbered. Here instead we have a group of powerful elites, men at the center of political, cultural, academic and ecclesiastical privilege bemoaning their oppression at the hands of the homosexuals and religious minorities they claim run the world. They are overlords posing as underdogs. (It’s hard out there for a pope.)

[...]

So ultimately, even though we’re being treated to grand examples of the Blowhard Fool — a comic type that dates back before Plautus — this isn’t funny. And formally, structurally, we’re dealing with tragedy. There is no resolution, no reconciliation, no marriage. (Shakespearean shorthand: Tragedy means everyone dies; comedy means everyone gets married.) Indeed, the whole production here is an explicit rejection of the possibility of reconciliation and an adamant denial of marriage. So this isn’t comedy. We can’t help but laugh at these tragic clowns, but the laughter has a bitter aftertaste.

The important thing here, though, is to recognize why these buffoons have embraced this buffoonery. Their silliness is not a sideshow. The pompousness is the purpose. The fatuousness is the function. This is, as the kids on the Internets like to say, a feature, not a bug.

The anti-gay, anti-abortion, anti-religious minority Manhattan Declaration is not primarily about opposing any of those things. That’s all just collateral damage. The primary purpose of the Manhattan Declaration, its raison d’etre, is to help the authors and signatories convince themselves that they’re better than everyone else. The ridiculous, overweening pride is what it’s for.

Chuck Colson, Robert George and Timothy George are blitzed out of their minds on the drug of smug. They’re hard-core umbrage junkies, snorting offendedness, mainlining grievance, freebasing uncut self-righteousness.

Big thinker indeed.

Inspired by the example of Martin Luther King Jr., Christian culture warriors declare that they will stand together as one in an attempt to suppress the rights of those whose conduct they do not condone:

…45 evangelical, Roman Catholic and Orthodox Christian leaders have signed a declaration saying they will not cooperate with laws that they say could be used to compel their institutions to participate in abortions, or to bless or in any way recognize same-sex couples.

“We pledge to each other, and to our fellow believers, that no power on earth, be it cultural or political, will intimidate us into silence or acquiescence,” it says.

The manifesto, to be released on Friday at the National Press Club in Washington, is an effort to rejuvenate the political alliance of conservative Catholics and evangelicals that dominated the religious debate during the administration of President George W. Bush. The signers include nine Roman Catholic archbishops and the primate of the Orthodox Church in America.

They want to signal to the Obama administration and to Congress that they are still a formidable force that will not compromise on abortion, stem-cell research or gay marriage. They hope to influence current debates over health care reform, the same-sex marriage bill in Washington, D.C., and the Employment Non-Discrimination Act, which would prohibit discrimination based on sexual orientation.

They say they also want to speak to younger Christians who have become engaged in issues like climate change and global poverty, and who are more accepting of homosexuality than their elders. They say they want to remind them that abortion, homosexuality and religious freedom are still paramount issues.

“We argue that there is a hierarchy of issues,” said Charles Colson, a prominent evangelical who founded Prison Fellowship after serving time in prison for his role in the Watergate scandal. “A lot of the younger evangelicals say they’re all alike. We’re hoping to educate them that these are the three most important issues.”

Don’t forget kids, millions may live in poverty or die of hunger, the global economy is a wreck, climate change threatens all of nations, but the real issues of consequence are the sexual practices of a minority of Americans!

Ira C. Lupu, a law professor at George Washington University Law School, said it was “fear-mongering” to suggest that religious institutions would be forced to do any of those things. He said they are protected by the First Amendment, and by conscience clauses that allow medical professionals and hospitals to opt out of performing certain procedures, and religious exemptions written into same-sex marriage bills.

Well right, but you can’t get anybody’s attention or sympathy (or votes) be moralizing at them, at least not openly. Far better to pretend you are the oppressed minority, so as to shield your bigory and more grand-standing in the guise of religious tolerance! A technique which, by the way, only works when most people actually agree with your intolerance.

More disability-as-diversity nonsense, this time from Gary Bauer and Daniel Allot (only this time reworked as a defense of Sarah Palin:)

Polls suggest public support for abortion is highest when the child is likely to have a deformity or a genetic condition.

Anti-disability bias pervades our legal and medical institutions. Studies show that parents informed that their unborn child will be disabled are often given only the negative aspects of the life to come.

In a 2005 study, Dr. Brian Skotko, a physician at Children’s Hospital Boston, interviewed mothers who had received a definitive prenatal diagnosis of Down syndrome. He found that most were not informed about “the positive potential of people with Down syndrome, nor did they feel like they received enough up-to-date information or contact information for parent support groups.”

Other studies have concluded that many pregnant women feel pressured to undergo invasive prenatal testing and to abort if results are positive for Down syndrome.

At least 28 states recognize “wrongful birth” lawsuits, in which parents of disabled children are compensated when doctors neglect to tell them their unborn child may be at higher risk of a genetic abnormality in time to abort.

These biases have helped produce an abortion rate of up to 90 percent for babies with Down syndrome, cystic fibrosis, spina bifida and other genetic conditions.

With the introduction of universal prenatal genetic testing, as well as more sophisticated and less invasive testing methods, many disability rights advocates worry about what former Washington Post writer Patricia Bauer predicts could be “the elimination of an entire class of people.”

Incidentally, a column by Patricia Bauer in the Washington Post in 2007 is what prompted me to write this:

In no way do I believe that the disabled-even those profoundly disabled-do not have a right to life, cannot enjoy life to some satisfactory extent even by a highly subjective measure, or should not be brought into the world by parents who decide to have them. But the idea that we should encourage parents to bring disabled children into the world in the interest of “genetic diversity” is absurd. Disability is not diversity. The idea that disabled people are objectively “defective” (and I use the world in a clinical sense) in some manner, does not at all mean that they are less worthy of life than non-defective people. I understand that throughout human history, there have been societies who thought so: neither the ancient Spartans nor the more modern Nazis thought much of killing the disabled at birth or later. And I understand that even in our society, there are those who-if they don’t quite discriminate against the disabled-still regard even only the physically disabled as “lesser” humans than the rest of us. But the antidote to this backwards and uneducated thinking is not to argue that the disabled are only “different” from the rest of us and that we should actively encourage disability in the name of diversity.

Again: I am not opposed to the idea that people choose not to abort a fetus that is diagnosed with a disability. Neither am I opposed to the idea that some couples may choose to abort that fetus. That is a profound and difficult choice that every couple in that position must struggle to make in accordance with their own consciences. What I am opposed to, is the idea that women should feel compelled to give birth to a disabled child because they would similarly give birth to a non-disabled child. And what I am particularly opposed to, is the idea that disability represents some type of “diversity” that justifies deliberately bringing disabled children into the world. Accepting disabled children as fully realized and valuable human beings capable of living meaningful lives is inarguably correct. Arguing that profound disabilities make someone no more different than having a different skin color, is inarguably wrong.

After lots of arm-twisting on anti-war Democrats in the House of Representatives, Congress voted to approve funding for the wars in Iraq, Afghanistan in an emergency supplemental. This is supposed to be the last time such funds will be provided for outside of the normal budget. IMF funding and the “cash for clunkers” program made it into the final bill, but it does not include the $80 million the White House requested to start effort to close Gitmo. The bill also prohibits detainees from being released in the United States and allows the transfer of detainees for prosecution only after Congress receives a plan detailing the risks.

The Senate passed a separate bill to block the release of detainee abuse photos. President Obama had given his formal word to classify the photos to placate those who wanted to put the prohibition in the war funding bill, which would have further weakened its chances of passing. If and when it will come up for a vote in the House is unknown.

Senate Republicans blocked a resolution condemning violence against women’s health-care providers. The Senate did pass a formal apology for slavery, and will be followed by the House next week. It’s hard to believe this hasn’t happened already. The House did pass a resolution knocking Tehran’s crackdown on protesters, with Rep. Ron Paul being the only “nay” vote.

Lastly, on the health care front, House Dems presented a plan that does have a public option, but that was left out of the Senate version. What ultimate comes out of Congress is anyone’s guess at this point, assuming that something does that is. The only thing we know for sure is that it appears it’s a long road ahead…

UPDATE: For the first time in 20 years, the House unanimously approved four article of impeachment against U.S. District Judge Samuel Kent of Texas accusing him of sexually assaulting two female employees and lying to judicial investigators and Justice Department officials. This now sets up a trial in the Senate.

Fred Clark flays the hypocrisy of the anti-abortion movement. Nothing new, except of course Clark has a perspective unique in the liberal-ish blogosphere:

In 1994, as now, the mainstream evangelical groups responded to the slayings in Pensacola by saying all the right things — offering a raft of statements unambiguously denouncing the violence and condemning Paul Hill’s actions.

I remember those statements very well because I wrote one of them. In the ’90s, I was the staff writer for an evangelical — and, therefore, anti-abortion — nonprofit, and so it fell to me to write the first draft of a statement after Paul Hill’s killing spree.

The statement we wrote was consistent with what our group had been saying all along. My boss, in whose name this statement was released, was a lifelong pacifist, a devout Mennonite who has, for decades, unfailingly opposed all forms of violence. And as a good Mennonite, his rhetoric too was always studiously nonviolent — peaceable to the point of blandness, actually.

But at the same time we were drafting and issuing this statement, I was reading dozens of similar statements from other evangelical groups whose rhetoric had never been marked by anything like my boss’s Mennonite pacifism. These were groups that routinely spoke of abortion as “murder” or “mass-murder,” and that routinely spoke of legalized abortion as an “American Holocaust.” They had, for years, been using precisely the same rhetoric and making exactly the same arguments that Paul Hill was now using to attempt to justify his double homicide.

Those groups’ condemnations of Paul Hill then — like their condemnations of Scott Roeder now — ring hollow. Such condemnations seem to be self-refuting. How can they condemn men like Hill or Roeder just for taking their own arguments seriously?

Paul Hill argued that abortion was the moral equivalent of the Nazi Holocaust — just like the National Right to Life Committee, the Southern Baptist Convention, the Christian Coalition, Focus on the Family and dozens of other evangelical groups said it was. If that’s true, Hill said, then he wasn’t merely justified, but obligated to take up arms against abortionists. If you’re confronted with an evil equal in magnitude to that of Adolf Hitler — as all these groups insisted was the case — then surely one is obliged to do more than vote Republican every four years in the hopes of one day appointing enough judges to change the law of the land. Confronted with what all of these groups assured him was the Holocaust, he decided to become Claus von Stauffenberg.

Yet when Hill repeated their own argument and their own rhetoric back to them, these groups all recoiled. They all claimed to share Hill’s premise, but not to share his conclusion. That won’t work. Hill’s violent conclusion arose logically from that shared premise. If he was a madman to be condemned — as all those groups suddenly insisted he was — it was because of the madness of that premise. So how was it possible they could repudiate him without also repudiating that rhetoric that compelled him to act?

[...]

Now here we are again, 15 years later, as the arguments of the anti-abortion movement are again being proved disingenuous by their own self-refuting statements condemning the latest lethal fruit of their rhetoric of “mass-murder” and “Holocaust.” Once again some sad, disturbed man has committed the error of taking their rhetoric more seriously than it was ever meant by the people who supposedly believed it to be true.

Didn’t Scott Roeder realize that it was all just a game? Didn’t he appreciate that all this talk of Holocaust was just a gimmick to get his fellow Kansans to support a repeal of the estate tax? Didn’t he understand the difference between really believing that abortion is “mass-murder” and just indulging in the smug posturing of self-righteousness that makes the members of the Anti Kitten-Burning Coalition feel a little better about themselves?

No, apparently, he didn’t. Apparently he was just crazy enough to believe that these people meant what they said, crazy enough to believe that they believed their own words and that he should believe them too.

To believe these people — to believe that their words matter or that their words are truthful or that their arguments are made in good faith — is madness indeed.

I’m not as comfortable flinging about charges of hypocrisy because I like to give people credit for actually believing what they say they believe. But Fred Clark knows these people in a way we don’t, so who am I to say he’s wrong? Maybe it is all just a game. You know, abortion’s “murder” until somebody gets murdered over it, and then it’s back to “Well now we’re not saying you should murder someone just because they’re a murderer.”

Will Saletan also tries to address this conundrum in his Slate column, with less success:

So is Roeder getting support from the nation’s leading pro-life groups? Not a bit. They have roundly denounced the murder. The National Right to Life Committee says it opposes “any form of violence to fight the violence of abortion,” preferring instead “to work through educational and legislative activities to ensure the right to life for unborn children, people with disabilities and older people.” Americans United for Life agrees that it was wrong to kill Tiller because “the foundational right to life that our work is dedicated to extends to everyone.”

I applaud these statements. They affirm the value of life and nonviolence, two principles that should unite us. But they don’t square with what these organizations purport to espouse: a strict moral equation between the unborn and the born. If a doctor in Kansas were butchering hundreds of old or disabled people, and legal authorities failed to intervene, I doubt most members of the National Right to Life Committee would stand by waiting for “educational and legislative activities” to stop him. Somebody would use force.

The reason these pro-life groups have held their fire, both rhetorically and literally, is that they don’t really equate fetuses with old or disabled people. They oppose abortion, as most of us do. But they don’t treat abortionists the way they’d treat mass murderers of the old or disabled. And this self-restraint can’t simply be chalked up to nonviolence or respect for the law. Look up the bills these organizations have written, pushed, or passed to restrict abortions. I challenge you to find a single bill that treats a woman who procures an abortion as a murderer. They don’t even propose that she go to jail.

The people who kill abortion providers are the ones who don’t flinch. They’re like the veterans you sometimes see in war documentaries, quietly recounting what they faced and did. You think you’re pro-life. You tell yourself that abortion is murder. Maybe you even say that when a pollster calls. But like most of the other people who say such things in polls, you don’t mean it literally. There’s you, and then there are the people who lock arms outside the clinics. And then there are the people who bomb them. And at the end of the line, there’s the guy who killed George Tiller.

If you don’t accept what he did, then maybe it’s time to ask yourself what you really believe. Is abortion murder? Or is it something less, a tragedy that would be better avoided? Most of us think it’s the latter. We’re looking for ways to prevent abortions—not just a few this month, but millions down the line—without killing or prosecuting people. Come and join us.

Unfortunately Saletan also manages to create a false equivalence between Tiller and his murderer, as opposing soldiers in the “battleground” that is abortion in this country. But you get his point. If you really believe that abortion is mass murder, then you should also believe that it’s okay to murder those who administer abortions. However, there are those whom you cannot accuse of harboring any hypocrisy, at least not on their abortion stance:

While most pro-life leaders condemned the May 31 murder of a controversial abortion provider inside his Wichita, Kan., church, one former Southern Baptist Convention official called it an answer to prayer.

“I am glad George Tiller is dead,” Wiley Drake, the SBC’s former second vice president, said on his Crusade Radio program June 1.

Tiller, one of only a few doctors in America who still performed a controversial late-term procedure termed “partial-birth” abortion by critics, was gunned down in the foyer of Reformation Lutheran Church just after the morning worship service began. He was serving as an usher for the congregation, where he was a long-time member.

Drake, pastor of First Southern Baptist Church in Buena Park, Calif., called Tiller “a brutal, murdering monster” and said he is “grateful to God” that the physician is no longer around.

“There may be a lot who would say, ‘Oh that is mean. You shouldn’t be that way,’” Drake said. “Well, no, it’s an answer to prayer.”

Now you can accuse the man of being a fraudulent representative of the religion he purports to preach, but you certainly can’t accuse him of hypocrisy on abortion. Abortion providers are murderers, and deserve death. But people like Drake only highlight the problem for the rest of his ilk, who are comfortable with the rhetoric but not with what naturally follows from such rhetoric. People whom, after the tragic death of Tiller, are forced to issue standard repudiations of the all-too-logical violence of their fellow believers.