Anti-choice activists have wide range of responses to the Planned Parenthood shooting
For an RH Reality Check post today, I collected comments from anti-choice activists to in response to Friday’s shooting at a Planned Parenthood center in Colorado Springs.
The comments ranged from a total rejection of violence to support for the domestic terrorist, who appears to have targeted Planned Parenthood because of his disagreements with the organization. From RH Reality Check:
“Whatever his motives, I condemn the violent actions of the shooter in Co Springs today,” state Rep. Gordon Klingenschmitt (R-Colorado Springs),who once praised a fellow Republican legislator for comparing Planned Parenthood to ISIS, wrote on Facebook. Klingenschmitt once saidthat “left-wing politicians want [women] to kill their babies.”
Meanwhile, a former GOP nominee for a seat in the Colorado legislature supported the gunman.
Nate Marshall, who was nominated by Republicans in 2014 for a state house race, but later dropped out, posted an angry response to the shooting on Facebook. Marshall later deleted the comment.
“My comments on the situation in Colorado Springs is simple and this: this guy is a hero,” wrote Marshall, who was found in 2014 to have ties to white supremacy groups. “Children are not being slaughtered and butchered for profit by left wing scum today.”
“Yesterday three innocent born people were murdered along with an unknown number of preborn children,” wrote Gualberto Garcia Jones, author of Colorado’s 2014 personhood amendment, in an email Saturday. “We are called to personally work against both. As a side note, I would say that the death of the Christian, pro-life police officer is especially tragic since he leaves behind a wife and two young children. My prayers are with all the victims regardless of their personal views.”
Personhood USA spokeswoman Jennifer Mason, who is based in Colorado, had similar thoughts, but also criticized the news media’s coverage of the tragedy, writing that “the media is failing to report that innocent babies are killed in that very building every day that they are in business.”
Colorado Right to Life spokesman and Denver talk-radio host Bob Enyart alleged that violence by pro-choice activists goes unreported.
Enyart: Colorado RTL contrasts the eight people unjustly killed since 1993 by known anti-abortion vigilantes with the eighty women killed by pro-abortion violence for refusing to abort their own children. (See this in the excerpt from ARTL’s anti-vigilantism article.) Those murdered moms are invisible to the media.
When a journalist advocates a “right” to dismember an unborn child (an act that would put an animal rights activist into a rage if done to a preborn cow), that kind of psychological dysfunction helps explain why the pro-killing media including the Huffington Post ignores those mothers who were brutally killed. And then there are the hundreds of women sexually assaulted by their own abortionists who are also ignored. But who cares; certainly no one in the media. The silence is for the greater good. No?
I could not verify Enyart’s claims.
The Colorado Springs Gazette reported that the alleged terrorist, Robert Lewis Dear, was not one of the regular protestors at the Planned Parenthood center where the shooting occurred.
Dear was not a protester at the Colorado Springs Planned Parenthood clinic, said Joseph Martone Jr., who regularly attends prayer services outside the building on Centennial Boulevard.
Martone said Dear’s name was not familiar to members of the Colorado Springs Respect Life group that meets twice weekly for Mass at the Planned Parenthood on the mornings the clinic reportedly does surgical abortions.
“Nobody seems to know him,” Martone said.
On Breitbart, John Nolte wrote:
Nolte: Almost entirely for purposes of convenience, nearly 60 million innocent children have been butchered since the Supreme Court manufactured a Constitutional right to kill your unborn child.
In the coming days, as the defenders of this barbaric practice get more shrill, we must not be intimidated. In fact, with the media spotlight on abortion and on the pro-life movement, we must use this opportunity to continue to make our case for the million-plus innocent lives that will be legally massacred next year.
Outside or inside the womb, senseless violence must be condemned.
Those who condemn one and not the other have no place in a civil society.
Many anti-choice politicians who’ve been condemning Planned Parenthood with such intensity in reacent months, such as Colorado’s Rep. Mike Coffman, Sen. Cory Gardner, Rep. Doug Lamborn, and others, have yet to even mention the organization’s name in their communications about the tragedy, as far as I can tell.