Monday, March 2, 2009

Anti-Abortion Terrorism And Raffles

It'd actually be pretty nice if the religious right makes lots of noise about George Tiller in Kathleen Sebelius' confirmation hearings. He's the abortion doctor whom she had dinner with after he won a raffle. It would probably be fine even if she'd invited him for dinner by choice, but in these circumstances all honorable Americans will agree that the customs of raffles must be obeyed.

And then there's the fact that Tiller was shot in both arms by an anti-abortion activist in 1993. This seems like the kind of detail that is good at making its way into a story. Anti-abortion activists have done a pretty good job of not shooting people for the past few years, unlike the 1990s. (Nowadays they're more likely to set clinics on fire and blow stuff up.) If the fundamentalists want to remind people of their doctor-shooting ways, that's an arrangement we can live with.

2 comments:

Anonymous said...

This seems like the kind of detail that is good at making its way into a story.

You might think, but I haven't actually seen it in any of the stories that say "Anti-abortion activists are expected to scream loudly about Sebelius because she once had dinner with a DOCTOR WHO IS UNDER INDICTMENT FOR PERFORMING LATE TERM ABORTIONS," as if anti-abortion activists weren't going to scream like little babies over anyone that Obama appointed. (Srsly, did anyone ever report that pro-choice activists didn't like Bush's appointees?) So empirically, I have to say that it's not the sort of detail that finds its way into stories.

You might also think that they'd mention that the prosecutions were started by Phill Kline, who got voted out of two different offices over his outrageous behavior and basically punched in the nuts by the courts too. I think the latest prosecutions are somewhat independent (the prosecutors dropped the most serious of Kline's charges and filed some misdemeanors), but still, you might think it'd be worth mentioning that Tiller has basically had to deal with Inspector Javert for years. But they don't.

Anonymous said...

Also, following the links gets me to a RWNM post beginning "Concerned Women for America is CONCERNED." Are they consciously modeling themselves on lolcats?