Power

Three People Are Dead. According to Its Own Yardstick, It Is the ‘Pro-Life’ Movement’s Fault

Over and over again we've seen that the GOP and the anti-choice movement writ large blatantly disregard the likely consequences of their own rhetoric, and then cry foul when asked to do some soul-searching.

David Daleiden, head of a previously unknown organization called the Center for Medical Progress . FRCAction / YouTube

Read more of our articles on the Colorado Springs Planned Parenthood shooting here.

During a speech this past September to the Greater Houston Partnership, an influential Texas business association, U.S. senator and presidential aspirant Ted Cruz (R-TX) asked for a moment of silence in honor of Deputy Darren Goforth, a Houston-area police officer who had been shot and killed at close range in August after stopping at a gas station to refuel his police cruiser. The alleged assailant is a 31-year old Black male named Shannon Miles.

Cruz continued his remarks by claiming that police and other first responders “are finding themselves under assault right now at an unprecedented level.”

“Speaking to the press after his speech,” wrote reporter Christopher Hooks in the Texas Observer, “Cruz made it clear that he believed this “assault” [against Goforth] originated in the White House.”

“The violence we’re seeing directed against law enforcement is a direct manifestation of the harsh rhetoric and the vilification of police officers and law enforcement that sadly has come all the way from the top,” Cruz said. “Senior administration officials,” he continued, including leaders at the Department of Justice, “have chosen to vilify law enforcement.”

Asked by another reporter how he could blame the president for a specific police killing, Cruz replied: “Rhetoric and language has consequences. It has consequences. And over and over again we’re seeing police officers targeted, and the president has a powerful bully pulpit.”

Rhetoric and language do indeed have consequences. It seems, however, that the fundamentalist right only admits this when they want to lay blame or antagonize for reasons of political and electoral expediency, no matter how tenuous the connection between cause and effect. But certainly this connection never comes up when it’s time to take responsibility for the obvious results of their own hate speech and inflammatory statements.

Cruz’s assertions about Obama’s “rhetoric” and police violence, for example, bear no connection to reality. As Radley Balko pointed out in the Washington Post, claims that police are facing unprecedented dangers are outright false. “Policing has been getting safer for 20 years,” Balko wrote. Both the actual numbers and rates of police fatalities are at the lowest they’ve been in over 50 years. “You’re more likely to be murdered simply by living in about half of the largest cities in America than you are while working as a police officer,” he concluded.

And it would be difficult for any objectively rational person to read “incitement to violence against police” in President Obama’s statement after Goforth’s murder, in which he talked about calling the officer’s widow and then said:

I also promised that I would continue to highlight the uncommon bravery that police officers show in our communities every single day. They put their lives on the line for our safety. Targeting police officers is completely unacceptablean affront to civilized society. As I said in my State of the Union Address, we’ve got to be able to put ourselves in the shoes of the wife who won’t rest until the police officer she married walks through the door at the end of his shift. That comfort has been taken from Mrs. Goforth. So we must offer her our comfort—and continue to stand up for the safety of police officers wherever they serve.

But for Cruz and others in the GOP, this indictment of Obama serves a far-right meme percolating since at least the beginning of this year when, in response to Black Lives Matter (BLM)—the organic movement against police brutality that coalesced after the killing of Michael Brown in 2014—the right countered by blaming the victims of excessive police violence for their own deaths, denying the persistence of racism in our society, and claiming that efforts by Black people to assert their basic humanity were resulting in “unprecedented” dangers for police.

Given the right’s reliance on a diminishing base of older, white voters who increasingly appear to be driven by fear, ignorance, and prejudice, the conservative movement’s determination to take and maintain political power requires a kind of Through the Looking Glass-journey, into a world in which efforts to address problems (such as racism, climate change, health care, refugees) based on facts, data, and evidence actually are at fault for the existence of the problems themselves and those who can’t or won’t face reality or take responsibility for those problems shift blame no matter the plausibility of their claims.

While eager to lay blame where no evidence exists to support it, the right is and has long been loathe to take responsibility for its own rhetoric. And we can see this in real time in the aftermath of the most recent episode of violence against reproductive health providers.

Last Friday, two civilians and one police officer died and nine others were wounded in a vicious and wholly predictable attack at a Planned Parenthood clinic in Colorado Springs, Colorado. The alleged gunman, Robert Lewis Dear Jr., who used what the New York Times described as an assault-style rifle to blast his way into the health-care facility, reportedly said “no more baby parts” during his arrest.

This would be a direct reference to false and defamatory rhetoric ceaselessly repeated by GOP candidates and the anti-choice movement over the past six months to claim Planned Parenthood profited from the sale of fetal body parts for research, when not a shred of evidence of illegal or unethical activity has been produced.

It’s no secret that the GOP, now fully co-opted by what was once a radical Christian fringe, long ago set its sights on destroying access to reproductive health care in the United States. With callous disregard to the effects on the nearly three million a year who receive primary reproductive health care at Planned Parenthood clinics, the right has made a religious crusade of efforts to shutter Planned Parenthood, persistently threatening to shut down the entire U.S. government in an effort to do so. State legislatures and governors throughout the country have voted to strip funding from family planning and other forms of reproductive health care, destroying an essential keystone of public health. And an entire industry now exists devoted to, among other things, manufacturing lies about abortion and contraception; passing laws to reduce access to abortion care and make criminals of doctors and patients; picketing clinics; harassing and threatening providers and patients; and denying women medically accurate information.

In this environment, heated rhetoric about abortion providers is only one lit match away from a raging forest fire of hatred and violence culminating in unstable people taking matters into their own hands.

Let’s assume for the purpose of argument that Ted Cruz or some other GOP leader had said the following, playing off Cruz’s own words above:

Clinic personnel, reproductive health care providers, and patients at clinics are finding themselves under assault right now at an unprecedented level. The violence we’re seeing directed against clinics, providers, and patients is a direct manifestation of the harsh rhetoric and the vilification of doctors and patients that sadly has come all the way from the top of the GOP ticket and permeates throughout the base of the Republican Party, in which women’s bodies are treated as public property. Presidential candidates, congresspeople and state legislatures have chosen to vilify women’s health providers at every level. Rhetoric and language has consequences. It has consequences. And over and over again we’re seeing health providers targeted. We have a powerful bully pulpit and we must stop using discredited inflammatory rhetoric.

In this case, Cruz would be right: Reproductive health-care providers are indeed facing unprecedented levels of attack. Just this September, the FBI released a heightened threat assessment, noting that “it is likely criminal or suspicious incidents will continue to be directed against reproductive health care providers, their staff and facilities,” and warning clinics of increased threats based on “an uptick in attacks on reproductive health care facilities.” In fact, the FBI tracks what it now calls the “pro-life extremist movement.”

Yet despite ample evidence of this, the anti-choice movement took steps to spray gasoline on what was already a highly flammable situation, and then lit the match.

This past summer, a previously unknown organization called the Center for Medical Progress (CMP) run by a previously unknown 20-something anti-choice operative named David Daleiden released heavily doctored videos of conversations with abortion providers that had been recorded surreptitiously by Daleiden and others operating under completely false pretenses. The edited versions of these videos, purporting to provide evidence that Planned Parenthood clinics were selling and profiting off the sale of fetal tissue and “baby parts,” bore no resemblance to the original footage taken by Daleiden, which in fact showed exactly the opposite, that clinics were providing a service, at cost, according to strict legal and ethical guidelines, to women who of their own volition wanted to donate fetal tissue to research. In short, and to repeat, there was not a shred of evidence of charges levied by CMP, and in fact, it is CMP now under investigation by the attorney general of California.

Not allowing facts to stand in the way of its crusade, the right began and has pursued a relentless campaign of attacks on Planned Parenthood specifically and reproductive health providers generally, most recently accusing them of trafficking in body parts.

It would require a book-length list to repeat the false statements and unproven allegations against PP made by anti-choice politicians and actors in the past six months alone, but here are a few samples:

In a modern recreation of the blood libel used to defame and isolate Jews and which fostered mob violence and pogroms, Daleiden claimed to the National Review that providers were “haggling over the price of living children.”

In July, shortly after release of the first CMP videos and without any effort to verify incendiary claims made in the videos, Cruz released a statement saying:

Today’s news regarding allegations that Planned Parenthood is possibly selling the body parts of the babies it has aborted is sickening. There is no place for taxpayer funding of organizations that profit from taking away innocent life, much less profiting off the bodies of the lives they have stolen. Congress should immediately begin an investigation of Planned Parenthood’s activities regarding the sale and transfer of aborted body parts, including who is obtaining them and what they are being used for. And it should renew efforts to fully defund Planned Parenthood to ensure that its morally bankrupt business receives not one penny of taxpayer money. [Emphasis added.]

Cruz has continued to hammer this theme on the campaign trail. In a September op-ed, Cruz wrote about the “horrifying and barbaric nature” of Planned Parenthood, asserting, among other things, that “American taxpayers are currently forced to fund this likely criminal organization, which barters and sells the body parts of unborn children.”

Well after the videos were found to be falsified, GOP candidate Carly Fiorina, who as noted by University of California researcher Carole Joffe, “has the habit of forcefully doubling down on her [false] claims [even] when she is confronted with the truth,” continued to claim Planned Parenthood was guilty of “harvesting baby parts,” despite evidence that the video to which she pointed was falsified.

Mike Huckabee has made attacks on abortion providers and on Planned Parenthood a centerpiece of his campaign, claiming that clinics are “selling babies’ body parts like the parts of a Buick.” Huckabee has variously called Planned Parenthood a “kill for hire organization,” compared abortion providers to Hitler, and stated that “only since the Nazis have we seen such coldblooded indifference to human life.”

Variations on this theme have been endlessly repeated for months by presidential candidates Ben Carson, Donald Trump, Marco Rubio, and Jeb Bush on TV, radio, and in print, and continued well after threats to clinics were directly linked by the FBI to the release of the CMP videos.

“Since the release of the initial video by pro-life organization Center for Medical Progress in July, investigators say there have been nine criminal or suspicious incidents across the country,” according to a report on the FBI findings by Jeff Pegues of CBS News.

The incidents include reported cyber-attacks, threats, and arsons. The FBI believes the incidents are, “consistent with the actions of lone offenders using tactics of arsons and threats all of which are typical of the pro-life extremist movement.”

Such threats were well-known before the FBI report and well before the release of the inflammatory videos. The National Abortion Federation (NAF) has tracked incidents of violence against providers since 1977 and has found that since 1977, an “organized campaign by anti-abortion extremists … has resulted in escalating levels of violence against women’s health care providers … [as] anti-abortion extremists have chosen to take the law into their own hands.”

NAF research shows that what began as “peaceful protests with picketing moved to harassing clinic staff and patients as they entered clinics and eventually escalated to blockading clinic entrances,” and later evolved to include arsons and bombings, the use of butyric acid to vandalize clinics, anthrax threat letters to frighten clinic staff, and, eventually, the series of murders of doctors that began in the 1990s and continues with other shootings and violence to this day.

In its 2014 National Clinic Violence Survey the Feminist Majority Foundation found that while “only” 19.7 percent of clinics nationwide experienced “the most severe types of anti-abortion violence,” down from 23.5 percent of clinics nationwide in 2010, clinics surveyed in 2014 nonetheless reported “significantly higher levels of threats and targeted intimidation of doctors and staff than in prior years.” For example, the survey found that in 2014, doctors and clinic staff at 28 percent of clinics surveyed were targeted by pamphlets containing personal information—photos, home addresses, and other information—up from 18.8 percent of clinics surveyed in 2010, and that stalking of physicians has increased, from 6.4 percent of clinics in 2010 to nearly 9 percent in 2014.

You cannot be a responsible public leader and not know of, understand, and be vigilant about the environment in which such violence thrives.

Yet in the wake of Dear’s alleged murderous spree on Friday, the GOP and its anti-choice supporters furiously sought to exculpate themselves from responsibility while still perpetuating the same falsehoods and rhetoric that led to violence in the first place. According to the New York Times, “Cruz, chafing at the suggestion that conservative criticisms of Planned Parenthood might have played a role in the attack at a Colorado clinic on Friday, lashed out on Sunday at the ‘vicious rhetoric on the left, blaming those who are pro-life.'” The vicious rhetoric of the left?

Reuters reported that while he called the shooting “an incredible tragedy,” Huckabee “dismissed talk that harsh anti-abortion rhetoric may have contributed to the attack,” and Fiorina “said on Fox News it was ‘typical left-wing tactics’ to demonize opponents of abortion or the ‘sale of body parts’ because of what she said was ‘obviously a tragedy.'”

The crocodile tears of sorrow over the shooting poured forth throughout the anti-choice community. As Jason Salzman reported here, Personhood USA spokeswoman Jennifer Mason, who is based in Colorado, said in a statement that her organization “opposes all abortion-related violence, against born and unborn people,” but went on to criticize 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.”

What may be the most outrageous (and creepy) performance of denial and wide-eyed lack of accountability came from Daleiden himself, who claimed that of course he does not condone violence, and gee, he’s nervous he might be blamed and is concerned about his “friends at Planned Parenthood.”

Yes, Ted Cruz, rhetoric and language have consequences. And over and over again we’ve seen that the GOP and the anti-choice movement writ large blatantly disregard the likely consequences of their own rhetoric, and then cry foul when asked to do some soul-searching.

But by its own yardstick, the anti-choice community has this blood all over its hands.