Ted Cruz, however, isn’t so sure. “The media promptly wants to blame him on the pro-life movement when at this point there’s very little evidence to indicate that,” the Republican presidential candidate said in Iowa on Sunday afternoon.
Um, but what about the law enforcement official telling The Washington Post and others that Dear (who distributed anti-Obama pamphlets, according to a neighbor) explained the shooting by saying “no more baby parts”?
In one sense, I agree with Cruz. The antiabortion movement did not kill those three people in Colorado Springs. The one responsible is the deranged gunman himself. But it’s a different matter to ask whether the often-violent imagery used by conservative leaders on abortion is unwittingly giving the unhinged some perverse sense of justification to contemplate the unspeakable.
Just days before the shooting, Cruz trumpeted an endorsement from an antiabortion activist who once called killing an abortion doctor a “justifiable defensive action” and who leads a group, Operation Rescue, where a colleague did prison time for a conspiracy to bomb an abortion clinic.
The activist whose endorsement Cruz celebrated, Troy Newman, is also on the board of the Center for Medical Progress, which made the surreptitious Planned Parenthood videos that prompted Cruz and many other conservatives to accuse the organization of selling “baby parts” — the phrase Dear allegedly used. The videos, including footage from a Planned Parenthood in Denver, not far from Colorado Springs, were followed by a wave of threats and smaller attacks on the organization’s facilities.
Republican presidential candidate Mike Huckabee, who has flirted with the idea of using federal troops to block access to abortion, dismissed the Supreme Court’s authority and said that we should “protect children instead of rip up their body parts and sell them like they’re parts to a Buick.”
Newman, the Operation Rescue official whose endorsement Cruz touted, has called women who have abortions “murderesses.” He said societal responsibility “rightly involves executing convicted murderers, including abortionists, for their crimes in order to expunge bloodguilt from the land.” Australia, calling Newman a risk to the community, revoked his visa to visit the country this fall.
Newman and his organization say they are peaceful and law-abiding. That may be so. But in an environment where such a man and message are embraced by a top-tier presidential candidate, we shouldn’t be surprised if people with a few screws loose get other ideas.
