Several pundits have blamed Republican lawmakers for last week’s shooting at a Planned Parenthood clinic in Colorado Springs, Colo., explaining in multiple lengthy op-eds that the fatal incident was prompted by “hateful” pro-life rhetoric.
Police say Robert Lewis Dear opened fire last Friday at a Planned Parenthood clinic, killing three people, including a police officer, and wounding nine more.
Though there are no confirmed details regarding Dear’s motivation, newsrooms everywhere have cited an anonymous police official who claimed the gunman mumbled something about Planned Parenthood’s controversial practice of harvesting organs from the remains of aborted fetuses. But no one involved in investigating the shooting has confirmed this.
Still, op-ed writers in some of the nation’s largest newsrooms have convinced themselves that the gunman was indeed influenced by the pro-life movement, and that the Republican Party bears blame for the attack.
“Inflammatory rhetoric inflames. Words — extreme language and overheated representations — have consequences,” Washington Post columnist Ruth Marcus wrote in an article titled, “Republicans deserve some blame for the Planned Parenthood shooting.”
She explained that if unverified reports claiming Dear made some mention of “baby parts” prove to be true, then “Republican politicians who fueled the overwrought and unsupported controversy over selling baby parts bear some measure of responsibility.”
“This is, literally, a manufactured issue, cobbled together from doctored videotapes and overheated accusations,” she said, referring to a series of undercover videos produced by a pro-life activist group, the Center for Medical Progress, which have prompted multiple congressional investigations.
“The organization’s activities have been so mischaracterized, and the practice of providing fetal tissue so overblown and so manipulated by lawmakers and politicians, that blame for the ensuing violence falls more heavily on them,” she added, referring specifically to the GOP presidential candidates.
“The criminal guilt for their deaths rests with the shooter,” she concluded. “The moral responsibility, from what we know so far, is more widely shared.”
She is far from alone in holding this belief. CNN contributor Sally Kohn said much of the same in an op-ed published this week, arguing also that “right-wing” ideologues have created an environment ripe for mass shootings.
“We don’t have full information about the shooter and his motives, but if what we know so far is accurate, those who spread this incendiary lie about Planned Parenthood are morally implicated in such a heinous crime,” Kohn wrote in a post titled “Incendiary rhetoric can produce violent results.”
She conceded that, “the shooter was nuts.” However, she added, “he can be a mentally unstable lunatic as well as a product of deliberately inflammatory anti-abortion extremism.”
“Spread incendiary lies against Planned Parenthood and you’re going to get horrible results. Anti-abortion extremists and right wing activists should do more than distance themselves from the violence. They should stop spreading heinous lies that help incite violence,” Kohn concluded.
The New Yorker’s Amy Davidson opined, “Do the Republican candidates think that nobody is listening to them? Are they even listening to themselves?”
New York magazine’s Ed Kilgore added that, “right-to-life leaders are relying on a ritualized tradition of deploring violence they developed and refined during the 1980s and 1990s, when terrorism against abortion facilities and providers was a relatively frequent phenomenon.”
“Perhaps none of these influences affected Robert Dear, and quite likely it was a coincidence that his murder spree occurred in Colorado Springs,” he added. “Nevertheless, it is not enough for conservatives to deplore violence in practice while justifying it in theory.”
“They should be willing and able to denounce the lethal twin ideas that their political opponents are quasi-Nazis and that patriots stockpiling weapons have not only the right but the obligation to use bullets if ballots don’t suffice,” he concluded.
The author of each of the op-eds admit that they don’t have all the details of the shooting, and that they are making large assumptions about Dear’s state of mind. Their arguments also closely match the arguments laid out by Planned Parenthood.
“It is offensive and outrageous that some politicians are now claiming this tragedy has nothing to do with the toxic environment they helped create,” Dawn Laguens, executive vice president of Planned Parenthood Federation of America, said Sunday.
“Even when the gunman was still inside of our health center, politicians who have long opposed safe and legal abortion were on television pushing their campaign to defund Planned Parenthood and invoking the discredited video smear campaign that reportedly fed this shooter’s rage,” the statement added.
None of the pieces mention that Dear was a recluse who lived in a shack without running water or electricity, or answered how GOP candidates campaigning miles away might have influenced his decisions.
