Says Father Pavone:
The biggest danger is the enemy within. It is the fear and self-doubt to which we can all too easily fall victim. It is the voice inside that makes us feel guilty for saying “Abortion is murder” or “Abortion is a holocaust” or “The babies who are being killed need to be defended now.”
Why yes, there should be some serious introspection taking place right about now among the fetus fetishist movement. It's not just the words - it's also about how that word is delivered.
The issue is also the blood-soaked rhetoric and imagery that the fetus fetishists employ. These images are designed and intended to shock people. To the more rational among society, these images are propaganda and have little impact. But, as has been shown repeatedly over the years, there are those in the anti-abortion movement whose contact with reality is sufficiently weak that these images and the blood-soaked rhetoric can drive them to violence - sometimes, it seems, to a killing rage.
The claim has been made that the man who kill Dr. Tiller was "mentally unstable", and a "loner". Perhaps he was all of the above. But he was also a consumer of the propaganda that the fetus fetishists have been producing for so many years.
The monsters who have carried out these assassinations may not be "sanctioned" by the screaming banshees of the anti-choice movement, but that doesn't mean that they are not influenced and driven by the propaganda of this movement.
Dr. Martin Luther King Jr, in his Letter from the Birmingham Jail, responded to criticisms that the civil rights activists were fomenting violence. No, he said. That’s like saying the person who owns money is fomenting the activity of the robber. To expose the violence that is already occurring, to call it what it is, and to sound the alarm that it has to stop, is not to foment violence.
The pro-life movement is a movement of non-violence.
I won't even touch the slimy attempt to co-opt Martin Luther King's work in the name of the anti-choice movement. It's more important to recognize the lack of understanding of the responsibility that the propagandists carry.
We should also recognize the repeated belligerence of the fetus fetishists - whether it is the juvenile behaviour of the University of Calgary's "Campus Pro Life" group, or the shrieking loons one sees accosting patients, staff and family outside of abortion clinics, this is not a group that conducts itself civilly. This is a movement that has lost its perspective, and needs to take a step back to re-examine its tactics, strategy and goals.
2 comments:
Some valid points for sure, but it's their freedom of speech just like it is mine and yours to say or display what they want - whether I like it or not.
Goes to the old Evelyn Beatrice Hall quote - "I disapprove of what you say, but I will defend to the death your right to say it".
I've said it before, and I'll say it again. Freedom of Speech, like other rights is not an absolute. It exists in tension with other aspects of the whole notion of civil and human rights.
What you are talking about is "freedom of speech without consequences", and I argue that there is no such thing.
The consequence of the bloody rhetoric of these people is the permission it gives the borderline cases to carry out their bloodier fantasies.
I'm sorry, but there are consequences, and there absolutely must be accountability.
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