This is an archived article that was published on sltrib.com in 2015, and information in the article may be outdated. It is provided only for personal research purposes and may not be reprinted.
Jim Pouillon was murdered in 2009 by a man who objected to the anti-abortion pamphlet he was distributing. Press coverage was scant, but some pro-choice groups, to their credit, denounced the murder. The New York Times didn't run articles suggesting that over-the-top pro-abortion rights rhetoric — likening anti-abortion supporters to the Taliban, accusing them of seeking to oppress women, urging a crackdown on their ability to protest abortion — had set the stage for the murder.
Anti-abortion supporters refrained from suggesting that pro-abortion rights groups bore responsibility for the murder. (I'm not aware of any exceptions to this generalization.) That was to their credit: The suggestion would have been obscene.
Pro-abortion rights supporters have been less restrained in the wake of the recent murder of three people at a Planned Parenthood clinic in Colorado. They intend to turn the killings "into a political moment they say will put abortion opponents on the defensive." The Washington Post, which didn't cover Pouillon's murder, is reporting sympathetically on claims that the rhetoric of mainstream anti-abortion supporters is to blame for the killings. Reporters are challenging anti-abortion politicians about the murders, which also didn't happen in the Pouillon case. The governor of Colorado says that "inflammatory rhetoric" from anti-abortion supporters played a role.
Why might these cases have inspired such different reactions? It can't be that anti-abortion violence is a frequent occurrence, and thus fits into a larger story: It is only slightly more common than pro-abortion rights violence against adults, which is to say not very common at all.
I suspect the media is crediting the pro-abortion-rights spin on these killings because most journalists are themselves on this side and inclined to see anti-abortion supporters as extremists. And so reporters who would consider it unfair to blame cop-killings on the rhetoric of some Black Lives Matter activists don't have the same sympathetic reflex when anti-abortion supporters are in the dock.
Anti-abortion supporters have decried the killings in Colorado, and complained that they're being smeared. But it must be admitted that political rhetoric — all political activism, for that matter — can inspire violence. Many on this side say that abortion is an evil on par with slavery. And some deranged people may try to play the part of John Brown in that analogy. Thankfully, such people are exceedingly rare.
When violence is committed in the name of a political movement, its responsible members have a duty to condemn it and to seek to root it out of their ranks — two things that anti-abortion supporters have done. Do members of a movement have a duty to restrain their words for fear that madmen will commit outrages based on them? I think the answer is that political activists should refrain from saying anything more inflammatory than needed to make their case against the injustice that moves them — not so much from fear of the deranged as from love of their fellow citizens. The reason Hillary Clinton should stop saying that peaceful, run-of-the-mill anti-abortion supporters are like terrorists is not that she's likely to inspire violence; it's that saying it makes our political debates even nastier and dumber than they already are.
Anti-abortion rhetoric isn't the real issue for pro-abortion rights supporters anyway. The bedrock anti-abortion view — which, if you haven't figured it out already, I share — is that abortion is the unjust killing of living human beings. Any expression of that view, any political action taken to advance it, is going to offend many who favor abortion rights, and could lead some people to violent acts. Abortion rights supporters who want anti-abortion supporters to stop saying that abortion kills unborn children aren't objecting to the anti-abortion movement's rhetoric; they're objecting to its existence.
And they're trying to score political points by associating the vast majority of anti-abortion supporters with a tiny violent fringe. What should, but will not, give them pause is the example of the man who died trying to defend the victims in Colorado. Few people are as courageous as Officer Garrett Swasey. But if you want an example of anti-abortion principles in action during this crime, look at him and not his killer.