She knows what’s up.
On November 27, a mass shooting left three dead and nine wounded at a Planned Parenthood clinic just miles from the headquarters of the Religious Right flagship, Focus on the Family. Was the shooting exactly what conservative Christian presidential candidates and members of congress wanted? Maybe, maybe not. But it is what they asked for. Republican members of the Religious Right incited violence as predictably as if they had issued a call for Christian abortion foes to take up arms. Inciting violence this way is called stochastic terrorism:
“Stochastic terrorism is the use of mass communications to incite random actors to carry out violent or terrorist acts that are statistically predictable but individually unpredictable. In short, remote-control murder by lone wolf.”
In an incident of stochastic terrorism, the person who pulls the trigger gets the blame. He—I use the male pronoun deliberately because the triggerman is almost always male—may go to jail or even be killed during his act of violence. Meanwhile, the person or persons who have triggered the triggerman, in other words, the actual stochastic terrorists, often go free, protected by plausible deniability.
She’s also not afraid to name names.
We can be confident that communications teams for Carly Fiorina, Marco Rubio, Jeb Bush, Ben Carson, Mike Huckabee, Ted Cruz, Rick Santorum and others are scrambling at this very moment to figure out the nuances of plausible deniability—weighing how best to distance themselves from the violence that killed a police officer and two others without making their protestations of surprised dismay sound as hollow as they actually are—without actually denouncing the disgust and dehumanization of women who have abortions and those who provide them.
But of course they’re going to get away with it. They’ve got obedient masses who were trained in the churches to obey authorities.
Certainly. They compare Planned Parenthood to Auschwitz, call abortion mass murder. Obviously the appropriate response to mass murderers is to do whatever it takes to stop them. CNN invited an anti-abortion Congressman to respond to the attack and his response was that Planned Parenthood is barbaric and vile. If you really believe that there is no moral difference between a fetus and a baby, then the moral logic compels violence.
I must point out that nobody, including the Pope, believed anything remotely like that until the late 19th Century. There is not one word about abortion anywhere in the Bible, Old Testament or New. A fact which nobody ever seems to point out and which does not embarrass them in the slightest. In fact abortion was commonplace in the Biblical milieu and nobody thought anything of it. This is not about babies or the sanctity of life, it is about the fear of independent women and the ickiness of sex.
It’s not hard to imagine what would have happened if his name had been Amed Ali. It would have instantly been called terrorism. At the same time there probably been even more emphasis on the cop who was killed, and whitewashing of the fact that attacks on abortion providers have always been by white, male Christians. Then there would eventually be someone like World Net Daily or Bryan Fischer claiming that Planned Parenthood and ISIS are allies, and that the terrorist had some other goal in mind.
Especially with the religious right urging them on, Christian terrorists are a greater threat to Americans than any other flavor of terrorist.
Both Sanders & Clinton have weighed in with respectable #StandWithPP statements.
Last I heard, among the Republicans only Ted Cruz has officially responded, with a broad issue-avoiding platitude.
cervantes @ # 1: There is not one word about abortion anywhere in the Bible, Old Testament or New.
Both Exodus and Numbers address abortion. In the first, when two men fight and cause a woman to miscarry, it’s treated as a property crime to be set right with a fine. In the latter, if a man suspects his wife of adultery, the priest goes through a ritual, including concocting a potion, such that if guilty she will have a god-induced abortion (euphemized in the King James Version as “her thigh shall rot”).
The Exodus bit is not about abortion, per se, although it does suggest that a fetus is not a person. The meaning of the passage in Deuteronomy is not clear, some people think it’s about inducing abortion but it’s ambiguous. But in any event, if there is anything about abortion in the Bible, it’s for it.
timguegen @ # 2: … attacks on abortion providers have always been by white, male Christians.
The first (non-fatal) shooting of Dr. George Tiller, outside his Wichita, KS clinic in 1993, was carried out by a woman in the “Army of God” named Shelley Shannon (currently held in a Minnesota federal prison and due for release in 2018). At least one other woman has been convicted for a “stink bomb” chemical attack on a northeastern clinic, and episodes of clinic harassment by women go beyond counting.
However, the rest of your description hangs true, so far as I know: hardcore antichoicers come just about entirely from whites and Christians (including “messianic” Jews-for-Jesus).
cervantes @ # 5: The Exodus bit is not about abortion, per se…
“Abortion” is often defined as an induced miscarriage; whether that includes both deliberately and accidentally induced seems unresolved.
The New International Version [click “Tools” and then “Bibles” for different renderings] translates the key passage in Numbers as “her womb will miscarry”; all the others apparently stick with the “thigh” euphemism.
Have I missed something relevant in Deuteronomy?
Sorry, I meant Numbers, not Deuteronomy. Here’s the Skeptics Annotated Bible on abortion. Definitely a big embarrassment to the Bible thumpers.
In addition to the honking horn politicians, the folks at the Center for Medical Progress have considerable responsibility for this terrorist attack, given that this particular lone wolf terrorist specifically addressed “baby parts.”
Cervantes — I’m curious how it’s known that abortion was common place in the Biblical milieu.
Pierce R. Butler:
However you define it, pro-choicers don’t support the “right” of pregnant women to miscarry because they were involved in fights. Because there isn’t any such right; it’s just a thing that can happen in some circumstances, which makes them a victim not a perpetrator. The authors clearly agreed that something about that situation was wrong or illegal or criminal, which certainly doesn’t mean they thought it was good or acceptable, so it’s extremely odd that you would try to frame it that way.
cervantes @ # 8 – Thanks for a handy & bookmarkable link!
consciousness razor @ # 10: The authors clearly agreed that something about that situation was wrong or illegal or criminal, which certainly doesn’t mean they thought it was good or acceptable, so it’s extremely odd that you would try to frame it that way.
I have some difficulty following you here. By “authors” do you mean those who wrote Exodus 21:22-23? They plainly thought accidentally induced miscarriage deserves a fine, and in # 4 I explicitly said they viewed it as a crime. So why, other than my well-known general-purpose villainy, would you say I tried “to frame it” as “good or acceptable”?
Now the Numbers passage says pretty clearly that a woman who miscarries (or suffers upper-leg atrophy) after undergoing the ritual and drinking the priestly potion has thus proved herself guilty of adultery and deserves shunning by the tribe: a negative outcome, for her, but explicitly Divinely Approved™ and therefore a Good Thing® by definition. But that’s the Biblical “framing”, not mine.
Cervantes @ 1:
No one at all “cared” about abortion right up to the 1970s (here in the States, anyway). I had an abortion in 1975, and there wasn’t so much as a whisper of fuss. The rise of the religious right took place in the late ’70s, with Donald Wildmon, who was pretty much a laughingstock for a number of years, but the rise gathered steam in the ’80s and hasn’t stopped since. Randall Terry, who started Operation Rescue, a flat out terrorist organization, didn’t gather attention or publicity much until 1986.
When it comes to the bible, there isn’t any problem with killing fetuses, infants or children, true, but in many of the passages involved, the woman who is pregnant, or has an infant or child[ren] is happily ripped up, burnt alive, or dispatched by other gruesome means. That aligns with christian right thinking, because it’s always been about the women, not the so-called babies. One thing the OT does make very clear: those male babies and children are worth more money than the females.
Yes.
I wasn’t going to bother with it, but they didn’t make a clear and explicit distinction like “property crime.” That’s a category we’re using in modern times. Of course, there is a very general tendency in the Bible to treat women like slaves, property, or extremely unfairly in other ways. I wouldn’t contest that.
However, the fact that a fine is imposed doesn’t imply a notion of property. The fact that invariably they must defer to a “husband” or another man, instead of having rights and legal standing of their own, does imply that women aren’t treated like full citizens with the same status as men. Perhaps they’re another class of citizens (if they had a coherent concept of citizenship), or they’re anything else that’s short of “property” or otherwise distinct from it, since they didn’t need to think in your terms, but at least you can actually make that case.
Because otherwise I don’t understand how this dialogue is supposed to go. We think abortions are good or acceptable, and Bible-thumpers don’t. The claim was basically that the Bible doesn’t even discuss abortions, positively or negatively (so they shouldn’t claim Biblical support for their views, as if Biblical support is something we should care about if they had it). The Exodus passage isn’t relevant, because it isn’t the sort of thing we’re claiming is good or acceptable anyway — it’s not an “abortion” in the relevant sense, even if a sophist could define it as such. Obviously, that passage also doesn’t take a stance that it’s acceptable, so it couldn’t be taken as any kind of implicit support for elective abortions (i.e., the modern procedures at issue, about which the Bible has literally nothing to say). Nor is it implicitly saying anything against abortions. Because it’s simply not about abortions.
I thought you were suggesting the Exodus passage is being nonchalant about the miscarriage of a fetus (which you’re inexplicably equating with an elective abortion), because it is merely treated as property and presumably nothing very serious, which wouldn’t make much sense. But admittedly, it’s not clear if you believe it’s regarding the woman as property or the fetus as property (or both), and I’m not sure how I’m supposed to interpret the Bible as making either claim in modern terms that we would understand.
Gotta give credit where due: Huckabee Admits Planned Parenthood Shooting Was ‘Domestic Terrorism’.
Of course, being Huckabee, he had to throw in some crap about Planned Parenthood’s “clinics where many millions of babies die”, but getting anything right counts as a step up for The Huck™.
Per the same article,
“Of course, being Huckabee, he had to throw in some crap about Planned Parenthood’s “clinics where many millions of babies die”…”
By equating domestic terrorism with performing a safe and effective medical procedure he did way more than that. He propagandized in support of terrorist acts.
““There is no excuse for killing other people whether it’s happening inside the Planned Parenthood headquarters, inside their clinics where many millions of babies die or whether it’s people attacking Planned Parenthood,” [Huckabee] opined.”
You have to wonder how these people sleep at night. Oh wait, that’s right… atop a large pile of money and snug underneath their Aryan Jesus blankets. Fucking parasites.
consciousness razor @ # 14: … they didn’t make a clear and explicit distinction like “property crime.”
Not quite in so many words, but given that the passage in question immediately follows the “eye for an eye, tooth for a tooth” decree, it seems they had some sort of distinction between what we now call “property” and “personal” crimes – and that this was (at least much closer to) the former.
Because it’s simply not about abortions.
I (think I) see your point, but I’m not sure how it applies. We’re juggling three different perspectives here: the ancient Hebrew priesthood’s, the modern pro-choice liberal, and the modern anti-choice fundagelical (yes, all those terms have fuzzy definitions, but I hope you can find them workable for present context).
For the modern antichoicers, taking their rhetoric at face value (I think we agree other levels usually work better), abortion is “about” fetuses – so the thinking in Exodus does matter since, to them, the “scriptures” matter. That passage is indeed “nonchalant” in the original meaning of “not heated” (an attribute very rare in our day’s antichoice discourse).
I suspect the Torah authors did customarily view both women and their pregnancies as male property – particularly in the verses in question, which simply describe a general rule rather than tell a story with individual characters. That seems utterly consistent with what we know about Semitic/Canaanite culture at the time these passages were written down, and in the previous eras when said tribal customs emerged. Translating any of that into 21st century terms indeed causes a lot of problems – but so long as powerful factions insist on doing so, we still need historically sound cogent rebuttals.
robro @ # 9: I’m curious how it’s known that abortion was common place in the Biblical milieu.
I thought I had a book covering the early history of abortion, but can’t find it at the moment, so will provide you with this Wikipedia link which cites Sanskrit, Greco-Roman, Vedic, and Babylonian (~1760 BCE, pre- or very-early Hebrew) sources discussing abortion.
Very informative article. Would love to read more like this.
How is jumping on a Trampoline and kill all the terrorist? lol kidding. Killing can’t be any solution
That reminds me of Sarah Palin, the Republican NRA in Arizona, and their victim Gabby Giffords. We need more target paper with images of NRA members on ’em.
madscientist @ 20:
How, exactly, would that help? You have people in this country (U.S.) who are fanatically devoted to guns, guns, guns, ammo, ammo, ammo, more guns, and publishing targets with said devotee images on it, why, that would make them see sense, and drop the gun fondling, oh my yes. (Insert Near Fatal Eyeroll Here.)
@consciousness razor, #14
Just because Pharyngula commenters believe that it is a morally neutral choice to terminate one’s own pregnancy does not mean that we believe it’s a morally neutral choice to force abortion or miscarriage on someone through violence.
[and, by-the-by, just because it’s a morally blameworthy choice to criminalize abortion doesn’t mean abortions or the choice to have an abortion is “good” or morally praiseworthy]
The bible spends zero words condemning any woman character*1 (or praising any woman character) for making the conscious choice to terminate a pregnancy. The bible spends zero words condemning any midwife-or-similar for actions assisting a woman who consciously chooses to terminate a pregnancy.
When the bible does bring up induced-end-of-pregnancy, its in the context of a violent tort*2 or in the context of a priest mixing up an abortifacient and forcing it upon a woman who has committed adultery.
You ask how then this conversation is “supposed to go”? It’s supposed to go like this: the bible – to the embarrassment of the bible-thumpers – supports the idea that women do have autonomy over their own bodies and pregnancies, and that their care providers are at liberty to help them exercise their wishes, save possibly in the case of a government inducing an abortion (not preventing an abortion!) as part of a punishment for a crime.
We can then respond that the purposes of the abortion punishment can now be fulfilled by other actions, that the US has a history of learning how harmful state control over reproduction can be, that the US has the 14th-fucking-amendment, and that therefore no reasonable person can, any longer, consider state-imposed abortion to be either necessary or moral.
==============================================
*1: there are no human characters explicitly portrayed as other-than-women but capable of being pregnant, so far as I know
*2: We like to pretend we’re superior because “fines” (not restitution or similar) to be paid to victims are specified in circumstances where today we might impose jail time. But understanding these as torts, where even today the remedy is coin, is probably more apt.
@Pierce R Butler:
I’d visit your wretched hive anytime.
@cervantes #8
Yes, thank you for the link. Very interesting.
Crip Dyke… @ # 23: I’d visit your wretched hive anytime.
Aww, that’s very
naiveopen-minded of you, but please give me a little advance notice so I can prepare atrapcake!Crip Dyke, #22:
I agree with most of that. Not sure if you meant to contradict me about anything though.
Of course it doesn’t mean or imply that, but additionally and independently, it can be good or praiseworthy. I meant that they’re good, acceptable, or they’re both. Whatever the circumstances, those three are exhaustive.
I was referring to the line of reasoning Pierce R. Butler seemed to be advancing. The more general type of conversation about the Bible and abortion is pointless, since I don’t think we need to be guided at all by anything the Bible says, what it doesn’t say, what it hints at, implies, fails to imply, supports, opposes, etc. I’m not asking how that should go, because I’m already fairly sure it should simply start and end with “it doesn’t matter.”
How and where does it do that? It’s not obvious to me that it ever merely alluded to bodily autonomy or any concept vaguely related to it, much less that it supports this specific claim. Maybe I’m just failing to remember or recognize what you’re talking about here, but could you help me understand where this coming from?
I don’t know they ever wrote of any liberties, and I don’t know the “wishes” of women themselves were ever respected, to the degree that those were binding on the law or constrained how it was interpreted. My impression has been that they were treated as non-entities wherever possible; and when it did become necessary to simply mention them incidentally, I certainly don’t recall anything remotely like that appearing in the Bible. Again, a little help?
I understand the temptation to get down and try to argue with anti-abortionists and their terrorist motivation using their bible and such but if anything is certain in this world it is certain that it is impossible to argue with the religious and the religiously motivated with reason. They will simply slip past and continue on. It is especially impossible and futile to start by using their sacred text.
It does not matter what anyone personally believes in a none theocratic society.
It is by words and actions that things are done. Terrorism is just one of the faces of tyranny.
uncle frogy
The poibt is that they clearly didn’t view it as murder, which was a capital crime. Anti-choicers surely would frame the same scenario as manslaughter.
Okay. Like us, they could’ve thought of it as manslaughter, which is homicide, not something as severe as premeditated murder. That could explain why the corresponding punishment for it isn’t the same as a crime like murder. So, if they did think it was homicide, but not necessarily murder given the circumstances or the mental state of the offender, then what is that supposed to imply about what their views on abortion would have been? Or did they not think it was any sort of homicide, because if they had believed that they wouldn’t have made any distinctions about it being accidental or unintentional — in which case, what would that imply? Tell me what the point is. How do you connect A and B?
madscientist @ 20:
My, what a lovely display of flaming hypocrisy. You oppose guns and supporters and guns and the best solution you can come up with is to shoot them? Thank you for reminding me that the far right isn’t the only bastion of hypocritical ass-wipes in this country.
P.S. Where are the moderators on this one? If some cretin suggested slapping pictures of feminists, NARAL members, etc. on targets, their ass would be banned in an instant.
@consciousness razor, #26:
No. I didn’t mean to contradict you on anything. I shy away from calling abortion “good” in itself (it certainly can be “good” when it’s saving a life, say, but that’s because it’s saving a life).
As for the “how the conversation is supposed to go” I was imagining points that extended PRB’s statements.
As for women having autonomy, well, women did have incredible autonomy in how they dealt with menstruation, pregnancy, and birth, so long as they dealt with it out of sight of men. There’s abundant evidence for that in the Talmud and various midrash traditions. The fact that the bible denies all kinds of freedoms, but never bothers to limit these freedoms is that argument. It’s pretty much the same argument that the bible permits the production of charcoal. People were doing it in the communities writing the bible. The bible never bothers to say one word about its morality. Therefore, the bible leaves people at liberty to produce charcoal, QED.
@treefrogdundee, #31:
Well, there are no moderators anymore. PZ is it, and he doesn’t really moderate much. Caine did call madscientist out, though, and now so have you. So I wouldn’t really do anything else. PZ will say something and/or do something if PZ feels like it. Otherwise, the very next comment called madscientist out as a jerkwad, so as far as I’m concerned Caine’s done the necessary work of condemnation unless and until madscientist decides to come back and make an issue out of their idiocy.
There were never any Moderators™, except PZ.
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Raw Story got the Ted Cruz inanity wrong too.
Ok. If we can read this and all nod our heads collectively in approval, why then can we not see the religious motivation in Islamic terrorists? Why do we recoil when someone tries to pin the blame for Paris or Tunisia or Egypt on Islam? There is more than a little bit of cognitive dissonance going on here…
Maybe it’s because actually I don’t see a lot of muslim clerics and leaders talking about how they must kill the infidels everywhere?
Oh, the research showing that most islamist terrorists are actually novices in their religion and not well versed either may matter as well…
Giliell, #37
*vomits*
Well, that’s embarrassing. Wrong thread.
Now where’s that ginger ale…
Penny,
Because those aren’t remotely the same thing. Valerie Tarico didn’t pin the blame for the Planned Parenthood shooting on generalized “Christianity.” Instead, she blamed (among others) individual “conservative Christian presidential candidates and members of congress” who incite such violence through their rhetoric.
The parallel response to Islamic terrorism would be to blame those particular Muslim leaders who have tried to justify the mass murder of civilian infidels/apostates/heretics. Not to blame “Islam”, or every Muslim everywhere, or every Muslim political/religious leader everywhere.
Giliell, open your mind.
From the US State Department’s 2012 International Religios Freedom Report for Saudi Arabia (http://www.state.gov/documents/organization/208622.pdf):
Anton – see my comment above. Saudi Arabia is a good place to start the blame game.
Penny,
But you didn’t ask why we’re not blaming the Saudi Arabian government in #36; you asked why we aren’t blaming “Islam.” They’re not the same thing.
And of course progressives have been criticizing the Saudi government, and our government’s cozy relationship with them, for several decades now. One of the main arguments against invading Iraq and Afghanistan was that those countries had far less to do with 9/11 than Saudi Arabia did.
PZ has been blogging about the theocratic horrors of Saudi Arabia since 2008, if not earlier. It’s just that he doesn’t try to blame them on every Muslim everywhere.