When Robert Dear shot and killed people in a Planned Parenthood clinic, the broad brushes came out. (Funny how they got put away quickly when the San Bernardino shooters turned out to be Middle Eastern and Muslim.) An article I posted on the Google+ page, claiming that the shooter and PP were doing essentially the same thing, got a reader to comment. Here's what he said, and my response to it.

Mentioned links:

The Podcast Game Show

Abortionists and Planned Parenthood Shooter Are Just Two Sides Of The Same Coin

Google+ conversation with Tony Sidaway

History of Operation Rescue

Show transcript

As I have mentioned before, I will occasionally post articles that I think are of interest to you on my Facebook, Google+ and Twitter accounts, and one post recently got a comment on Google+. Yes, people do read that.

Recently I posted an article from Matt Walsh, who’s writing I really enjoy, that make a compelling case that the shooting at the Planned Parenthood clinic in Colorado Springs, perpetrated by a man named Robert Dear, was essentially the same as the killing of babies that Planned Parenthood does. The link to it is in the show notes. I quoted this passage from the article.

Planned Parenthood would like to pretend that Robert Dear reveals something about the pro-life cause, but that is demonstrably untrue. He clearly did not do what we do or what we encourage others to do, because all we do is strive to end the butchery and victimization of the innocent, and we urge others to do the same. He did not follow our cue in that regard. No, he followed theirs. He did what they do, which is why I detest his actions, and why I detest theirs, and why they are really two sides of the same hideous coin.

That sound you hear is a nail being hit right on the head.

That got Google+ user Tony Sidaway to respond, trying to equate this shooting with some others from a bygone era.

Um, you know a group called Operation Rescue? They're part of the mainstream anti-abortion movement. Just a week or so ago their President Troy Newman endorsed Ted Cruz for President, a fact that Cruz's campaign proudly acknowledged. Here's what Troy Newman wrote in response to the execution of murderer Paul Hill in 2003:

He quotes Newman, who said that Hill didn’t get a fair trial because the judge didn’t allow him to present the defense he wanted to, namely that by killing the abortion doctor he actually saved lives. Then Mr. Sidaway observes:

And that's the leader of a mainstream anti-abortion organisation speaking.

“Mainstream”? No, not really. I said to Mr. Sidaway that he was correct that Operation Rescue was (or presented itself as) the mainstream of anti-abortion thought in the late 20th century. They were in the media quite a bit then. However, the killing by Paul Hill was a watershed moment in the pro-life movement, causing it to reassess its methods and motives.

But I noted that what I just said is all in the past tense.

Pretty much at the same time OR defended the murder by Hill, and due to a number of other issues, it fell out of the mainstream of anti-abortion thought.  The Wikipedia page for the history of OR (also linked to in the show notes) basically ends in the 1990s. So trying to paint them as “mainstream” 20 years later is a bit of a reach.

The other major claim I’ve seen from the pro-abortion side is that the videos made by the Center for Medical Progress – those showing PP personnel haggling over the price of baby parts and promising, against federal law, to alter the manner of abortion to preserve those parts – were “incendiary”,