The Radical Conservative Scourge

Evan at PEEK has a truly disturbing story about a Focus on the Family (Dobson’s outfit) dispatch, targeting a doctor who performed an abortion on a rape victim who later died. (The doctor was cleared of any wrongdoing by the Kansas Board of Healing Arts.)

Nonetheless, the anti-choice brigade is after him, and Evan says, troublingly, that there is “a creepy lack of any discouragement from violence,” notable since the doctor was “shot by violent pre-lifer Rachelle Shannon back in 1993.”

The Citizen Link report, which makes no mention of the shooting nor anyone who advocates stopping short of violence, quotes Operation Rescue's President Troy Newman:

"It's high time that this man is held accountable for his actions that have caused untold misery and loss of life."
In the LifeSiteNews article it links to, Newman's rhetoric is even more inflammatory and irresponsible: "Christin was raped in Texas and killed in Kansas..."

Operation Rescue's founder, Randall Terry has well-documented links to killer James Charles Kopp before, during and after his conviction.

With a history of inciting violence and a doctor who's already been shot, how much of a stretch is it to charge that this kind of talk borders on terrorism?
Which reminded me of something I read over at Orcinus this morning:

Yesterday being the 11th anniversary of the Oklahoma City bombing, I suppose I should just be grateful that, this year at least, we're not cursed with an Ann Coulter profile in Time.

Still, every year since 2002, this sad anniversary reminds me of a question I still haven't heard answered:

Why wasn't April 19, 1995 the "day that changed everything"?
A fine question indeed. Since that time, conservative extremism has not been the target of any large-scale effort to halt its momentum; in fact, that very brand of radicalism has gone mainstream. Ann Coulter’s “joke” that her “only regret with Timothy McVeigh is he did not go to the New York Times Building,” Bill O’Reilly’s offering up San Francisco to al-Qaida, the neverending stream of hateful spewage that pours from the yammering maws of Rush Limbaugh, Michael Savage, Michelle Malkin, Sean Hannity, Pat Robertson, Pat Buchanan, Jerry Falwell, etc. etc. etc. Look at this parade of freaks, all of whom the likes of Coulter, O’Reilly, and company purport to disdain, even while serving as conduits for their vile messages of hatred. The only difference between the two groups is that the talking heads of the radical conservative movement know how to deliver the putrid communiqués in subtler tones, but the message is still the same.

They are the well-paid, carefully coiffed arbiters of white supremacy, homobigotry, misogyny, and a twisted nationalism that casts dissenters as treasonous. And day after day after day, they launch their loathsome missives into the atmosphere, giving legitimacy to that which deserves nothing but contempt, making it ever harder to criticize such repulsive swill without being accused of intolerance.

And how much longer will it go on? I dread to consider what will have to happen, since April 19, 1995 was not a "day that changed everything,” before the rest of the country wakes up and pays attention to the creeping scourge of conservative extremism—and denounces its place in our public sphere once and for fucking all.

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