The day after Thanksgiving, Robert Lewis Dear opened fire inside a Planned Parenthood clinic in Colorado Springs, Colo. Barricading himself in the facility, he held law enforcement at bay for nearly six hours before he was captured. In the interim, nine people were injured and three killed, including one police officer.
Friday’s events are a tragedy, and our hearts go out to the families of the victims. That is our first, last, and most important thought.
Reports so far suggest that Dear was mentally disturbed, with a particular inclination toward paranoia, with no known links to the pro-life movement, and with no diagnoses or convictions that could have prevented him from owning a firearm, despite Colorado’s relatively stringent gun laws. All of this should forestall a rush to the Left’s pet conclusions, but of course it hasn’t. Even before the standoff was over, left-wing social media was ablaze with warnings about “Christian terrorism,” and prominent voices were suggesting that Planned Parenthood workers regularly face similar violence; they have seized on unconfirmed reports that Dear, post-arrest, mentioned to investigators his opposition to taking “baby parts” (although reports also say his post-arrest comments were rambling). Meanwhile, some on the right have sought to compare Dear to Planned Parenthood abortionists.
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This tragedy is not the context in which to discuss the issue of the rights of the unborn, important as we believe that issue is. This is a time for grieving for victims, and anybody on either side who politicizes the tragedy — in the sense of exploiting it to smite enemies, rather than making a good-faith effort to understand what happened and what reasonable steps we could take to prevent such murders — is shamefully exploiting it.
If supporters of Planned Parenthood insist on blaming pro-life advocacy for Dear’s crimes, they should remember Floyd Lee Corkins II, the man who in August 2012 shot a guard at the Family Research Council and intended to shoot and kill as many employees as he could manage after he got worked up by the anti-FRC advocacy of liberal groups such as the Southern Poverty Law Center. If we are going to play the rhetoric blame-game, then we should hold liberal groups to account for Corkins.
#share#We prefer that individuals be held responsible for their own actions. A tendency to blame the acts of deranged individuals on the rhetoric of advocacy groups is a sure path to the curtailing of civil society, of the rights of individuals and groups to work to change policies and attitudes.
It should be obvious that these singular cases of violence differ wildly from the Islamic terrorism being perpetrated daily in the Middle East and, increasingly, in Europe, which has unmistakable ideological origins and is part of an extensive, well-organized, well-funded movement. But for those still inclined to exploit these events, or to forward a thesis about “Christian terrorism,” we hope that they will pause to consider that the officer killed, Garrett Swasey, was an elder at his church and an opponent of abortion, who rushed from his post at the University of Colorado, Colorado Springs, ten miles away, to help protect employees and patients in danger at the clinic.
We mourn Officer Swasey and the civilians who died with him and pray for the speedy recovery of those wounded in this appalling crime.