NBC's Brian Miller reports a firebombing at a Planned Parenthood clinic in Wisconsin. Other sources report that the device used was of an incendiary nature. Nobody was hurt, and only minor damage was done to the building. An FBI investigation is ongoing.
The bigger story here is that this sort of thing hasn't just happened before, but that it can almost be called commonplace. Abortion clinics and abortion doctors are threatened with violence, attacked, and killed more frequently in the United States than anyone is comfortable admitting. Whether you agree with abortion's legality or not, you must recognize that this is a serious problem.
This sort of attack weakens the pro-life argument. While nobody was inside at the time of the bombing, this was not assured, and even if it were, violating a law without hurting anyone is still violation of the law. If I want to defend a moral cause, say, the abolition of the use of condoms (this being only an example), and I do that by stealing a shopping cart full of condoms and setting fire to them on the sidewalk, not only am I personally going to look pretty crazy, but now the entire anti-birth-control crowd is going to be associated with that level of crazy. How much worse is it, then, when people get hurt?
The main argument for the pro-life side is that all life is sacred, and that life begins at conception. If we defend that life by taking away other lives, how is that internally consistent logic? There is talk all the time of moral relativism being a slippery slope, but it seems to be a slope with a cutting edge in both directions. Is abortion being the logical precursor to assisted suicide worse than abortion being the precursor to terrorism? I'll leave that for the individual conscience to decide.
Am I about to get an abortion? No. Does this sort of thing make me nervous? Not really, I live in a much different social climate. But does terrorism from the "Christian" Right make me, a Christian myself, absolutely furious? You better believe.
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