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Republicans deserve some blame for the Planned Parenthood shooting
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Carly Fiorina speaks at a barbecue in Wilton, Iowa, on Nov. 22. (Scott Olson/Getty Images)

By Ruth Marcus Columnist December 1 at 8:11 PM

Inflammatory rhetoric inflames. Words — extreme language and overheated representations — have consequences. The killer bears the ultimate responsibility for the carnage in Colorado Springs. But if initial reports of alleged gunman Robert Lewis Dear Jr.’s comments about “no more baby parts” prove true — and logic suggests that it was no mere coincidence the attack was at a Planned Parenthood clinic — Republican politicians who fueled the overwrought and unsupported controversy over selling baby parts bear some measure of responsibility.

That is a harsh accusation, so let me explain why I believe it is fair to lodge.

Ruth Marcus is a columnist for The Post, specializing in American politics and domestic policy. View Archive
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The debate over abortion rights is unavoidably emotional. For those who believe that abortion is the taking of a human life, the fact of millions of abortions performed in the United States since the decision in Roe v. Wade is inevitably going to generate alarm and horror, with Holocaust comparisons and talk of bloodbaths.

As a young reporter, I witnessed the consequence of such views, covering a string of abortion clinic bombings in the Washington area in the 1980s. Michael Bray, a local pastor who served nearly four years for the crime, explained his twisted logic to “60 Minutes” in 1999: “If we are to affirm, as I do, that the children in the womb who are killed at abortion facilities are in fact children . . . then action taken to defend them is justifiable and cannot be condemned.”

This thinking is sick; leaders in the antiabortion movement have a responsibility to condemn it, forcefully. Yet on an issue as emotionally charged as abortion, there will always be a fringe so lunatic as to believe violence is acceptable. But tarring the larger group with their criminal excesses is unwarranted…

The current effort to demonize Planned Parenthood feels different. This is, literally, a manufactured issue, cobbled together from doctored videotapes and overheated accusations. The organization’s activities have been so mischaracterized, and the practice of providing fetal tissue so overblown and so manipulated by lawmakers and politicians, that blame for the ensuing violence falls more heavily on them.

This argument, I concede, rests on a potentially slippery and subjective slope. Holding advocates responsible for such unintended consequences risks dampening speech. Second, conservatives have blamed Black Lives Matter protesters for inspiring the killing of police officers; what makes my critique fair and theirs not?