Juan Cole: Abortion Clinics, White Christian Terrorism, and GOP Candidates

[eridani]

http://readersupportednews.org/opinion2/277-75/33744-abortion-clinics-white-christian-terrorism-and-gop-candidates

Americans are more at risk from violence by armed white Christian fanatics than they ever were from Muslims.

Abortion clinics have been targeted for violence by fundamentalist Christians of a violent bent for decades. In 2009, Dr. George Tiller was relentlessly shot to death by Scott Roeder, who insisted that the good doctor was satanic because he performed abortions. Dr. John Britton was murdered in 1994 on similar grounds. A strain of Christianity in the United States has never accepted Roe v. Wade, which made it a woman’s right to have an abortion. Not accepting it for oneself is a matter of conscience, and there is nothing wrong with that. But not accepting it for other people is a form of coercion aimed at depriving them of a legal right.

Deploying violence against people to halt abortions is the textbook definition of terrorism, which in the 1990s the Federal Code sensibly defined as non-state actors using violence against civilians to achieve a political aim. Much violence and coercion at Planned Parenthood (only 3% of its activity has to do with abortion) is inspired by Christian fundamentalism.

On this point, Christian ultra-conservativism agrees with the point of view of the Malik school of law among Muslims. In essence, Christian terrorists are attempting to move the United States on the below map away from a modern European norm, where abortion is elective up to a certain point in pregnancy, to an Afro-Asian and Maliki Muslim norm where it is often forbidden except to save the mother’s life (or not even then).

There are four legal schools within Sunni Islam, the Maliki, Hanbali, Shafi’i and Hanafi. Ironically, the Hanbali, Shafi’i and Hanafi schools of Sunni Islam allow abortion, the Hanafi until day 42, and the Shafi’i until 4 months– and so they are more liberal on this issue than much Evangelicalism or Roman Catholicism. The Qur’an, like the Bible, doesn’t mention the issue.

Even mainstream GOP politicians (and apparently most of the presidential candidates) now want to ban abortion even in cases of rape or where the mother’s life is in danger, exalting the rights of the fetus and its father over that of the adult woman. Marco Rubio recently switched to this extreme position. Carly Fiorina famously melted down over a figment of her imagination — a video she said depicted a Planned Parenthood abortion wherein the aborted fetus was still alive, a video that does not exist (and what she may be referring to was probably footage of a miscarriage and certainly not at PP). I.e., the Republican Party is now to the right of conservative, Maliki Morocco on the abortion issue, which is planning to make the procedure legal in cases of rape or incest.

[longship]

1. A very good read. R&K please click through. nt