No, it’s not. These guys have said repeatedly that a theocracy is what they want. They want a country that bows its knees to God. They only care about the separation of church in state when it affects their ability to act in Christian ways.
It’s not that they would support the terrorists directly once in power. There’s no need in that case. They would just make abortion illegal. You’d have the police coming in and dismantling everything. Terrorism is a tool for when you don’t have power to do what you want.
As for homosexuals, it’s not the death penalty I’d be afraid of, but forced conversion camps. I do think homosexuals would be prosecuted, because that’s exactly what we used to do. There’s a reason sodomy was a crime.
Now, granted, merely being president won’t let them do this. Even controlling the entire government probably wouldn’t, as they’d have to worry about the majority who would not support their actions and would vote them out.
But this does accurately describe the U.S. they see as the ideal. They want the U.S. to be a Christian country. I know–I grew up being told this stuff and actually believed it for a large part of my life. The U.S. had been taken over by Satan because Christians weren’t voting. We were supposed to vote and take back this country for Jesus! (Fortunately, I never voted while still believing this.)
If it was one of those “here’s why the other candidate is better” kinds of things, that’s one thing, but if it contains information that would rival the allegations lobbed against the Clintons (the most outrageous I’ve seen: that he’s had gay lovers murdered to keep them quiet :rolleyes: :eek:; all the sources have been blogs), that’s another story.
Ted Cruz claims the shooter is a “transgendered leftist activist”. He also claims that blaming this on anti-abortionists is a plot by the liberal media.
Cruz is disgusting. He’s like that alien in Men in Black who’s just wearing Vincent D’onofrio’s skin. Trying to shift the blame for this from anti-abortionist to a vulnerable population like the transgendered. People have died because of the rhetoric coming from rightwing crowd and in response, and in order to protect himself, Cruz lashes out at another group that routinely suffers violence at the hands of his conservative friends.
Yes, UltraVieres, I have no doubt that if Cruz or Huckabee had their way, they’d find an excuse to pardon Robert Dear. It’s no different than, say, finding excuses not to prosecute police who commit crimes. I also believe they’d make homosexuality illegal again.
Hell, for that matter, they’d outlaw abortion, lock up any woman who had a miscarriage, and prosecute abortion doctor. And inevitably, the rightwing crowd would support them, saying, “oh, well you have to respect their personal beliefs.”
The thing is, you’re talking about persecuting homosexuals or or looking the other way as a targeted minority is terrorized as if these are unthinkable acts that could never happen in this country. The truth is, lynchings and terrorism happen routinely. Only we excuse them as being the work of “one bad apple” who was just a crazy man, so we don’t feel obligated to take any steps to change things and prevent this.
Partly we do this because we’re lazy. Change is hard and there are no easy (or cheap) solutions. But partly we do this because some of us *like *lynchings and terrorizing minorities. It’s well within living memory when that shit was happening semi-openly. Even today, harassment and violence towards women and minorities happens so regularly that it barely qualifies as news. And immediately, it’s followed up by people making excuses: “Oh, she was mouthing off”. “Oh, why didn’t the black guy obey orders”. “Oh, well, he’s just a queer who came on to me”.
Of course Cruz or Huckabee would excuse Dear. If they weren’t so worried about their political ambitions, they’d be right there, holding his coat.
Let’s put some of the blame on Republican presidential candidates perpetuating lies about Planned Parenthood. No, they don’t sell baby parts. They don’t even sell fetus parts. No matter how many times Carly Fiorina (is she still running?) repeats that lie, it didn’t fucking happen. Perhaps if they hadn’t repeated these lies in order to pander to the Reich Wing of the party, this deranged guy wouldn’t have picked up his gun and gone human hunting.
John Mace, you asked me earlier what my problem is with taking our time to identify the shooter as being motivated by anti-abortion rhetoric.
The problem is that anti-abortionists like Cruz are trying to downplay their responsibility for the violence that is directed at Planned Parenthood.
The article I quoted above, continues:
By trying to shift the blame from the people who demonize Planned Parenthood, Cruz is trying to prevent having to take responsibility or change his behavior. Refusing to blame domestic terrorists, gives cover to the terrorists and their supporters.
Calling it murder allows him and his ilk to pretend that this is just a random unpreventable attack, and not the latest in a string of domestic terrorist acts aimed at PP.
If Cruz comes out and claims that this is domesticate terrorism, then he’d have to take action to prevent showing support for a terrorist. But Cruz doesn’t want to stop supporting terrorism against PP, so he’s playing this, “let’s wait and see card”.
It’s no different than the right wingers who tried to float that maybe Darren Roof was just a misguided youth who was attacking Christians, not Black people.
Meanwhile, while the whole shooter situation was still going down, fucking CNN invites anti-abortion fan, Adam Kinzinger, (R-IL) on to promote, yet again, the idea that those videos are an honest expose and people have legitimate problems with PP. The shooting hadn’t even stopped yet, but rightwing anti-abortionists were already on air, insisting that this was just a lone psycho who had twisted their legitimate grievance.
We’re at the point where we need subcategories of terrorism. Proposal: organized terrorism, and petri dish terrorism.
Organized terrorism is Al Qaeda. They have leaders, chains of command, recruiters, trainers, rehearsals, budgets, propaganda branches. They have plans. The people committing the terrorism are totally sane, inasmuch as a murderous zealot can possibly be sane.
Petri dish terrorism is this asshole. Yeah, he’s probably a nutjob. If he lived in a different culture, he might be a harmless nutjob. But he lives in a culture with rhetoric calling abortion doctors “murderers,” with propagandists telling lies about “baby parts,” with easy access to guns. You put a virus like him in a petri dish like that, you’re going to grow a terrorist. No budget, chain of command, rehearsal, recruiter required.
But the end result is shockingly similar.
The question is, what do we do to stop petri dish terrorism? Because what we’re doing now is obviously ineffective.
I think the main threat to the US from Islamic terrorism in self-radicalized loner attacks, like the Boston marathon bombers. Daesh encourages it. All you have to do is go online, hangout on the right websites and get yourself all self-radicalized.
All Christian conservatives have to do is go online, hangout on the right websites and get themselves all self-radicalized. Walla, loner attack.
Same thing, but in the US, one of those is responsible for more death.
I guess it depends what time frame you want to look at. If you included the Reconstruction era through today, I’d guess white Christian terrorists would win out. Also if you look at the years since 9/11, white Christian terrorists are more of a threat.
Definitely. Not trying to be snarky, but I’m not sure why you bring him up–do you think I’m suggesting petri dish terrorists are insignificant or something? Or just offering another example?
Given the Federal Building bombing, it’s overwhelmingly clear that the main non-organized threat to the US is from self-radicalized far right folks with a Christian background. Is this what you meant?
I was pointing out the petri dish terrorist are definitely NOT insignificant. McVeigh killed 168 people. So was Anders Behring Breivik, the Norwegian shooter who killed 77 people.
In no way do I think that “petri dish terrorists” are insignificant–indeed, given that I said we need to figure out something that works and what we’re doing is not working, I’m not sure how you could think I was suggesting they were insignificant. I think they’re a huge problem.
But I hate the idea of “lone wolf terrorist,” because it suggests they’re acting in a vacuum. They’re not. These lone wolf terrorists are heavily influenced by the culture at large. When people tell vicious lies about Planned Parenthood, and then some nutjob decides to shoot up PP, there’s a link. When people argue for making guns trivially available, and then some nutjob finds it trivially easy to get the guns for a massacre, there’s a link. The “petri dish” metaphor indicates that the terrorist is acting within a culture that nurtures their murderous tendencies, even if it doesn’t specifically condone those tendencies.
This does not mean we need to restrict speech, or that we need to have gun control. The solutions aren’t so uncontroversially simple. It may be that the benefits of unrestricted speech are so great that we should put up with the occasional petri dish terrorist. Or it may be that there’s a third way that neither restricts speech nor nurtures terrorists.
But we shouldn’t be subject to the myopia encouraged by the “lone wolf” metaphor, in which we pretend that the nutjob is acting without any outside influence. There may not be an Al Qaeda leadership that bears responsibility for this attack, but in a very different way, The Center for Medical Progress, a sham group that propagated lies about PP that the nutjob took to heart, bears some responsibility.
Based on the facts to date, the mainstream pro-life movement bears about as much blame for this as the environment movement does for Ted Kazsinski.
What is your evidence that the shooter got his ideas from the Center for Medical Progress? Has he mentioned anything about it, or has some reliable source said so?
On some level I am hoping this guy starts chanting “Allahu akbar” at his arraignment just to see the flip-flops on the SDMB.
I believe all Planned Parenthood clinics are gun-free zones - that certainly helped, as much as it usually does.
A lot of the attacks in Europe by followers of ISIS could be called petri dish terrorism; a common term for these attacks is ‘lone wolf.’ The terrorist is inspired by the propaganda of a movement and takes action without any support from a broader network. Lone wolf terrorists give the creators of hate propaganda an out because they don’t have any direct contact with the terrorist.
The evidence is that before the CMP released their lying videos, nobody was talking about “baby parts” in conjunction with Planned Parenthood. Post hoc ergo propter hoc is often a fallacy, but not in this case. They changed the national conversation by injecting some plausible slanderous lies into it, and this nutjob seemed to believe it.
If you can point to similar lies that a specific environmental organization propagated, lies that were later parroted by the Unabomber whose name I hate trying to spell, I’ll be convinced.
The cop who got killed wasn’t gun free, and they had the security cameras in the clinic helping to guide their operation. The idea that armed nurses and receptionists would have helped more than a safe room is laughable.
My assumption is that gun free zones are so that heated emotions don’t end with someone pulling out a gun. Since they aren’t forcefields that prevent guns from coming in, I doubt anyone expects them to stop a crazy person from running in with a gun and shooting people. What do suppose people advocating gun free zones expect them to do? Be magical?