The Increasingly Vile GOP Messengers

Conservative columnist Kathleen Parker has a column in the Washington Post that looks at the growing problem for the GOP that those who most loudly shout its message are nutcases who increasingly cause moderates and the non-insane to run for the Democrat Party. Some years back the powers that be in the GOP decided to sell the party's soul to the Christianists in order to win elections. Now, the Christianists more or less control the party and rational thought and moderation are a thing of the past. Oh yes, candidates like Bob "Taliban Bob" McDonnell try to masquerade as moderates but they are anything but that. Listen to the fanatics in the party and there you will see the true agenda of its candidates. Unless and until the GOP totally disavows these nutcases and ejects them from places where they can influence party platforms, the GOP needs to rejected by voters. Here are highlights from Parker's column:

*

Before recent events, I intended to write about the GOP's message problem with the headline: "Shoot the Messenger." Sunday's fatal shooting of abortion doctor George Tiller makes my title inappropriate, but the idea remains relevant. . . . By grotesque coincidence, Tiller's murderer furthers the point.

*
It has long been a problem for the GOP that some of the party's cherished positions are embraced most enthusiastically by people whose grip on reality is sometimes . . . tenuous. This is especially true with regard to abortion.

*

Rather than persuading people to think differently about abortion, the Terry-Keyes act makes one want to write checks to Planned Parenthood. And smart Catholics, who were perfectly capable of articulating their objections to the president's invitation to America's premier Catholic university, were suddenly stuck in the frame with rabble-rousers who demean the message. Such is the continuing dilemma of the GOP: How do you get out the message when the messengers keep getting in the way?

*

[F]ire-breathers on the right don't help, whatever the cause. They may warm the base, but the Republican base is becoming a remote island in mainstream America. Everyone else is paddling away.

*

Accurately or not, the right-wing wacko contingent increasingly dominates the public perception of the GOP. And, fairly or not, that perception makes it easier for characters such as Scott Roeder, the suspected shooter, to become associated with the party.

*

Some Internet commentary even refers to Roeder as a "Christian terrorist." Let's see: Christian, pro-gun, anti-government, pro-life. Sounds like a Republican, right? Oh, and he's suspected of being an assassin. Connect them dots.

*

One can convincingly argue that the media have a hand in perpetuating the conservative caricature, but the Republican Party has contributed to the distortion by pandering to its less rational elements. Still fresh in our minds is the last presidential election -- a strange season that might be attributed to GOP desperation if not for a prior history in times of political prosperity.

*
Two words: Terri Schiavo. During that 2005 Operation Rescue debacle -- complete with death vigils and lamentations -- Bill Frist, then the Senate majority leader and a practicing physician, lent credibility to the circus performers by diagnosing Schiavo's condition via video and challenging other medical opinion that she was in a persistent vegetative state.

*

[U]ntil the Republicans marginalize those who belong in the margins, they won't be attracting many new recruits. And the messengers will continue to obscure the message.

Portraits of Zealots

As more information on Scott Roeder (pictured at left) - the shooter who shot Dr. George Tiller to death Sunday morning - comes comes out, the picture is increasingly one of a religious fanatic of the worse kind. Unfortunately, Roeder is more representative of the Christianist far right than most Americans want to admit. These people are obsessed with unborn fetuses but frankly do not give a damn about living humans as typically evidence by tax cuts that would de-fund children's health care and other programs they deem socialist/communist. I am not a supporter of abortion - but believe it should be legal and combined with nationwide comprehensive sex education and other measures that would significantly reduce abortion as a contraceptive measure - but I oppose the terrorist tactics of the extreme "pro-life" crowd. Belief Net has some information on Roeder that is most telling:

*

Anti-abortion and anti-government, Scott Roeder appears to be a bomb with a short fuse. The Wichita Eagle has the best profile up so far:

*
The suspect in custody in connection with the slaying of abortion doctor George Tiller was a member of an anti-government group in the 1990s and a staunch opponent of abortion. Johnson County sheriff's officials said Scott P. Roeder, 51, of Merriam, was arrested on I-35 near Gardner about three hours after the shooting. In the rear window of the 1993 blue Ford Taurus that he was driving was a red rose, a symbol often used by abortion opponents.

*

Those who know Roeder said he believed that killing abortion doctors was an act of justifiable homicide. "I know that he believed in justifiable homicide," said Regina Dinwiddie, a Kansas City abortion opponent who made headlines in 1995 when she was ordered by a federal judge to stop using a bullhorn within 500 feet of any abortion clinic. "I know he very strongly believed that abortion was murder and that you ought to defend the little ones, both born and unborn."

*

Among the publications Roeder subscribed to is Prayer and Action News, which seems to be linked to the radical anti-abortion Army of God. The magazine once printed the AOG Manual, which makes the case for killing abortion providers. Here are highlights from Spiritual Politics which look at the publication's reaction to Tiller's murder:

*

At the top of its website is this reaction to the killing of George Tiller: A great day for unborn children scheduled to be murdered by Babykilling Abortionist George Tiller. Now those children lives are spared from the Kansas BabyButcher, George Tiller.George Tiller reaped what he sowed and is now in eternal hell. Psalm 55:15 Let death seize upon them, and let them go down quick into hell: for wickedness is in their dwellings, and among them. Further down, the website lionizes Paul Hill as "American Hero." Hill was executed in Florida in 2003 for the murder of two abortion providers in Pensacola in 1994.

*

Then there's Lou Engle who organized "The Call," the anti-gay, anti-gay marriage rally in San Diego last year who has been ecouraging "Christian martyrs" in opposition of abortion:

*

Rick Warren and Randall Terry are not the only high-profile leaders on the religious right who employ inflammatory antiabortion rhetoric. Footage from TheCall San Diego, taken November 1, 2008 by video documentarist Michael W. Wilson [author of Silhouette City] shows Engle and his disciples exhorting a Qualcomm stadium crowd to acts of Christian martyrdom against legalized abortion: rhetoric that serve as thinly veiled exhortation towards violent acts of terrorism against abortion clinics and abortion providers.

*

The simple truth is that these Christian extremists are a clear and presnt danger to medical providers and abortion counseling services and, on a larger front, to the religious freedom of other Americans.