On a story with which to illustrate the absurdity of MgS’s case against strong denunciations of abortion

Here’s an article from yesterday’s Sydney Daily Telegraph:

Gunman anti-war

WASHINGTON: Two soldiers were shot, one fatally, outside a military recruiting centre in Arkansas yesterday by a gunman who police said was opposed to the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq. Abdulhakim Muhammed was arrested in his car without a struggle after blasting the centre with an assault rifle, firing more than a dozen rounds.
(The Daily Telegraph, Sydney, Australia, Wednesday, June 3, 2009, p. 24)

Now I would never be so unfair as to inculpate the anti-war movement in this criminal act, despite its use of emotive propaganda (e.g. slogans like ‘no blood for oil’, demonstrations where people cover themselves in fake blood and pretend to be dead). Even if I could find someone from the fringes of the anti-war movement who might try to justify this crime, I wouldn’t be so silly as to try to impute such an offensive notion to the mainstream anti-war movement, since it’s ridiculous to think that by denouncing something as wrong one incurs any responsibility for unrepresentative extremists who try to remedy wrong with more wrong, in violation of the once-unassailable principle that two wrongs don’t make a right (once-unassailable, because nowadays consequentialist thinking is quite influential). Yet MgS, against logic, facts and elementary fairness, accuses the anti-abortion movement of precisely this. And wait a minute, has not MgS herself joined in denouncing these wars?

If you believe that the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan are about anything noble, you've been drinking far, far too much Rethuglican Kool-Aid.
(comment at the bottom of http://crystalgaze2.blogspot.com/2008/06/bom-bom-go-drums-of-war.html)

So MgS, then, has participated in the very rhetoric that might incite an extremist to strike a blow against these ignoble wars. Should one infer, then, that she has participated in handing the alleged gunman a “license to kill”, as she might put it? Ah, but of course MgS’s ethics derives its consistency entirely from her own tastes and preferences: the anti-abortion movement incurs responsibility for the actions of anti-abortion murderers because she has a taste for abortion, but no such responsibility rests with the anti-war movement when anti-war extremists commit murder because she has a distaste for these wars.

(I suppose one might object that the alleged anti-war gunman probably had an Islamist rather than pacifistic motivation, given his name, but that would be a rather racist inference, wouldn’t it? I would love to see MgS raise this objection!)

Reginaldvs Cantvar
Pentecost Thursday, A.D. 2009