Friday, October 12, 2007

Well, technically it's true....

This review of the new documentary, "Lake of Fire", has an interesting quote:

"This was not a balanced portrayal of the issue," said Carol King, former National Organization for Women board member and abortion-rights activist, who has seen the documentary. "One of the things that has upset me more than anything else is the [comparison] of the anti-choice extremists to pro-choice activists. I have never encouraged in any way to kill people with whom I disagree."


Technically true. She has never encouraged anybody to kill people with whom she disagrees. She just encourages them to kill people whose presence they themselves find troubling. King has no personal beef with the fetuses in question.

But ya know, they're just as dead as if she did have a personal grudge against them.

In a way, what she does is even worse, because of the cold, clinical detachment of the whole thing. It's one thing to kill somebody you hate. One act of murder where you at least have the guts to look your victim in the eye. It's another entirely to build your life around encouraging the wholesale slaughter of people you feel nothing for whatsoever, people you avert your eyes from, people whose existence you deny even as you fight for other people's right to deny them life.

One is hot-blooded murder. You can't condone it, but it's at least human.

The other is as cold as death itself.

Not to mention there's an inherent hipocracy in an abortion advocate opposing any kind of killing. Paul Hill made an agonizing moral choice, in consultation with his God and his conscience. He did what King insists is every WOMAN'S right. On what grounds can she possibly oppose giving the same moral agency to Paul Hill that she insists we are to give women?

If women have the right to kill people whose existence is troubling to them, then men have that same right, Ms. King.

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