In North Dakota Planned Parenthood Waves The Bloody Shirt

The degree to which Planned Parenthood is using the shooting at one of their clinics in Colorado to try and silence their opposition, and distract from that nasty scandal over the apparent marketing of dead baby parts, is downright ghoulish.

With the president of the abortion industry giant set to speak at a fundraiser in Fargo the group is taking security precautions. That’s certainly understandable. But the group’s operatives making sure the media knows all about their security arrangements?

That’s egregious case of waving the bloody shirt.

What’s more, the group wants pro-life activists to cancel a protest planned for the event:

Jacobson said organizers have hired additional private security guards and will be bringing in the security department from the regional Planned Parenthood headquarters in Minneapolis. She was also hoping an anti-abortion group would cancel the protest it announced last week.

“We will sing Christmas carols about the infant Jesus to urge mothers to choose life in spite of adversity, and not give in to the false promises of abortion,” according to an advertisement in a newsletter from the Respect Life Office for the Catholic Diocese of Fargo.

“That was prior to the shooting on Friday, so I’m hoping they have reconsidered,” Jacobson said.

Why on earth should the pro-life protesters reconsider? They had nothing to do with the shooting in Colorado Springs. Heck, despite the rush to judgment by those wishing to shoehorn the incident into a certain political narrative, police still haven’t released any official information about the motivation.

But even if the shooter was motivated by animus against Planned Parenthood for its position on abortion, so what?

“Opinions don’t kill people — people kill people,” writes Tim Carney for the Washington Examiner today. In his column, he reminds his readers about an incident where an armed man took hostages at the headquarters of the Discovery Channel in Washington D.C. in 2010.

“NO MORE BABIES!” the gunman wrote in his manifesto. “Civilization must be exposed for the filth it is. That, and all its disgusting religious-cultural roots and greed. Broadcast this message until the pollution in the planet is reversed and the human population goes down!”

These were the demands of James Lee, who, strapped with explosives and a rifle, entered the suburban Washington, D.C. headquarters of the Discovery Channel in September 2010 and took three hostages in a five-hour standoff.

Lee’s crazed manifesto clearly echoes the environmental doomsaying of some of our politicians and many of our journalists. His screed, with the all caps declaration, “MORE HUMANS EQUALS MORE WAR!” could also have been cribbed from Planned Parenthood’s founder, Margaret Sanger, who once wrote: “the old civilization defying nature’s balancing has created an overpopulated world, with ‘cold wars’ threatening peaceful existence, for the fit and intelligent adults of our present civilization.”

Just as Sanger called for the uprooting of “human weeds,” Lee’s manifesto cursed “parasitic human infants.”

Environmentalist fearmongering and Sangerism had clearly seeped into Lee’s brain. But the soundest explanation for his attack was probably that Lee was psychotic.

The cause of his rampage was his own mental illness. The rhetoric of environmentalists and anti-natalists helped determine his target — the Discovery Channel — and the text of the manifesto. But there’s no basis for blaming Margaret Sanger or Greenpeace for Lee’s violence. They never justified or extolled actions like his.

Extremists exist in every cause. We do not, and should not, blame all Muslims for Islamic extremism. We do not blame all environmentalists for eco-terrorism. Planned Parenthood shouldn’t get to paint the pro-life movement as a whole with the actions of one deranged man in Colorado.