Moral Centers

I had actually started a post this morning -- got about halfway through, as it happens -- when my wonderful antique computer froze up and I lost it. I haven't been commenting (combination of intentional hiatus and unintentional intestinal bug), but I have been reading. A couple of stories stuck out as illustrating one of my ongoing contentions about the anti-gay, Christianist right: they have no morals to speak of.

The first was the conviction of Scott Roeder for the murder of Dr. George Tillman. From LA Times:

Reporting from Wichita, Kan. - In a trial that never became the referendum on abortion that some abortion foes wanted, Scott Roeder, a 51-year-old airport shuttle driver, was convicted Friday of murdering George Tiller, one the nation's few physicians who performed late-term abortions.

When he was slain in the vestibule of his church last May 31, Tiller became the fourth doctor since 1993 to be killed by antiabortion extremists. In June, his family announced that his clinic would close permanently.

The jury of seven men and five women deliberated for only 37 minutes before finding Roeder guilty of premeditated murder. He faces life in prison.

Roeder has supporters:

"I don't condone what Scott Roeder did, but I cannot condemn the consistency of his logic," said Randall Terry, a founder of antiabortion group Operation Rescue. "George Tiller killed 60,000 innocent human beings in barbaric ways, and Scott felt the way to protect more babies from a grisly death was to kill Tiller."

Jan Holman, an elderly antiabortion activist, drove from Iowa for the trial. She came in a truck covered with photographs of aborted fetuses. "I support Scott Roeder," she said. "I guess you might say he's my hero."

First off, Terry's lying -- of course he condones it. He's one of the people whose inflammatory rhetoric and thuggish tactics made Tiller's murder, or something like it, inevitable. Then that Holman person -- her hero is a cold-blooded murderer. Without getting into the pros or cons of abortion itself, what's at issue here, as far as I'm concerned, is the arrogant assumption that someone like Scott Roeder or Randall Terry has the right to make other people's decisions for them. In spite of the "pro-life" rhetoric ( you know -- the "life begins at conception and ends at birth" crowd), being pro-choice is not necessarily being pro-abortion. It's recognizing that certain decisions are best made by those directly involved.

The other one I liked this week is the ongong saga of Andrew Breitbart's fair-haired boy, James O'Keefe, of ACORN scam fame. For some nice insights on the whole ACORN episode, see this summary (PDF). His latest little frat boy prank involves entering a federal facility under false pretenses with the intent (at this point still only "alleged") of compromising telephone equipment maintained by the federal government. Jonathan Turley has a good run-down on the whole thing here.

They have been charged with entering federal property under false pretenses with the intent of committing a felony. However, that is likely only the first charge. There are a host of additional charges, particularly if the prosecutor support the widespread speculation of an alleged conspiracy to wiretap the office of a federal official. It is not clear if the authorities confirmed an effort to wiretap or found such equipment — as opposed to another prank-like video. Moreover, I would expect other possible arrests. Usually there are other individuals with knowledge of such a boneheaded plan.

That's just the tip of the iceberg.

As John Amato points out, this is part of a fine old "conservative" tradition.

In the autumn election season of 1970, a cherubic, bespectacled teenager turned up at the Chicago campaign headquarters of Alan Dixon, a Democrat running for state treasurer in Illinois. No one paid the newcomer much attention when he arrived, or when he left soon afterwards. Nor did anyone in the office make the connection between the mystery volunteer and 1,000 invitations on campaign stationery that began circulating in Chicago's red-light district and soup kitchens, promising "free beer, free food, girls and a good time for nothing" for all-comers at Dixon's headquarters.

That was Karl Rove.

And to bring it a little closer to home, Jeremy Hooper notes this little item from the indefatigable Maggie Gallagher:

A new government study just came out that looks at child abuse.

Question: What kind of family structure best protects children from child abuse?

Answer: Married biological parents. (see page 5-25).

Being the reality-challenged bigot that she is (and I realize it's no longer PC to call someone a bigot, even if they are), she tries to fold that into an argument against same-sex marriage, especially the Perry vs. Schwarzenegger trial in California. There's only one problem:

All the other family structures studied (which does not include same-sex parent families probably because these are such a small part of the population), but does include solo parents, other married parents (remarried primarily), single parents living with a partner, cohabiting parents, and no parents.

The big gap is between the intact married biological family and every other family form. Children living with both their mom and dad united by marriage have one-third the rate of serious child abuse, compared to children in any other family structure. (Emphasis added)

In other words, the study doesn't cover the population she's using the study to argue against.

In other words, she's full of shit. And she knows it. Gallagher, like most of the anti-gay crowd, is deliberately using "studies" that don't address the question to target gays. It's the Paul Cameron "faith-based science" school of argument, which is intrinsically dishonest. Which sort of define Gallagher and her crusade: dishonest.

Is it any wonder that when these people talk about morality, I tune out?