Remember how Michigan representative Bart Stupak received charming pro-life threats from charming pro-lifers after he voted in support of health care reform? He was inundated by faxes, phone calls, and threats against his family for choosing to vote really pro-life, and support health care reform.
The message he was given:
"Congressman Stupak, you baby-killing mother f***er... I hope you bleed out your a**, got cancer and die, you mother f***er," one man says in a message to Stupak.
Well, it's happening all over again, this time to federal judge Susan Bolton in Arizona, after she enjoined several key provisions of Arizona's draconian new immigration law. It's now being reported that Bolton has been inundated with threats, some of them violent.
As this pattern of violent resistance to decisions that serve the core democratic values of our society unfolds, you have to wonder: is the hard right really all about the sanctity of life, about shoring up the supposedly dwindling moral values of our culture?
Or is about something else altogether: theocratic control of society, backed up (and ushered in) by violence, if necessary? In other words, is it about the very (non-existent) fascism it claims to deplore in the left?
Have to wonder. It would be really interesting to see a good empirical study of hard-line anti-immigration folks in places like Arizona, and the pro-life movement.
My intuition is that you'd find a lot of overlap between the two groups--to the discredit of the U.S. Catholic bishops, who have obviously failed in their pastoral responsibility to teach the fundamental values of life as they constantly wave the anti-abortion flag. The bishops cannot speak to the immigration debate with any moral force because they negated their moral authority during the debate about health care reform, and have been negating their moral authority for years now through their alliance with political and religious groups that call themselves pro-life, while they are all about values antithetical to life.
My intuition is that you'd find a lot of overlap between the two groups--to the discredit of the U.S. Catholic bishops, who have obviously failed in their pastoral responsibility to teach the fundamental values of life as they constantly wave the anti-abortion flag. The bishops cannot speak to the immigration debate with any moral force because they negated their moral authority during the debate about health care reform, and have been negating their moral authority for years now through their alliance with political and religious groups that call themselves pro-life, while they are all about values antithetical to life.
