Three people were killed and nine were injured when Robert Lewis Dear opened fire at a Planned Parenthood center in Colorado Springs, Colorado. After capturing the shooter, the authorities resisted identifying a motive for Dear's attacks, because they didn't have one.
Early reporting based on interviews with his recent neighbors in North Carolina turned up nothing. "If you talked to him, nothing with him was very cognitive," said neighbor James Russell to CBSNews.com. "Two topics Russell said he never heard Dear talk about were religion or abortion." The Washington Post found the same: "The neighbors said they never saw Dear with a gun, and they never heard him speak about politics or abortion rights."
But then NBC and others found an anonymous source to say Dear muttered "no more baby parts" to police after his surrender, launching a media game based on pro-abortion mantras rather than facts. Can we blame this on the sting videos of the Center for Medical Progress? Can we blame it on the Republican presidential candidates? Can we blame it on a "climate" of hostility from anyone who's ever publicly declared abortion is evil?
These are the same journalists who protest to the skies that anyone would ever have the audacity to associate the average American Muslim with ISIS terrorists, or point fingers at the environmental movement over the Unabomber. But the pro-life movement? They are implicated, indicted, tried and convicted before we know much of anything about this shooter.
Planned Parenthood boss Cecile Richards made the rounds of liberal media outlets on Nov. 30, and everywhere she went, they helpfully asked her to connect the dots. Richards would first say they were cooperating with the authorities to find out the motive, and then agreed that "hateful" pro-life remarks were surely to blame -- except she was in no position to document them.
NPR's Steve Inskeep relayed reports that Dear made "a remark -- something about baby parts, which, inevitably, will bring to mind this controversy over three Planned Parenthood affiliates that have provided fetal tissue for research. There was a sting video that's been much, much disputed and debated. Is it fair to link this to this other debate?" Not if "this" is an anonymous rumor you cannot even recount.
MSNBC's Andrea Mitchell was perfectly partisan: "I wanted to play some of the Republican reaction to this. It was slow in coming. ... Certainly there's been a lot of campaign rhetoric and a lot of false claims as well, and the Democrats for the most part came out right away trying to make that connection. ... How does Planned Parenthood deal with all this now?"
CNN's Anderson Cooper wasn't being coy: "Earlier today, you said, 'Hateful rhetoric and words and harassment of doctors and harassment of women going to health centers have real implications.' And you've said that you've 'never seen the kind of rhetoric that we've seen from presidential candidates.' Do you directly link the rhetoric that you're hearing from presidential candidates to what happened?"
These people don't sound like journalists. They sound like the hired help.
On their Facebook page, Planned Parenthood Action sounded the call to censorship: "We demand an end to the incendiary rhetoric" because it "creates a climate of disrespect that makes violence possible." They even promoted feminist Jessica Valenti insisting in an op-ed that "Words matter. When we dehumanize people ... we make it easier for others to do them harm."
On NPR, Richards denounced pro-lifers as "really un-American. It's been hard to see the kind of dehumanization of both health care providers and of course, women who are simply looking for health care."
Planned Parenthood is snuffing out more than 325,000 babies' lives a year -- and lecturing others about the harm of dehumanizing people. This was an evil enterprise before Dear and nothing has changed since.
The slaughter of the innocents continues.
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