Selective Outrage

After White House press secretary Sarah Huckabee Sanders was booted from Red Hen restaurant in Lexington, Virginia, Representative Maxine Waters stated in part at a Los Angeles rally  “If you see anybody from that Cabinet in a restaurant, in a department store, at a gasoline station, you get out and you create a crowd and you push back on them and you tell them they’re not welcome anymore, anywhere."

Besides the predictable over-reaction and incitement to violence by the President of the USA

“The people who claim tolerance seem to be the most intolerant in this process,” House Majority Leader Kevin McCarthy said during a Fox News interview, adding, “We need civility in this country, but the idea that you’re asking people to go forward, that becomes very dangerous and it becomes a risk inside our country as well.”

House Majority Leader Paul Ryan has also asked Waters to apologize for the remarks, and said that there’s just “no place for that in our public discourse,” even as he skirted critiquing Rep. Steve King for his promotion of a neo-Nazi.

It was, well, uncivil and intolerant and it does little good to point out that many individuals on the right, most of them not coincidentally supporters of Donald Trump, are far more brazen, to wit:

In downtown Tampa. I’m speechless and embarrassed to live in this state. pic.twitter.com/gKLAaRHrBe

— Kathleen mahar (@Kathy0727) July 10, 2018

The lack of "civility" conservatives discovered when Mrs. Sanders was denied dinner at the restaurant of her choice took a violent turn when 91-year-old Rodolfo Rodriguez, a Mexican citizen in Willowbrook, Los Angeles County to visit relatives

was walking to a nearby park on Wednesday when he passed a woman and a little girl. Without warning, the woman assaulted him, he said, hitting him with a concrete block and enlisting a group of men to join in beating him.

"I didn't even bump into her kid," Rodriguez said. "I just passed her and she pushed me and she hit me until she was done."

Police are looking for "a female suspect and three to four male suspects" in the assault, the LA County Sheriff's Department said in a statement Monday night.

Authorities don't know at this time if any weapons were used or what the motive might have been, the statement said.

"We are concerned, especially with the type of crime they committed," Sheriff's Deputy D'Angelo Robinson told CNN affiliate KTLA. "There was what appears to be a 4-year-old child there who witnessed the entire thing. We can't have these kind of people like that out in the streets."

Misbel Borjas was driving by when she saw the woman hitting Rodriguez repeatedly in the head with a concrete block, she said.

"I heard her saying, go back to your country, go back to Mexico," she told CNN by phone. "When I tried to videotape her with my cell phone, she threw that same concrete block, tried to hit my car."

An elderly man is attacked allegedly because he is Mexican and the calls for "civility" are ... absent. Still, there will probably be little impact, with only Mr. Rodriguez and members of his family affected. Not so in one state, where according to Rewire. News

Planned Parenthood is closing its clinic in Fort Wayne, Indiana, because of a coordinated intimidation and harassment campaign by anti-choice activists.

The closure of the reproductive health-care clinic comes amid a massive surge in violent actions against abortion providers. There were three times as many incidents of trespassing, obstruction, and blockades of abortion clinics in 2017 than in the previous year, according to a report by the National Abortion Federation (NAF).

Christie Gillespie, president and CEO of Planned Parenthood of Indiana and Kentucky (PPINK), said in a statement Monday that Fort Wayne patients and providers have been subjected to harassment and attacks from those who oppose abortion rights.

“I am putting Allen County Right to Life, and all anti-women’s groups, on notice: You have intimidated and harassed us for the last time in this community,” Gillespie said. “We will be back, stronger than ever before. Because our supporters know that we provide lifesaving, high quality health care to the thousands of Hoosiers in the Fort Wayne community. No matter what.”

Maybe, and hopefully, but the outrage about the lack of "civility" demonstrated by forced-birth fanatics toward a clinic in Indiana is unsurprising. This sort of thing has been going on a long time amid little anger or attention, despite its enormous impact upon women. 

In the interests of full disclosure, note that

Cathie Humbarger, executive director of Allen County Right to Life, denied the allegations made by PPINK, and said the group does not “practice or condone intimidation,” reported the Associated Press.

If Humbarger's denial is valid, the campaign probably is not organized by a group but is merely the product of less-organized thugs of the forced-birth movement. Generally the most civil of Americans, Midwesterners describe the targeting of individuals and their families for violence as "not how decent, compassionate people behave." Rewire adds

Gillespie said in a press conference that the anti-choice activists harassed local businesses to ensure they didn’t partner with the clinic. “This harassment goes well beyond the ritual protesting. It includes publicly sharing personal information, including home addresses of staff,” she said.

“This is not how decent, compassionate people behave,” she added.

Ironically, "Anti-choice activists targeted the clinic with protests even though the Fort Wayne facility did not provide abortion care." Intimidating innocent persons for evidently political reasons to compel a change in behavior once was called "terrorism." Evidently, when the target is reproductive freedom, that label would be an affront to "civility."

Share |