At his Beliefnet blog, Steven Waldman writes that the murder of George Tiller, a Wichita abortion provider, should “force a re-assessment of the Department of Homeland Security’s maligned report on ‘right wing extremism’“:
I was thoroughly dumbfounded at the conservative reaction to that report in April. If you read the report, it was quite clearly aimed a serious, violent, insane extremists. Yet mainstream conservatives took great offense, accusing the Obama administration of chillingly targeting the free-speech of conscientious anti-abortion citizens, veterans and conservatives writ large.
Conservatives should have said, “Here! Here! We applaud the efforts to clamp down on terrorism, crime and extremists.” After all, most conservatives have nothing to do with, and deplore, violent extremists. Instead, by saying the report was an attack on conservatism in general, the conservatives—not the government—blurred the lines between the violent extremes and the conservative mainstream.
[…]
The report suggested that the bad economy and the election of a black president could stimulate more anger and activity from “violent anti-government groups.” Far from attacking anti-abortion activists in general, as many claimed, the report instead noted white supremacists’ “longstanding exploitation of social issues such as abortion.”
We’ll see if [suspected murderer Scott] Roeder maintained his ties to the militia groups or had shifted his focus to abortion only, but at a minimum, conservatives have to make a new choice: take seriously right wing extremists—the real ones, not the bloviators—or run the risk of truly being lumped together.
Read the full post here.