Dear DaughterOfAnIwoJimaVet,
"I guess I just disagree with that, sitetest."
Okay, I can see that you might disagree. But it is my perspective, so perhaps you need to reconsider the lectures on "attitude," and so on. The poster's posts were false, and in my view, insulting. I did my best to restrain my own responses.
Bottom line - it isn't intransigent pro-lifers, as represented by some posters at FR, that have stymied the efforts of the pro-life movement. To say otherwise is to offer insult to all the dedicated pro-lifers who give so much for the cause of the innocent.
"This goes even deeper than the thrust of this thread - people refusing to vote for Condoleezza Rice because she isn't a hard-core pro-lifer (and potentially giving all of us a President Hillary Clinton in the process)."
There is a wide diversity of opinion among pro-lifers about Ms. Rice.
However, I hang with a lot of pro-lifers. Folks who are just active supporters, like me, and folks who work full-time in the arena.
First, about me and my crowd. We're pretty much all devout Catholics who accept the whole Catholic thing. Even on questions like contraception. On the life issues - abortion, euthanasia, embryonic stem cell research, etc., we're pretty much "extremists" in our ultimate goals.
Now, this is what we think pretty much uniformly about the candidacy of Ms. Rice.
Ms. Rice is an acceptable candidate to pro-lifers if she merely agrees that Roe must go, and that she will do her best to appoint judges and justices who respect the Constitution sufficiently to see that Roe must go.
We will support her even if she follows up that statement with one that says something like, "I think abortion should be legal in many circumstances, but that it should be a question that is decided by the elected representatives of the people, not the courts."
She doesn't have to be pro-life to win our support. But she must understand that Roe is bad constitutional law, and must go.
But if Ms. Rice thinks that the general framework of Roe should stay indefinitely, then we will not support her. In that case, she is not a politician who respects the Constitution.
This, from us Catholic "extremists."
"I've read threads on FreeRepublic with hard-core pro-lifers posting their refusal to condemn the killer of an abortion clinic doctor."
Big deal. A majority of folks in the United States believe that 95% of abortions should be illegal. That's well over a hundred million folks. Among their number, I'm sure we can find a few fruitcakes here and there.
I'll break a sweat about this just about the time I see the destruction of two pregnancy aid centers here in Maryland, in less than a year, make the national news. Or heck, even if it makes the local CBSABCNBC news affiliate. The last one did get a favorable story on the local Fox affiliate. I almost had a heart attack. What is it that Denny Crane says about truth, God, and Fox?
Until then, I'm sorry, I'm not going to get too worked over some folks who talk a lot on an Internet forum.
Let's not slur the entire movement with a handful of nuts. That's a Dan Rather move.
"Maybe the movement - referring to the entire movement here, not simply your circle of real-life friends and acquaintances - contains a broader range of attitudes than you believe it does."
I don't question for a minute that there are eight or nine lunatics running around who want to cut down abortionists.
Heck, they've done it maybe 10 times over the last 32 years.
But it's hardly a popular opinion in the movement.
On the other hand, there are hundreds of violent actions taken against pro-lifers every year. The ratio of violent acts by pro-aborts to violent acts by pro-lifers is about 100 to 1. You may wish to consider doing a little research in this area.
I've been involved formally on and off, at the fringes, with the pro-life movement for 15 years. I have a pretty good idea of the parameters of the movement. Like I said, don't fall for the lamestream media move of smearing the whole movement because there are a few squirrelly folks among us.
Especially while the perpetrators of serious crimes against the pro-life movement go unsolved, largely uninvestigated.
"I don't think Trinity_Tx is mistaken for recognizing that, and I would hope you wouldn't take such personal offense to it."
If his or her belief is that there are any significant number of pro-lifers who sanction violence, Trinity_Tx would be quite mistaken, as you would be, too.
And I would take extreme personal offense to such an over-the-top libel. As I said, the ratio of pro-abort violence against pro-lifers to the converse is about 100 to 1(and I'm not even talking about over a million murders per year in the abortuaries).
"Look around you on FR. There are a lot of people here who don't have the slightest intent of compromising on anything..."
First, my posts to Trinity_Tx were in response to the poster's assertion that such views had prevented the banning of partial birth abortion, or the support by pro-lifers of candidates who respect the Constitution.
Whether such posters exist on FR or not isn't the point. I haven't made it the point.
As bans on partial birth abortion have actually been passed, and as pro-lifers regularly endorse candidates who respect the Constitution, there can be no cause and effect between FR posters and these phenomena, cited by Trinity_Tx, because the phenomena are falsely reported by Trinity_Tx.
"Just because you don't know them personally doesn't mean they're not out there."
How often should I repeat this? I didn't say such posters don't exist. I said that the effects cited by Trinity_Tx allegedly caused by folks like these don't actually exist, and thus couldn't have been caused by folks like this.
THERE'S your reality.
sitetest
The reason I jumped in here in the first place was that you were condescending to someone who was in no way condescending to you.
Probing further, your position seems to be that you and your friends are the quintessential, mainstream, model pro-life advocates, and that the behavior of other types of pro-life advocates is to be dismissed completely. Therefore, any criticism of those people or acknowledgment of their influence in the movement is invalid.
You also don't appear to believe anyone has a right to disagree with you about that.
Having said that, I'll go back to the reason I jumped in:
If you don't think pro-lifers treating other (often pro-life, or fence-sitting) people condescendingly is a problem, I strongly disagree - but I recognize that you are certainly welcome to your views.
I suspect all we will agree on is the last seven words of the paragraph above. I'm content to leave it at that.