The Brilliant Minds in S Dak have come up with plan to eliminate all abortions that is breathtaking in its simplicity, almost elegant. Make it legal to kill the doctors who perform them.
A law under consideration in South Dakota would expand the definition of "justifiable homicide" to include killings that are intended to prevent harm to a fetus-a move that could make it legal to kill doctors who perform abortions. The Republican-backed legislation, House Bill 1171, has passed out of committee on a nine-to-three party-line vote, and is expected to face a floor vote in the state's GOP-dominated House of Representatives soon.
But this, one may say, is only the beginning. American eliminationists have long been searching for a way to get rid of anybody who doesn't fit their ideal image: white, rich, preferably male, and very very conservative. The answer that S Dak has just put forward solves the problem of legal eliminationism, which it hasn't been - legal, that is - up to now. Murder has never been acceptable and genocide has been an ugly word ever since Hitler, so the problem has been how to frame the mass murder of non-conservatives in a legally acceptable way. S Dak's "protectionist" framing solves this problem by neatly dove-tailing into the protectionist framing that justifies the Second Iraq War, the destruction of civil liberties since 9/11, and the looting of the economy by Wall Street.
Don't see the connection? It's simple. Although the law appears only to be a sop to the anrti-choice crowd who want to get govt out of the boardroom and into the bedroom where it belongs, actually if passed it would effectively enshrine in law the principle that a "justifiable" murder would occur whenever a politically designated "value" was considered "protected" and was "threatened" by another group or individual, and someone acted to "protect" the former by eliminating the latter physically on the assumption that anyone who disagreed with the essence of the designated "value" deserved to die.
Once this principle is accepted legally, it will be relatively easy to enlarge the scope of the law to include, say, the nation. Those in political control at the time the law is written would of course define which values were worthy of "protection" and which citizens constituted a "threat" to those values. Eliminationists, who are all rabid conservative Republicans, would be able to argue legally that liberals and progressives were a "threat" to the nation because we all know they're trying to destroy it with socialist weapons like free food and medicine for the poor paid for by taxes on the rich. They would therefore be able to, as advocated by President Limbaugh and Vice President Coulter among others, argue successfully in court that "putting liberals against the wall to be shot" (cf Sec of War Beck) was a legally justifiable way of "protecting" the "values" of the nation, at least as they were defined by the rabid conservative Republicans who wrote the law.
It's a cinch to predict that rabid conservative Republicans, if successful in S Dak, will move to widen the effects of the law in just this way since they have been saying publicly for 30 years that this is what they want (see the recent CPAC conference for examples). Leaders of the Dermocrat party will of course insist that the rabid conservative Republicans have gone too far and in the interests of bipartisan co-operation suggest a compromise in which the justifiable murder of liberals will not be unlimited but will be confined to a season - say, November through January - when identifiable left-wingers may be hunted like deer or turkeys. This compromise will be acceptable to a filibuster-proof majority coalition of rabid conservative Republicans and marginally less rabidly conservative Blue Dog Democrats.
Once this program is fully under way and the vast majority of dangerous, invidious liberals have been "justifiably" eliminated and are no longer blocking their plans, rabid conservative Republicans will then move on to hunting seasons for illegal immigrants, women who don't belong to a country club, and all non-fundamentalists, Christian or not.
Then life will be beautiful all day long and all you'll have to do is smile.
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After catching a lot of heat, the bill was withdrawn.
I'm sure it will come up again if SD is ever stupid enough to give the Republicans big majorities in both houses.
Posted by: Mark Gisleson | February 18, 2011 at 05:33 PM