Rachel Maddow: Right-Wing Terrorism Must Be Stopped

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http://www.alternet.org/reproductivejustice/140501/rachel_maddow%3A_right-wing_terrorism_must_be_stopped

Rachel Maddow: Right-Wing Terrorism Must Be Stopped
By Rachel Maddow, MSNBC. Posted June 8, 2009.

The tactics of anti-choice extremists are designed to change policy by terrorizing Americans. How do we stop them from committing violent acts?

Editor's Note: The following is an edited version of a transcript from the Rachel Maddow Show.

We begin tonight with another deadly act of domestic terrorism. The first time a doctor was murdered by the modern anti-abortion terrorist movement in America was March 1993. Anti-abortion demonstrators were protesting at a clinic in Pensacola, Florida. As Dr. David Gunn arrived at a clinic, a young man named Michael Griffin shot Dr. Gunn several times in the chest with a snub-nose .38 revolver.

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In 1992 and 1993, Shelly Shannon set fires and used acid to attack at least 10 abortion clinics in Oregon, California, Idaho and Nevada. In 1993, she went to Wichita, Kansas, and used a semiautomatic pistol to shoot Dr. George Tiller in each of his arms outside the clinic at which he worked.

While she was in prison, Ms. Shannon signed on to a pledge of support for Paul Hill, the murderer of yet another American doctor. In June 1994, Paul Hill shot to death Dr. George Britton and a 74-year-old clinic escort named James Barrett, and he seriously wounded Mr. Barrett‘s wife.

Six months later, a man named John Salvi walked into two clinics in Brookline, Massachusetts, and killed two receptionists and wounded five other people. In January 1998, yet another murder—security guard Robert Sanderson was killed and a nurse named Emily Lyons was critically injured by a nail bomb that exploded at an Alabama abortion clinic at which they worked. That bomb was planted by a man named Eric Rudolph.

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In October 1998, another murder—in Amherst, New York, Dr. Barnett Slepian was standing inside his house when James Kopp shot and killed him with a sniper rifle. Kopp was a member of an anti-abortion extremist group that calls itself the Lambs of Christ.

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RANDALL TERRY, FOUNDER, OPERATION RESCUE: I stand before you today saying about George Tiller what I said in his life. He was a mass murderer. George Tiller was a mass murderer. He killed tens of thousands of innocent human beings at his own hand. George Tiller was a murderer and he was doing something that was literally demonic.

RACHEL MADDOW: Another anti-abortion extremist group, Operation Save America, also put out a statement celebrating George Tiller‘s murder today, saying, quote, “He is now vowing before Jesus and confessing that Jesus is right and that he, George Tiller, was wrong.”

If you go to the Web site of the Army of God, you will find hagiographic websites for anti-abortion terrorist movement heroes, like Paul Hill and Eric Rudolph and Shelly Shannon. You can actually scroll through pages and pages of mug shots and descriptions of bombings and shootings and murders and attempted murders—all praising the perpetrators, and even suggesting ways to get away with the same types of crimes that these people committed but you could do it without getting caught.

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