Washington Post’s Ruth Marcus is No Liberal

The Washington Post‘s liberal columnist Ruth Marcus is making the claim that because the Planned Parenthood shooter allegedly said “no more baby parts,” Republicans are to blame for the attack. It is an absurd claim, one being parroted by the left throughout the media with the sole purpose of shutting down ordinary criticism of Planned Parenthood and open debate about abortion policy.

It is a fact that Planned Parenthood provides fetal tissue to researchers. It is also a fact that the organization was caught on video apparently expressing a willingness to do so for a price above cost. There are only two things in dispute: whether any sale above cost counts as “profit” for the purposes of federal law, and the broader question of whether the fetuses were, in fact, babies.

If it is an incitement to violence to argue that people should not sell baby parts, or should not sell fetal parts for profit, then federal law itself is an incitement. The entire argument is absurd on its face and should be exposed for the illiberal purpose at its core.

Marcus argues that “Republican politicians who fueled the overwrought and unsupported controversy over selling baby parts bear some measure of responsibility” for the Planned Parenthood shooting.

“Overwrought” is just another way of saying that Marcus thinks the issue is not important. What part of the controversy is “unsupported?”

She claims the videos are “doctored”–a false claim that has entered the left’s standard talking points. What has been changed? She does not say–because she cannot prove that lie.

Sometimes rhetoric does lead to violence–as when Michael Brown’s stepfather reacted to the non-indictment of a Ferguson, MO police officer by yelling to a crowd: “Burn this bitch down!” The Planned Parenthood videos are not even in the same universe. They are what used to be called “investigative journalism,” and they are precisely the kind of speech the First Amendment was designed to protect.

But because Marcus doesn’t like that speech, she wants to suppress it. That is not liberalism. It is fascism.