If Congress doesn't stop stalling and get tougher on violence by anti-abortion protesters, Dr. David Gunn may have died in vain.
He's the physician who, after receiving increasingly blatant and vicious threats, was shot to death this week outside an abortion clinic in Pensacola, Fla. during a demonstration.If his slaying does not prompt Congress to start moving on a stalled bill to make the blocking of clinics a federal crime, what will it take?
Since 1991, the number of reported incidents of harassment at clinics has more than doubled. The incidents range from taunts, hate mail and physical obstruction to the use of acid sprays and fire bombs. The cost of arson and other vandalism to the clinics amounted to nearly $2 million last year alone.
Though the protesters are certainly justified in wanting to protect the unborn, the abandonment of persuasion in favor of coercion tends to discredit an otherwise noble movement. Killing to defend the right to life is simply indefensible.
Early this year, the U.S. Supreme Court ruled that judges could no longer use an 1871 federal law to stop blockades of the clinics. Injunctions could still be issued against the blockades under state laws, like those governing trespass. But it is not clear to what extent such state laws are available.
What is unmistakably plain is the principle that a just cause does not warrant the use of blockades or bloodshed. If federal rather than state laws must be used to put that principle into practice, so be it.