Amanda Marcotte writing for Slate:
Things had been good for Wichita, Kansas, anti-choice fanatics in the years since one of their own forcibly closed down the town's sole abortion clinic by shooting its doctor dead in the middle of his church. With Dr. Tiller gone, the anti-choicers didn't have to spend so much time endlessly protesting and obsessing over his clinic, giving them more time for quiet contemplation about how liberals and feminists will destroy civilization with all their genital-touching. But now there's a new clinic in town where Dr. Tiller's used to be, and irate anti-choice groups are petitioning the city to have it shut down.
Their reasoning is that the clinic, the South Wind Women's Center, provokes them into harassing the people going in and out of it, and because they understand that they are super annoying people, they would like the provocation taken away.
Better yet, an intra-fundamentalist controversy has erupted over the question of exactly how provocative the clinic is. One group says that medical workers providing private abortion care are deliberately provoking gun violence and have to be stopped before some hapless responsible gun owner who brings a gun to an abortion clinic ends up in jail because a meanie doctor pushed him to murder. The other groups say that while they fully agree that the clinic is making them harass its workers and patients, it's a step too far to suggest they're pushing anyone to shoot at them.
