Anti-abortion and Anti-gay: It's Terrorism That Works by Patricia Nell Warren

The other night on MSNBC, Rachel Maddow pointed out a disturbing fact. Despite government efforts to punish violent anti-abortionists, their terrorist campaign is actually succeeding. And it's terrorism by every definition, because it uses threats of death and injury to cowe people into doing what the terrorists want. Thanks to decades of harassment, most of the doctors, nurses and volunteers have given up and fled the abortion field. Tiller himself knew he was living on borrowed time. On top of this, federal and state government has woven a sticky web of laws that limit access to this procedure. Today, nearly 90 percent of U.S. counties have no access to abortion. So abortions are still technically "legal" in the U.S., but it's hard for most women to get one now.

A similar disturbing fact is coming clear with the hate speech aimed at LGBT Americans. Because it comes from the same people who oppose abortion, and its long-term attrition is working against us too. Sure, it hasn't blunted our collective will. But it has pushed the gay-bashing statistics higher than ever. Worse, it has slowed our progress towards equal protection under the law, by encouraging more Americans to oppose us "because God wants fags dead."

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But in the last 10 years, an average of one activist a year has been murdered. Yet their deaths, unlike that of George Tiller, seldom made a ripple in the national media. It has been a quiet, if no less deadly, attrition that has cut deep into the communities that knew the victims. From this, I conclude that the murder of a heterosexual abortionist is "important" enough to spark a national meltdown of conscience ... but the murder of a gay or lesbian or bisexual or transgender activist is not quite as "important."

Often law enforcement insisted that these were not hate crimes. They attributed the attackers' motives to robbery, or insisted that the victims brought it on themselves sexually in some way. Most weren't publicly assassinated, as Milk was. Many died in more private circumstances.

But all these activist victims had two things in common. One -- they had drawn attention to themselves, either nationally or locally, by being prominent in civil rights, philanthropy, public service, social work, community organizing -- or simply being popular community figures. In some cases, their visibility may have been the lightning rod that drew that strike of death their way. And two -- their killers could hear all those decades of hate speech ringing in their memory, telling them that God wants fags dead.