They will continue to use empathy as a dirty word, while wondering obliquely why the mean and nasty liberals can’t empathize with a poor guy who just wanted to stop the mean man from killing babies.

What Jeff said. Empathy for white guys in positions of relative power: good. Empathy for women and everybody else: bad.

And I wonder which major GOP spokesmonster will just opine that if abortion were outlawed we wouldn’t have this problem.

No wonder he was public enemy number one to so many conservatives, with Bill O’Reilly leading the pack.

That sanctimonious fuckwad spent the whole first five minutes of his show tonight defending everything he has ever said about Dr. Tiller, and then proceeded to smear pro-choice advocates for having the audacity to call him out.

I will not say that I want anyone to do anything bad to him.

But God I would love for him to get diagnosed with a brutally painful terminal illness that causes him to have a long and agonizing death.

Olbermann looked like he was going to have an aneurysm when he addressed O’Reilly’s vile monologue tonight.  The veins were popping out of his head and he was furious.

Rachel Maddow is so frickin’ awesome.  She began with a litany of violence committed by anti-choice activists, and went on to say that “we have an established anti-abortion terrorism” network in this country.  And it’s working.”

Now she’s talking about how it’s impossible to get an abortion in 87% of U.S. Counties, and what it means to have abortion legal when you still can’t get one…. and talking with Dr. Susan Wicklund, another doctor (first woman consultant I’ve seen on the shows today!)

I only wish Rachel would give some details about the kind of women Tiller helped (http://www.aheartbreakingchoice.com/kansasdelays.html)

Go ahead and write more about it. The more I think about this murder, the more angles pop up, and I’m not even as close to the topic as I imagine you are.

For example, we’ve pointed out repeatedly to the forced-birth crowd that there’s always been abortion, there will always be abortion. It’s recently (i.e.,  this morning) occurred to me that, as long as abortion is legal, these terrorist shit-heels are going to be a fact of life too. 

Vigilance, as they say, is the price of freedom, but it may be unreasonable to expect people to spend their lives looking over their shoulders for the privilege of keeping abortion safe and legal for the rest of us. So what can we do for them?

(Also, not to go OT, but this has been on my mind all day: If Dr. Tiller was one of only a very few American docs who handled late-term terminations, what’s going to happen to this body of knowledge if the remaining practitioners don’t train successors? Are there training programs? The remaining docs would be a lot safer if there were more of them. Moreover, w/r/t the security concerns above, if there were more, the older practitioners could retire from this sort of life. )

The thing that people don’t get about empathy is that you don’t have to share the same experience with someone to empathize with them. You just need to have those same feelings. It’s not that difficult. If someone is telling you a sad story and they start to cry, all you have to think about is the last time you felt that sad, and you’ll have to hold back a few tears too.

I can’t empathize with this guy who murdered Tiller, because I’ve never experienced psychopathy or psychosis. The only thing I can understand is a feelings of injustice and social responsibility. But to have these feelings for fetuses instead of women is just beyond me.

The right-wingers are going to turn right around without a semblance of self-awareness and start talking about how empathy turns you into a victim. Dr. Tiller was murdered because he was weak enough to think from others’ points of view. Just watch.

Amanda-you forgot to mention the Kathleen Sebelius nomination fight which was all about abortion in Kansas for no real reason

“Empathy” to the right-wing is a dirty word.  After all, their poster-boy for how to handle feelings was Shrub.  I knew everything I ever needed to know about him when he was governor of Texas.  He listened to Karla Faye Tucker ask for a commutation of her sentence to life imprisonment (she cited her conversion to Christianity and how she could mentor others in jail).  He mocked her openly in an interview, and then signed her death warrant.  “Compassionate conservatism”, my ass.

These people think compassion and empathy are weak, feminine qualities.  Real Men (M) kick ass and take names…. none of this sissy “I feel your pain” stuff.

Going to lie down now, before I join Olbermann in the stoke ward.

I’d bet a lot of money that O’R, Beck, and their cohorts in self-promotion-thru-hate-of-women all beefed up THEIR security this weekend. “Its not my fault!” they’ll squeal, wetting their pants while crouching behind a throng of bodyguards in their fenced estates.

There is a least one piece of good news to emerge amidst this whole wretched story right now… Dr. Tiller’s clinic will reopen next week, and all women who were scheduled to receive reproductive health services will be accomodated - Dr. LeRoy Carhart (of the famed Carhart SCOTUS case?), a friend of the Tiller family, will step in to perform the procedures at the clinic…

http://www.kansas.com/news/tiller/story/835055.html

what’s enraging is that those of us who support and indeed utilize our reproductive rights are expected to, in the name of “common ground” sit around and say that all of us abhor abortion and it’s the worst thing that could ever happen to a women and etc. etc.
I resent that I’m expected to say that my 1st choice, upon finding that I was pregnant (and my $$$ per month for my BC didn’t work) would be immediately that I would be keeping it. It’s not and never will be.
That’s not how it works in reality for many women. This is why abortion has been around for a long time - a lot longer than the option of not dying from abortion has.
In fact, often the worst thing that could happen to the woman making the choice is keeping the baby or bringing it into the world even if she wasn’t keeping it. (which really shoots the whole “just give it up for adoption!” meme that seems to be the “answer” to common ground).
Bullshit. It’s still forced pregnancy.
That’s the way they want this whole game to end up and I’m not playing into it.

DTG, it is indeed THAT Carhart.  He was a regular OB/GYN who performed occasional abortions until forced birthers burned down his farm, killing dozens of animals and destroying his home.  He has, since then, dedicated his life to women’s reproductive rights fighting long and difficult legal battles to keep his clinic, against abortion restrictions, and to keep practicing. 

I think the most important part of empathy is the ability to suspend one’s own position and just entertain the position in the world of someone else, to understand that you cannot universalize from your own experiences.  The whole debate over empathy an Sotomayor has been so indicative of the fact that for the rightwing the worldview of the white, het dude is the center of the universe. Anything else is bias.

Thanks for dedicating so much time and energy to writing about this, Amanda.  I am certain this is beginning of another era of ramped up terrorism on behalf of the christian fundamentalists.

The main danger of having Ad-Sense on your blog—another beautifully written piece on Dr. Tiller ... topped with a ad offering “pro-life” products.  Doesn’t exactly present the best picture although I know you have no control over it.

It’s my hope that those like Rachel Maddow and Keith Olbermann continue to hammer at the anti terrorists.  And that Keith, whom I’ve loved dearly since his ESPN days, doesn’t have a stroke on air one of these days.

I hope someone airs the stories of some of Dr. Tiller’s patients.  I’ve been really moved by their accounts of how he treated his patients as human beings and understood how the care of a rape victim or a woman forced to abort a very wanted child due to birth defects to a woman in economic crisis all required special and different attention.

That’s empathy.  And it is an amazing quality.

“Operation Rescue: Protecting Life through Murder since 1973.”

The anti-choice American Taliban demonstrates their kinship with the Radical Islamists through their willingness to kill those dedicated to improving the lives of women. Anti-choice mullahs like Randall Terry, through their use of emotionally-charged rhetoric, cannot escape their responsibility for the violent attacks on innocent health-care workers.

“diplomacy over warfare in our foreign relations”

Did you mean the opposite?

I’m just assuming hate mongerers are anti-diplomacy, but I could be wrong.

pennylane makes a very important point: in some respects, this is almost the opposite of empathy. It’s about respecting individuals as moral agents: that’s to say, you believe that women should have the right to make decisions that you yourself might not necessarily make in the same situation, or respecting the fact that each decision is personal and private. It’s all very well for Republicans with gay children to support gay marriage, or for John McCain to say that Meghan would be making her own choice if she got pregnant, but empathy is, on that level, a kind of no-shit-Sherlock thing, and it rolls over to the misplaced empathy in which Lord Saletan projects his sense of ick onto other people.

A deeper sense of the term recognises that there can be no absolute empathy, because decisions and situations are personal and contingent, and respects the autonomy of individuals as moral agents.

“diplomacy over warfare in our foreign relations”

Did you mean the opposite?

I thought that for a second, but I re-read the sentence and realized she said that they oppose diplomacy over warfare.  It is a little confusing, but it does technically say what she meant it to say.

Oh, wow.  English major can’t read sentence.  Sorry!

I hope someone airs the stories of some of Dr. Tiller’s patients.

Know who is, crazily enough?  Andrew Sullivan.  And while he’s still clinging to his Disapproval of abortion, it’s apparently shaken some of his “certainties” a bit. 

Gosh.  It’s almost like a gay man who was also a dedicated member of a church run by celibate men, and a movement dominated by selfish, patriarchal men (conservatism or libertarianism, take your pick) lacked a certain perspective on pregnancy.  Give him credit for realizing that, now let’s see if he actually does anything with it.

The wife of an elected official in my state died in child birth last week. The baby died two days later. Everyone was sad. The official is a conservative Republican, and probably either evangelical or Mormon. Before the murder of Dr. Tiller it did not occur to me that perhaps the doctors knew the woman’s life was in danger and that she might have refused a late term abortion to save her life due to her religious beliefs. It is speculation, no details about the deaths have been released, but one does now wonder if this woman is dead because she refused medical advice to save her life.

“I can’t empathize with this guy who murdered Tiller, because I’ve never experienced psychopathy or psychosis. The only thing I can understand is a feelings of injustice and social responsibility. But to have these feelings for fetuses instead of women is just beyond me.”

I might, IF I thought they really believed there was no difference between a fetus and baby.

But as Amanda says, they act a lot more like a bunch of people who can’t stand that anyone bucks their authoritah and I can’t emphathize with that. I just don’t have the synapse that fires and tells me to try to subjugate someone else. Dr. Tiller was probably the epitome of disobedience, as a white male Christian from Kansas, who should have listened to them about what God wants, but wouldn’t. They can explain away the women who get abortions because they don’t believe women can really make decisions, hence all the focus on Tiller over the years. And all the rhetoric about dastardly men, be they docs or boyfriends, tricking or forcing women into having abortions.

But to have these feelings for fetuses instead of women is just beyond me.”

I might, IF I thought they really believed there was no difference between a fetus and baby

This is the “pro-life” big lie, that they care about life. Do you hear any of them proposing day care for new mothers ? Do any of them volunteer to care or feed babies born from poor mothers, rape victims ? Do they have a clinic or fund centers to deal with babies born with birth defects ?

Nope. All the so called “pro-life” concern ends when the baby is actually alive. Then it’s the woman’s problem on how to feed and care for that “mistake”. And she better not dare to go on welfare!!!!

It’s all a big lie. Those people hate women AND hate kids. They just want to force punishment on the sluts who dared to have sex.

Until I see “pro-life” funding schools and day care and research for disabled kids I will never believe a word they say about caring for anything but their sick need to punish others.