No true Saletan

I’ve come to expect contrarianism from Slate as a matter of course. The wisdom of the counterintuitive—that’s sort of the point, right? Unfortunately, sometimes the obvious answer is the best one, and devil’s advocacy can lead you down some pretty moronic paths. Take William Saletan’s latest Slate column, titled (I suspect he thinks provocatively) “Is it wrong to murder an abortionist?” This bizarre, sententious mess exposes itself to such simple objections that I have to wonder how it made it to “print.”

Saletan begins by explaining why the recently murdered abortionist George Tiller was unique:

Tiller was the country’s bravest or most ruthless abortion provider, depending on how you saw him. The pregnancies he ended were the latest of the late. If your local clinic said you were too far along, and they sent you to a late-term provider who said you were too late even for her, Tiller was your last shot. If Tiller said no, you were going to have a baby, or a dying baby, or a stillbirth, or whatever nature and circumstance had in store for you. . . .

Tiller’s murder is different from all previous murders of abortion providers. If you kill an ordinary abortionist, somebody else will step in. But if you kill the guy at the end of the line, some of his patients won’t be able to find an alternative. You will have directly prevented abortions.

That seems to be what Tiller’s alleged assassin, Scott Roeder, had in mind. . . . Roeder told other pro-lifers that he condoned deadly violence to stop abortions. He admired the Army of God’s “Defensive Action Statement,” which endorses the murder of abortion providers on the grounds that “whatever force is legitimate to defend the life of a born child is legitimate to defend the life of an unborn child.”

This is followed by Saletan’s next “provocative” question: “Is that statement wrong?” You should be able to guess where this is going. Saletan, who knows you better than you know yourself (“You think you’re pro-choice. You think marching or phone-banking makes you an activist. You know nothing”), is giving you two options: Either you believe it’s okay to murder abortionists, or you don’t believe that abortion is really murder.

“If unborn children are morally equal to born children,” he writes, “then Tiller’s assassin has just succeeded where the legal system failed: He has stopped a mass murderer from killing again. So is Roeder getting support from the nation’s leading pro-life groups? Not a bit.” Pardon? Last  I checked, “succeeding where the legal system failed” is called “vigilantism”—terrific for Batman, but hardly compatible with democratic society. Saletan has no time for this dissent:

[T]his self-restraint can’t simply be chalked up to nonviolence or respect for the law. Look up the bills these organizations have written, pushed, or passed to restrict abortions. I challenge you to find a single bill that treats a woman who procures an abortion as a murderer. They don’t even propose that she go to jail.

First we were meant to be astonished that “the nation’s leading pro-life groups” don’t support extrajudicial killing. (Never mind that plenty of Americans don’t believe in capital punishment for murderers of the less ambiguous variety, either.) Now we’re meant to be persuaded of their insincerity because they don’t hurt their cause pursuing quixotic legislation. Sounds to me like a classic logical fallacy: If a pro-lifer says he is opposed to murder in all cases, Saletan replies that no true pro-lifer would object to the violent defense of human life.

As an occasional reader and frequent admirer of Saletan’s work, I have to assume he didn’t write this: No true Saletan could come up with something so obnoxious.