{"id":150,"date":"2011-01-11T08:41:40","date_gmt":"2011-01-11T08:41:40","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/blog.beliefnet.com\/religionandpubliclife\/2011\/01\/palin-and-loughner.html"},"modified":"2011-01-11T08:41:40","modified_gmt":"2011-01-11T08:41:40","slug":"palin-and-loughner","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/religionandpubliclife\/2011\/01\/palin-and-loughner.html","title":{"rendered":"Palin and Loughner"},"content":{"rendered":"

\"crosshairsmap.jpg\"Pace<\/i> Sarah Palin’s spokeswoman<\/a>,
\nbut of course the lady’s map featured crosshairs–just another example
\nof the recourse to firearms imagery in contemporary Republican political
\nrhetoric. Is it accurate to trace it to Pat Buchanan’s famous “Lock and
\nLoad!” summons to (metaphorical) arms in his insurgent 1996 campaign
\nfor the GOP presidential nomination? Whatever, it’s what we have come to
\nexpect from the Party of the Second Amendment and the Ten Commandments.<\/p>\n

The
\ncommotion over whether such imagery can be blamed for Jared Loughner is
\nalso pretty familiar. It happens every time an abortion doctor is shot,
\nmost recently after the 2009 murder of Wichita physician George Tiller
\nby Scott Roeder. My colleague Andrew Walsh reviewed<\/a> the back-and-forth in Religion in the News <\/i>and came to the following conclusion.<\/p>\n

\n

No one argued that Cardinal Rigali or Richard
\nLand or even Randall Terry ordered a hit on Tiller, but it’s clear that the
\nunceasing confrontational campaign in Wichita did involve a large number of
\n“mainstream” pro-life groups over a lengthy period. Reporting by  [David] Barstow, Judy
\nThomas, and others showed that Scott Roeder–although by no means a major figure
\nin pro-life activities in Kansas and Missouri– participated over a long period
\nin anti-abortion activities and was quite well known. He picketed, he did
\n“street counseling,” he campaigned on the Internet, and he attended the Kansas
\ntrial that ended in March when Tiller was acquitted of 19 misdemeanor charges
\nthat he broke Kansas law in performing late-term abortions…<\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n

“Roeder was not one of us,” Philadelphia
\nDaily News <\/i>columnist Christine Flowers insisted on June 12. “He was a
\npsychopath, a man whose demented mind led him to commit a crime that is,
\nessentially, the antithesis of what the pro-life movement represents.”<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

\n

It is hard, at this point, to take such
\nself-exoneration seriously. Roeder was one of them, and not the first to take
\nthe movement’s violent words and confrontational deeds one step further.<\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n

From
\nthe initial reporting, it does not seem that Loughner had the sorts of
\nties to the Sarah Palin wing of the Republican Party that Roeder had to
\nthe pro-life movement. But if, say, a copy of her map is found tucked
\ninside of one of his books, she will have something to answer for.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Pace Sarah Palin’s spokeswoman, but of course the lady’s map featured crosshairs–just another example of the recourse to firearms imagery in contemporary Republican political rhetoric. Is it accurate to trace it to Pat Buchanan’s famous “Lock and Load!” summons to (metaphorical) arms in his insurgent 1996 campaign for the GOP presidential nomination? Whatever, it’s what…<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":222,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-150","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry"],"yoast_head":"\nPalin and Loughner - Religion & Public Life With Mark Silk<\/title>\n<meta name=\"robots\" content=\"index, follow, max-snippet:-1, max-image-preview:large, max-video-preview:-1\" \/>\n<link rel=\"canonical\" href=\"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/religionandpubliclife\/2011\/01\/palin-and-loughner.html\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:locale\" content=\"en_US\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:type\" content=\"article\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:title\" content=\"Palin and Loughner - Religion & Public Life With Mark Silk\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:description\" content=\"Pace Sarah Palin’s spokeswoman, but of course the lady’s map featured crosshairs–just another example of the recourse to firearms imagery in contemporary Republican political rhetoric. Is it accurate to trace it to Pat Buchanan’s famous “Lock and Load!” summons to (metaphorical) arms in his insurgent 1996 campaign for the GOP presidential nomination? Whatever, it’s what…\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:url\" content=\"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/religionandpubliclife\/2011\/01\/palin-and-loughner.html\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:site_name\" content=\"Religion & Public Life With Mark Silk\" \/>\n<meta property=\"article:published_time\" content=\"2011-01-11T08:41:40+00:00\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:image\" content=\"http:\/\/www.spiritual-politics.org\/crosshairsmap.jpg\" \/>\n<meta name=\"author\" content=\"Mark Silk\" \/>\n<meta name=\"twitter:card\" content=\"summary_large_image\" \/>\n<!-- \/ Yoast SEO plugin. -->","yoast_head_json":{"title":"Palin and Loughner - Religion & Public Life With Mark Silk","robots":{"index":"index","follow":"follow","max-snippet":"max-snippet:-1","max-image-preview":"max-image-preview:large","max-video-preview":"max-video-preview:-1"},"canonical":"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/religionandpubliclife\/2011\/01\/palin-and-loughner.html","og_locale":"en_US","og_type":"article","og_title":"Palin and Loughner - Religion & Public Life With Mark Silk","og_description":"Pace Sarah Palin’s spokeswoman, but of course the lady’s map featured crosshairs–just another example of the recourse to firearms imagery in contemporary Republican political rhetoric. 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After teaching at Harvard in the Department of History and Literature for three years, he became editor of the Boston Review. In 1987 he joined the staff of the Atlanta Journal-Constitution, where he worked variously as a reporter, editorial writer and columnist. In 1996 he became the founding director of the Leonard E. Greenberg Center for the Study of Religion in Public Life at Trinity College and in 1998 founding editor of Religion in the News, a magazine published by the Center that examines how the news media handle religious subject matter. In 2005, he was named director of the Trinity College Program on Public Values, comprising both the Greenberg Center and a new Institute for the Study of Secularism in Society and Culture directed by Barry Kosmin. In 2007, he became Professor of Religion in Public Life at the College. Professor Silk is the author of Spiritual Politics: Religion and America Since World War II and Unsecular Media: Making News of Religion in America. He is co-editor of Religion by Region, an eight-volume series on religion and public life in the United States, and co-author of The American Establishment, Making Capitalism Work, and One Nation Divisible: How Regional Religious Differences Shape American Politics. In 2007 he inaugurated Spiritual Politics, a blog on religion and American political culture.","url":"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/religionandpubliclife\/author\/msilk"}]}},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/religionandpubliclife\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/150","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/religionandpubliclife\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/religionandpubliclife\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/religionandpubliclife\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/222"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/religionandpubliclife\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=150"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/religionandpubliclife\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/150\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/religionandpubliclife\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=150"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/religionandpubliclife\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=150"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/religionandpubliclife\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=150"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}