Thursday, July 04, 2013

Why Throwing Bombs to Support Oppression is a Bad Idea

News item: Fort Worth Office of Texas State Senator Wendy Davis Firebombed.

From The Daily KOS:
“Police are trying to identify the man who entered the West 7th office of State Sen. Wendy Davis Tuesday afternoon and threw two firebombs just outside the door.”
Now, as anyone who has not been in a coma or living in central Borneo will tell you, State Senator Wendy Davis is the leader and figurehead of the pro-choice movement in Texas currently waging a war of attrition in the Texas legislature.

To hundreds of thousands of Texans right now, Wendy Davis is the symbol of the fight against the oppression of women in Texas. The oppression by which the state seeks to deprive them of their right to make decisions over their health and lives, and in so-doing, deprives them of much-needed medical health services statewide.

She is THE SYMBOL of this.

And so, in a bold move by the truly depraved, her senatorial district office was firebombed.

Not a good move.

Anyone remember Selma, Alabama? Anyone remember a movement for freedom and liberty that was floundering trying to get a piece of the national attention? A movement that suffered through gross insults and misinformation in the media and elsewhere?

Yeah, I do, too.

When a church in Selma, Alabama was firebombed all those decades ago, this floundering movement for the equality of African-Americans in the United States took on new life as the deaths of four innocent girls, whose only crimes were to be in a Bible study held in the basement of their church at the same time racist segregationists exploded a bomb that killed them.

Now in the Daily KOS story, two staffers were in the office at the time, just as the four little girls were in the basement of their church. All of them, at the time, probably felt pretty secure where they were, but were wrong, wrong, wrong, in that assumption.

And no, I’m not here to say that this is going to ignite a national movement that will end the oppression of women in America, because the fuse has already been lit.

But this is a very inconvenient blow to those who wish for this issue to just fade away in the next news cycle. Before we had a face, we had a figurehead, and we had a leader.

Now we have something akin to a martyr.

4 comments:

PDiddie said...

Hal, did you check the date on the Kos diary? It's from March of 2012. That doesn't make what the firebomber did any less worse, but he was motivated by something that occurred a year and a quarter ago, not by the vents of the past ten days.

Your righteous outrage is always a good read (even if it might be motivated by a dated event in this case).

Greg said...

Evil.

Utterly evil.

And I condemn it without reservation.

I'll condemn it even though your side wn;t condemn the mob actionthat disrupted the legislature last week.

I'll condemn it even though your side won't condemn the "Hail Satan" chanting folks in Austin.

I'll condemn it even though you folks won't condemn children being given profane signs to hold.

Why?

Because wrong is wrong -- even if your side insists upon calling wrong "right".

Hal said...

Perry: Sshhhhh!

Hal said...

See above. If Repubs can have their way with the clock, and timing of events, then what is good for the goose is good for the gander.