In Roy Exum’s column titled “Muffling the Mobs from Neighborhoods,” he ended by saying, “Can you believe America would ever stoop so low to attack a person’s home?”
Well, let’s be clear, nobody “attacked” anybody’s home. The protesters were not in any way violent. Noisy perhaps, but not violent. I have only recently started reading the Chattanoogan, so I don’t know what position Mr. Exum took regarding what happened in DC on Jan. 6, 2021, but most conservatives are still whitewashing the incident. Whether it can legitimately be called an insurrection or not is perhaps debatable, but I think that most rational people would agree that a definite line was crossed.
You want to talk about attacking somebody’s home (the home, the physical foundation of our government), that was an attack. It was loud, it was bloody, it was violent, lives were lost, property was destroyed, and there was the malicious intent of obstructing the government’s legitimate, peaceful transfer of power. Nothing of the sort happened at any of the protests at any of the South Carolina judges’ homes.
The likelihood of Roe v. Wade being overturned is a huge, unsettling deal, a nightmare, for most Americans and especially for pro-choice women. Personally, I think it’s admirable that the protesters showed as much restraint as they did. I was thinking, what if Congress managed to pass, by some miracle, legislation that made gun ownership and registration more difficult, something that the vast majority of Americans would actually like to see? I have no doubt whatsoever that many of the gun-loving crowd would take to the streets, locked and loaded. They would laugh at the thought of peacefully protesting. They would see the government as having gone too far for their liking and would declare an all-out civil war. And any conservative who denies the likelihood of that is not being honest.
So, please, spare me the histrionics about how those peaceful pro-choice protesters went too far. I’m quite certain that if they had confined their protests to the streets of the city, you would still be finding something to criticize about them. And Ron DeSantis would most likely still have come up with some way to make their protests illegal in the deep red state of Florida.
Rick Armstrong