The militant left is attacking churches and pregnancy centers. Does anyone care?

As congressional Democrats sound off this week on the menace of white supremacy and right-wing violence, ugly little actors on the political left are firebombing and vandalizing churches and anti-abortion pregnancy centers all across this country.

They’ve struck buildings in Buffalo, N.Y.; Seattle, Wash.; Boulder and Fort Collins, Colo.; Washington, D.C.; Madison, Wis. and Auburn, Ala.

They’ve vandalized four churches alone in Olympia, Wash.; a pregnancy center in Hollywood, Fla.; and threw rocks and bottles at Los Angeles police officers, injuring two.

LifeNews.com reports there have so far been 30 attacks on anti-abortion facilities, churches, activists and police since the May 2 leak of the U.S. Supreme Court draft ruling on Roe v. Wade.

In many instances, leftist militants have spray painted threats on buildings and sidewalks, “If abortion isn’t safe, neither are you.”

A gunman stalks Brett Kavanaugh

And now we have reports that a man dressed in all black and armed with a gun and knife showed up this week at the home of Supreme Court Justice Brett Kavanaugh in Washington, D.C., intending to kill him because he is an expected yes vote to overturn Roe.

The would-be intruder also expressed concern that Kavanaugh would uphold the Second Amendment after the school shooting in Uvalde, Texas.

Police arrested Nicholas John Roske, 26, of Simi Valley, Calif., and charged him with attempted murder.

Roske revealed “he had purchased the Glock pistol and other items for the purpose of breaking into the justice’s residence and killing the justice as well as himself,” FBI special agent Ian Montijo said in an affidavit.

The Biden White House condemned this would-be attack on a justice, but it's unlikely Democrats will break much of a sweat over the larger violence against churches and pregnancy centers. The American left encouraged an entire summer of violence in 2020 that burned and vandalized swaths of the nation’s largest cities and killed an estimated 25 people. During that summer, newspaper op-ed pages were filled with left-wing apologias for the behavior of looters and rioters who wreaked an estimated $2 billion in destruction.

When you hear Democrats on Capitol Hill this week agonize over political violence, understand that it only goes one way. They agonize about violence against the left.

It appears to be mostly the work of anarchists

It's important to understand that most of the violence done to churches and pregnancy centers does not seem to be the work of the mainstream left or its movement to defend reproductive rights.

The calling cards are those of anarchists and nihilists who can’t think two inches in front of their own noses. For if you don’t believe in laws and civilized society why do you give two shakes of your empty skull what the Supreme Court says?

Thinking, of course, is not a hallmark of the militant left. That’s been on display at sporting events and church services where they strip down to their skivvies to reveal crotches splashed with red paint. Get it? We’re returning to back-alley abortions.

Their other calling card is subtlety.

None of this is doing NARAL or NOW any good. It makes their side look like lunatics. It also promotes the fallacy that if the Supreme Court vacates Roe, there will be no more abortion in America. The Alito brief, if affirmed, will turn the question of abortion back to state legislatures where it probably belonged in the first place. We weren’t on the verge of national consensus on abortion in 1973 when Roe became law.

The issue badly needed a debate.

There’s a lot of anger on the left over Roe. Feminists are especially furious that five people in robes could take away their reproductive rights. But given how many legal scholars on the left have criticized Roe and the tissue-thin logic of the Blackmun court that issued it, you could argue the left has been freeloading on a bad ruling for half a century.

They probably owe conservatives an apology.

Where we'll eventually end up on abortion

Justice Harry Blackmun’s own clerk, Edward Lazarus, had this to say about Roe:

“As a matter of constitutional interpretation and judicial method, Roe borders on the indefensible. I say this as someone utterly committed to the right to choose, as someone who believes such a right has grounding elsewhere in the Constitution instead of where Roe placed it, and as someone who loved Roe’s author like a grandfather.”

“... What, exactly, is the problem with Roe? The problem, I believe, is that it has little connection to the Constitutional right it purportedly interpreted. A constitutional right to privacy broad enough to include abortion has no meaningful foundation in constitutional text, history, or precedent – at least, it does not if those sources are fairly described and reasonably faithfully followed.”

Here’s what Ruth Bader Ginsburg said about Roe:

“Roe, I believe, would have been more acceptable as a judicial decision if it had not gone beyond a ruling on the extreme statute before the Court. The political process was moving in the early 1970s, not swiftly enough for advocates of quick, complete change, but majoritarian institutions were listening and acting. Heavy handed judicial intervention was difficult to justify and appears to have provoked, not resolved, the conflict.”

If the High Court rules against Roe and debate breaks out in state legislatures, the pro-abortion activists are armed with a powerful argument that the state should not make such intimate and private decisions for women.

The majority of Americans believe that.

Eventually we will end up with Roe-like laws – legal abortion with some restrictions – in most, if not all, states.

In the meantime, all of us should be one chorus condemning political violence, whether it comes from the right or the left. Otherwise, we’re looking at a future that is more chaotic, with eroding authority of the courts, the laws and the legislatures.

The anarchists would love that. They’re idiots. The rest of us would rue the day.

Phil Boas is an editorial columnist for The Arizona Republic. Email him at phil.boas@arizonarepublic.com.

This article originally appeared on Arizona Republic: Churches and pregnancy centers are being attacked. Does the left care?