Topic: NewsBusters
Tim Graham doesn't seem to care much for the idea that turnabout is fair play.
In a March 30 NewsBusters post, Graham suggests there was nothing at all wrong with anti-abortion protesters targeting the 11-year-old daughter of the Maryland landlord who leased space to an abortion clinic by picketing at her middle school, calling them merely "aggressive," and besides, they were "near (but not on) the property of the middle school his daughter attended."
Again: Anti-abotion protester didn't target the abortion doctor or his family. They targeted the 11-year-old daughter of the doctor's landlord. And Graham is apparently perfectly fine with that. He did concede, however, that "Most pro-life activists prefer protesting at a clinic location than near a school, which can (and did) lead to bad publicity, or worse." But he didn't condemn the protest; instead, he played the equivocation game by pointing out "what happened to James Pouillon when he repeatedly protested abortion outside Owosso High School in Michigan. He was shot dead in 2009."
The landlord's response to such intrusive attacks, however, has drawn Graham's ire. He's really unhappy that, as the Washington Post reported, the landlord is collecting the names and phone numbers of anti-abortion protesters who made harrassing calls to his home "by the dozens, at all hours," and formed a network of supporters who called them back and “In a very calm, very respectful voice, they said that the Stave family thanks you for your prayers.”
Graham huffed that the Washington Post let the landlord "present himself as perfectly tolerant of peaceful pro-life protests as a First Amendment exercise," adding:
Do we know every pro-abortion caller is "calm and reasoned"? More "calm and reasoned" than the protest calls they receive? Dvorak saves words like "tormentors" for the people who oppose ripping out the limbs and vacuuming out the skulls of unborn babies in the third trimester of development. "Turnabout is fair play" is the headline. So Dvorak and the Post don't take the position of "two wrongs don't make a right." They find it "clever" that if you called Stave once, you deserve "up to 5,000 calls in return."
But Graham has made it clear he doesn't really see targeting an 11-year-old girl for something her father did is "wrong." He's just upset that the landlord is fighting back against invasions of his family's privacy by using like-minded tactics against the protesters. Apparently, anti-abortion protesters can be as "aggressive" as they want, but their targets aren't allowed to respond.
