GOP presidential candidates
condemned the deadly Planned Parenthood attack but stopped short of agreeing that fiery anti-abortion rhetoric contributed.
Several Republican presidential candidates on Sunday condemned the attack on a Planned Parenthood facility in Colorado Springs but stopped short of agreeing with critics who say that fiery antiabortion rhetoric contributed to the shooting.
“It’s obviously a tragedy. Nothing justifies this,” former Hewlett-Packard CEO Carly Fiorina said on “Fox News Sunday.” “Any protesters should always be peaceful. Whether it’s Black Lives Matter or prolife protesters.”
Calls to defund Planned Parenthood through congressional action have escalated in recent months amid a protracted national debate about the ethics of collecting fetal tissue for research.
Planned Parenthood representatives linked Friday’s attack, which killed three, to escalating rhetoric from anti-abortion activists.
“We’ve seen an alarming increase in hateful rhetoric and smear campaigns against abortion providers and patients over the last few months,” Vicki Cowart, president of Planned Parenthood of the Rocky Mountains, said in a statement. “That environment breeds acts of violence.”
Dawn Laguens, executive vice president of Planned Parenthood Federation of America, said in a statement: “It is offensive and outrageous that some politicians are now claiming this tragedy has nothing to do with the toxic environment they helped create. One of the lessons of this awful tragedy is that words matter, and hateful rhetoric fuels violence. It’s not enough to denounce the tragedy without also denouncing the poisonous rhetoric that fueled it.”
Fiorina rejected such comments, calling them “typical left-wing tactics.”
“This is so typical of the left to immediately begin demonizing a messenger because they don’t agree with the message,” she said. “The vast majority of Americans agree what Planned Parenthood is doing is wrong.”
In an interview Sunday on NBC’s “Meet the Press,” GOP front-runner Donald Trump called the alleged Colorado shooter a “sick person.” The suspected gunman is said to have used the phrase “no more baby parts” while discussing his motives.
“Well, this was an extremist. And this was a man who obviously they said prior to this was mentally disturbed,” Trump said, according to an online transcript of the interview. “So, he’s a mentally disturbed person. There’s no question about that.
“I will tell you, there is a tremendous group of people that think it’s terrible, all of the videos that they’ve seen with some of these people from Planned Parenthood talking about it like you’re selling parts to a car,” he said. “I mean, there are a lot of people that are very unhappy about that.”
Retired pediatric neurosurgeon Ben Carson called the shooting the work of “extremism.”
“Unfortunately, there’s a lot of extremism coming from all areas. It’s one of the biggest problems that I think is threatening to tear our country apart,” Carson said on ABC’s “This Week” with George Stephanopoulos, according to a transcript of the exchange. “We get into our separate corners and we hate each other, we want to destroy those with whom we disagree.”
Carson warned of increasing political divisions in the country.
“If we can get rid of the rhetoric from either side and actually talk about the facts, I think that’s when we begin to make progress,” he said. “And, you know, a lot of people, when they don’t have facts, when they don’t have a good backup, that’s when the rhetoric starts. That’s when the name-calling starts.”
Former Arkansas Gov. Mike Huckabee expressed dismay over the attack and added that the gunman’s actions stood against the principles held by antiabortion activists.
“Regardless of why he did it, what he did is domestic terrorism,” Huckabee said on CNN’s “State of the Union.” “What he did is absolutely abominable, especially to those of us in the pro-life movement, because there’s nothing about any of us that would condone or in any way look the other way at something like this.”