Whenever a new president is sworn into office, he takes an oath to do the following: “I do solemnly swear that I will faithfully execute the office of President of the United States, and will to the best of my ability, preserve, protect and defend the Constitution of the United States.”
The “preserve, protect and defend the Constitution” phrase covers a lot of territory, but I think we’d all agree that it certainly includes defending constitutional rights as interpreted by the Supreme Court. Like it or not, the Court ruled 36 years ago that it is legal for a pregnant woman to get an abortion, no matter how much Christian right extremists (in Georgia and elsewhere) might want to eliminate that right.
Concurrent with the right to get an abortion, of course, is the legality of a physician performing that particular medical procedure. And yet, we continue to see anti-abortion terrorists and other Christianists bombing women’s health clinics, physically harassing women who seek the procedure, and murdering physicians like George Tiller of Kansas who are performing what the courts long ago ruled was a legal medical act.
That leads me to ask this question of President Obama: Why aren’t you using the resources of the federal government to “preserve, protect and defend” women and doctors who are being stalked and murdered by these right-wing terrorists? Where is Attorney General Eric Holder on this? Why hasn’t he assigned U.S. marshals, FBI agents and other federal law enforcement personnel to protect doctors and their patients at women’s health clinics?
You have people like Bill O’Reilly and Randall Terry going on television and inciting right-wing kooks to murder physicians like George Tiller. Why aren’t the O’Reillys and Terrys being taken to the nearest FBI office and interrogated about these incitements to commit murder and terroristic acts?
Implicit in the oath of office a president takes is the promise that he will protect American citizens from terrorists both foreign and domestic. We are seeing an unprecedented wave of domestic terrorism against Americans who want to perform legal medical procedures or advocate the passage of healthcare reform legislation (there have been numerous threats of violence against SEIU employees who attend town hall meetings on healthcare). Is it too much to ask when our federal law enforcement agencies are going to do something about it?
Congressman Hank Johnson has scheduled a town hall meeting on health insurance reform for Monday evening at the Georgia Perimeter College campus in Clarkston. I’ll be interested in seeing whether Johnson can actually get a word in edgewise or whether his meeting will be disrupted by screaming right-wing thugs who’ve been bused in by Freedom Works and Americans for Prosperity — to destroy yet another basic constitutional right.
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