Kermit Gosnell, whose clinic in West Philadelphia was described as a “house of horrors,” has been found guilty of three counts of first degree murder, and may face the death penalty.

This horrible story does have a lesson for us, although it’s not the lesson the anti-choice movement seeks to promote: The Lessons of the Gosnell Case: Exactly the Opposite of the Right Wing Spin.

Obama asserted that “an assault on women’s rights” is underway across the country, with bills introduced in more than 40 states to limit or ban abortion or restrict access to birth control or other services.

“The fact is, after decades of progress, there’s still those who want to turn back the clock to policies more suited to the 1950s than the 21st century,” he said. “And they’ve been involved in an orchestrated and historic effort to roll back basic rights when it comes to women’s health.”

President Obama gave a speech this morning at the 2013 Planned Parenthood Gala, becoming the first US President to address the group and prompting the usual unison chorus of shrieking and freaking from right wing media and blogs. The full speech is viewable above, and here’s the roll call of right wing reactions:

Doug Powers and Michelle Malkin are freaking out.
Anti-choice propaganda site Lifenews is freaking out.
CNS News is freaking out.
Weasel Zippers - freaking out.
Michelle Malkin is also freaking out at Twitchy.com.
Jim Hoft, Dumbest Man on the Internet? Freaking out.
Also freaking out: the Daily Caller.
Breitbart.com joins the mass freak-out with several posts.
And of course, Sarah Palin is freaking out too.

Well done, Mr. President.

A Des Moines anti-abortion activist has publicly proclaimed that “it will be a blessing to the babies” if someone shoots the people who recently reopened a Kansas abortion clinic.

Dave Leach’s comments are being denounced by the leader of Iowa’s largest anti-abortion group, who says such talk is immoral and hurts the cause.

Leach posted the comments this month on YouTube. His posting includes a recorded phone conversation he had with another man, whom Leach identifies as abortion opponent Scott Roeder. Roeder is serving a life prison sentence for the 2009 shooting death of the Wichita clinic’s then-owner, Dr. George Tiller.

Leach has previously suggested that other men were justified in killing other abortion providers. He notes in the video that Tiller’s old clinic was recently reopened by a new abortion agency.

More: Des Moines Man Discusses Shooting Abortion Providers

The Republican Party of Ohio is being forced to give up their latest attack on women’s rights, as their absurd and deceptive “heartbeat” bill has been abandoned.

COLUMBUS, Ohio (AP) — An Ohio bill that would have imposed the most stringent restriction on abortions in the nation met its end Tuesday.

Senators don’t plan to vote on the so-called “heartbeat bill” before the end of the legislative session next month, Republican Senate President Tom Niehaus said, citing concerns the resulting law might have been found to be unconstitutional.

The bill proposed banning abortions after the first fetal heartbeat is detected, as early as six weeks into pregnancy. It had fiercely divided Ohio’s anti-abortion community, while energizing abortion rights proponents who protested against it.

Backers hoped the stringent nature of the bill would provoke a legal challenge with the potential to overturn the U.S. Supreme Court’s 1973 Roe v. Wade ruling that legalized abortion up until viability, usually at 22 to 24 weeks.

An “audible heartbeat” was also the reason why an Irish Catholic hospital recently refused an abortion to a woman suffering a miscarriage — and allowed her to die instead: Irish Hospital Refuses to Perform Abortion, Lets Woman Die.

This is the future the Republican Party has in store for America.

It’s easy to laugh at Todd Akin’s ridiculous caveman views, but Akin and the deranged anti-choice fanatics he associates with are really not a laughing matter; they’re deadly serious and willing to break laws: Todd Akin Arrested on May 9, 1987 With Radical Anti-Abortion Group.

We learned from a public records request that Akin was arrested on May 9, 1987 in St. Louis. The St. Louis Post-Dispatch covered the protest and reported the following day that police “arrested 30 anti-abortion protesters” for blocking “the front doors of Reproductive Health Services” while about “50 anti-abortion activists picketed two clinics” in St. Louis County. The Post-Dispatch quoted the spokesman for the protesters, John Ryan, who said the actions “were in honor of Mother’s Day.”

At the time, Ryan was head of the Pro-Life Direct Action League. He and his organization were among those sued by the National Organization for Women in 1986, which sought to “stop what it called a nationwide conspiracy to close abortion clinics.” “We believe there is a reign of terror going on,” said Eleanor Smeal, then president of NOW. She labeled Ryan - who had been “arrested almost 350 times” by then - a “terrorist.”

This is who Akin chose to get involved with in 1987 - and it gets worse. Ryan was pushed out as head of the Pro-Life Direct Action League around September 1987 and replaced by an aggressive, fundamentalist leader, Tim Dreste. Dreste affiliated the group with Randall Terry’s radical Operation Rescue the following summer. This is the same Randall Terry who later said of abortion providers, “When I, or people like me are running the country, you’d better flee, because we will find you, we will try you, and we’ll execute you.”

Dreste shared a jail cell with Terry in September 1988 and returned to St. Louis under orders to break with the Catholic-dominated Pro-Life Direct Action League. Just one month later, Akin appeared at an event for Dreste’s new group, Whole Life Ministries.

The Post-Dispatch reported on October 29 that Akin, who was elected days later to public office, “spoke to about 35 anti-abortion activists” planning to block clinic doors the next day. He said, “As far as I am concerned, you are the freedom fighters of America.” “My hat is off to you,” he continued.

The article identified Dreste as director of Whole Life Ministries, “a new anti-abortion group in St. Louis.” “We’re going to tell her we’re not going to allow her to kill her baby,” he said. Dreste made clear that protesters would block the clinic doors and refuse police orders to move. “We will tell (police) we will obey God’s law before we obey man’s law.” Sound familiar?

The meeting of religious fanatics and social conservative lunatics known as the Values Voter Summit gets under way today in its usual caveman fashion, as Republican congressman Tim Huelskamp calls Planned Parenthood “racist baby killers”, compares women’s reproductive rights to slavery, and repeats the usual right wing lies about Obamacare funding abortions.

WASHINGTON — A Republican member of Congress equated Planned Parenthood to “slavery forces” and called it a “racist organization” that was “created with the sole purpose of killing children that look like mine.”

Rep. Tim Huelskamp, a congressman from Kansas who made the comments at the 2012 Values Voter Summit this morning, is staunchly anti-abortion rights and said he has adopted four children “each of them either black, Hispanic, native American.”

“Besides slavery, abortion is the other darkest stain on our nation’s character,” Huelskamp told the crowd. “And this president is looking for every way possible to make abortion more available and more frequent, and he wants you to pay for it — even if you disagree with it. Welcome to another provision of Obamacare.

“Like the pro-slavery forces who invaded Kansas, the pro-abortion forces in Washington and elsewhere want us to believe that abortion is not murder — that being born is worse than death, that the unborn baby is property, not a person. We’ve heard that before — 150 years ago,” Huelskamp said, in an apparent reference to the Civil War and slavery.

Right Wing Watch takes a look at this weekend’s Values Voter Summit, the annual meeting of some of the right wing’s craziest elements — Birthers, bigots, homophobes, conspiracy theorists, Dominionists, and a host of miscellaneous fundamentalist fanatics: Who’s Who at the Values Voter Summit 2012.

Tony Perkins

Tony Perkins is president of the Family Research Council, the main organizer of this weekend’s summit. Perkins leads the group’s efforts against gay rights, abortion rights and church/state separation.

The FRC has one of the most anti-gay platforms of any major political organization, including expressions of support for the criminalization of homosexuality in the U.S. and abroad in countries law Malawi and Uganda. Senior fellow Peter Sprigg said he would “much prefer to export homosexuals from the United States than to import them into the United States because we believe homosexuality is destructive to society.”

Perkins himself frequently reflects the extreme views of his organization. He:

• said Islam is “evil”;
• attacked the media for dismissing conspiracies about Obama’s birth certificate;
• demanded Christians who voted for Obama “repent” since he has a “disdain for Christianity”;
• linked homosexuality to pedophilia and compared it to alcoholism;
• warned, “I don’t know if the country can survive ” another Obama term and that the president’s reelection would ” destroy this country.”
• called gay rights activists “intolerant,” “hateful,” “vile,” “spiteful” and “pawns” of Satan and said that homosexuality is “man shaking his fist in the face of God”;
• denounced hate crimes laws for promoting “chaos” and leading to the “indoctrination of our children in schools and the loss of religious freedom and the freedom of speech”;
• wrote that the anti-bullying “It Gets Better Project” is “immoral,” “disgusting,” and promotes “perversion”;
• denied that there was a correlation between anti-gay bullying and depression and suicide, saying instead that gay and lesbian teens know they are “abnormal” and “have a higher propensity to depression or suicide because of that internal conflict”;
• wrote that senators would have “the blood of innocent soldiers on their hands” if they vote to repeal Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell and allowed gays and lesbians to serve openly in the military;
• insisted the government may introduce the “promotion of same-sex relations ” as a means of “population control”;

Following the deplorable and tragic shooting at the Family Research Council’s headquarters, Perkins has tried to blame the incident on everyone from the Southern Poverty Law Center to the Obama administration. The unconscionable shooting, however, should not be used as a way to conceal his organization’s virulent language targeting gays and lesbians.

That’s just the Tony Perkins section. Read the whole horrifying thing.

And by the way, one of the featured speakers this year: Republican vice presidential nominee Paul Ryan.

Still think Rep. Todd Akin’s caveman views on women’s rights are unique in the Republican Party? GOP Senate Candidate Supports Life Sentences for Rape Victims Who Obtain Abortions.

Rep. Rick Berg (R-ND), the candidate for Senate from North Dakota, once voted for a bill that would have made any woman who obtained an abortion guilty of a homicide crime — even if it were in the case of rape or incest. Indeed, the bill Berg supported does not even contain an explicit exception if an abortion is necessary to save the woman’s life.

In 2007, Berg was among the small number of state representatives in the North Dakota House who supported the measure. It also would have imposed penalties on doctors and anyone else who “aids, abets, facilitates, solicits, or incites” a person into an abortion:

A new section to chapter 12.1-16 of the North Dakota Century Code is created and enacted as follows:

Intentional termination of human life - Preborn children. A person is guilty of a class AA felony if the person intentionally destroys or terminates the life of a preborn child. A person that knowingly administers to, prescribes for, procures for, or sells to any pregnant individual any medicine, drug, device, or other substance with the specific intent of causing or abetting the termination of a preborn child is guilty of a class AA felony. A person that intentionally or knowingly aids, abets, facilitates, solicits, or incites a person to intentionally destroy or terminate the life of a preborn child is guilt of a class C felony. For purposes of this section, “preborn child” includes a human being from the moment of fertilization until the moment of birth.

A class AA felony carries a maximum sentence of life without the possibility of parole in North Dakota. Chapter 12.1-16 of the North Dakota Century Code is the section of that state’s law that covers homicide crimes such as murder or manslaughter.

The Republican Party’s 2012 platform is the most extreme right wing GOP platform in history. Name a radical far right position on almost any issue, and chances are good you’ll find it enshrined in this document — and that includes the “stealth shariah” hallucinations of the crazed anti-Muslim crowd. It’s striking how hard the authors of the platform seem to have worked to obscure the true intent of their policy positions.

It’s the Tea Party’s Necronomicon.

Also see:
The 10 Oddest Items in the GOP Platform
David Barton Went 70 for 71 in Shaping the GOP Platform

Here’s Republican vice presidential candidate Paul Ryan in an interview last week with a horrifyingly calloused comment about rape victims, explaining why he would force women to bear the children of rapists — because “the method of conception doesn’t change the definition of life.”

A transcript:

Interviewer: Abortion now… something we’re talking about and I think our viewers want to know exactly where you stand, specifically, you’re pro-life, Catholic…

Ryan: Oh yeah, yeah.

Interviewer: But specifically where you stand when it comes to rape, and when it comes to the issue of, should it be legal for a woman to be able to get an abortion if she’s…

Ryan: Yeah, well, so, I’m very proud of my pro-life record, and I’ve always adopted the idea, the position that the method of conception doesn’t change the definition of life.

But let’s remember, I’m doing the Romney-Ryan ticket, and the President makes policy. The President, in this case, the future President Mitt Romney, has exceptions for rape, incest, and life of the mother, which is a vast improvement of where we are right now.

In other words, Ryan sees Mitt Romney’s already extreme anti-abortion positions as a good start.

Also see:
Paul Slansky: Paul Ryan Said Something That Should Force Him Off the Ticket, but You Probably Didn’t Hear About It

Last week, Paul Ryan gave an interview in which, defending his position that there should be no excuses for abortion, he referred to rape as a “method of conception.”

Wow, right? Talk about a benign euphemism. Rape — RAPE! — is now a “method of conception.” You know, like love-making, just without the love.

There could be no greater testament to the utter abdication of responsibility by what passes for a “news” media in America in 2012 than that, despite the grotesquerie of this cavalierly callous comment, chances are better than good that this is the first you’re hearing of it.