Why the vehemence?

The first message on my office voice mail Monday morning was vile and venomous.

"I just finished reading your Sunday column," the male caller hissed. "I wish to #!@!?&*$!! that YOU had been strangled at birth. You're a piece of..." He didn't say cake.

Others that followed were as vicious though less vulgar. A woman let fly a string of insults about my children. Several "offended" readers vowed to have me fired. Another raged against the "horrible 18th Century cult you belong to that wants to deny rational people freedom of choice."

Though his references baffled me, I assumed he meant the Catholic Church. Callers invariably do when something I've written contains the polite assertion that executing unborn children is morally unacceptable. In my experience, few things make bile flow faster from tolerant, broadminded, free-choice, liberal readers than a newspaper columnist who is an openly orthodox Catholic and unabashedly pro-life.

In the column that provoked these responses, however, I hadn't so much as mentioned Church doctrine.

Indeed, I used the word "abortion" itself only once, and that just to wonder at the discomfort its mention now causes for even die-hard pro-choice ideologues.

What I had done instead was draw parallels between the actions of Saskatchewan child-killer Robert Latimer and the scandalous actions of Calgary's health authority in permitting "genetic terminations" of unborn babies (Editor: see News in Brief, p. 23).

Timing made the connection effective. The same week the genetic termination scandal erupted around the local health authority thanks to an expose in Alberta Report magazine, the Supreme Court of Canada granted Latimer an appeal of the life sentence he received for killing his daughter Tracy. Latimer, of course, gassed 12-year-old Tracy in his truck cab. Calgary doctors have been forcing 20-week-old genetically impaired babies out of their mothers wombs, and leaving the infants to die. At least one newborn clung to life for 12 hours.

The only difference between that and Tracy Latimer's killing, I argued, is timing and scientific sanction. Morally, the actions are equally repulsive. Yet it was this statement of the obvious, rather than the destruction of the innocent children themselves, that seemed to repel readers so violently and make them so abusively angry.

The vehemence of some calls made them the aural equivalent of the rag-tag protestors I witnessed waving obscene placards and bowling vulgarities outside Human Life International's 18th World Congress in Toronto this past April.

In both cases, the sheer fury of the reactions was wildly out of proportion to any reasonable claim of provocation, and left me wondering just what was really under attack.

The onslaught against HLI was preceded by several weeks of media bonfire stoking and efforts to whip up literal "rage" against the pro-life organization.

The campaign occurred even though the world congress was held at a hotel hidden out near Pearson International Airport, miles from the madding crowds of down-town Toronto.

The question I asked several protestors was why they couldn't simply leave HLI delegates alone to quietly go about their business and share their opinions among themselves.

In the ensuing streams of profanity-laden responses about driving out the "fascists", "racists" "homophobes" and "hate-mongers", I never did get a legitimate, let alone a thoughtful, answer to my query.

Back home in Calgary, my reflection on the vituperation filling up my voice mail, confirmed for me the suspicion I developed watching the anti-HLI forces do their worst.

It was that those who oppose the pro-life message most vehemently are no longer content with merely ridiculing and harassing the messenger. They intend the complete, utter stifling of any expression resembling pro-life sentiments--including defending disabled pre-born or pre-adolescent children.

To these militants, the pro-life/pro-abortion debate is over. Finito. Kaput. And they have won. Their triumphalism is savagely totalitarian. I really don't believe, for example, that the caller who said he wished I'd been strangled at birth was speaking figuratively. I suspect part of him wished he could have done the deed personally.

Where could such a visceral need to silence pro-life opposition come from? In part, it's from the deep human need for denial. Constantly hearing abortion is wrong risks confronting the reality that the pro-choice argument is a foul lie.

But I think it goes even deeper. That's my next column.

Peter Stockland writes for the Calgary Herald. His column appears here every other issue.