The banner headline in today's Hamilton Spectator reads "Anti-Abortion Zealot Makes Death Threat", and it is a headline that provides me with some relief.

For five days, I have been arguing with family, friends and people I have never met about how "[you] pro-life people are so hypocritical! You're all anti-abortion and then you go and shoot a doctor!! You're all a bunch of murderers!!" Finally - a local media outlet has rephrased the damning stories, and started the City on the road to some sensible discussion. To their credit, the Spec has also printed many letters and statements today, from the local pro-life organizations.

Why did the original reports bother me so much?

Let's put it in perspective: Everyday, someone is killed by a driver who is way, way over the legal limit of alcohol, but we don't see gigantic banner headlines decrying everyone who consumes beer. There are no blanket statements from the tea-totallers of North America, castigating those who imbibe on weekends, and no demands for more federal funds to stop crazed wine lovers from enjoying their beverage.

But when some malodorous pinhead snipes an abortion provider we see story, after story, after story, after story, after bloody story about the hideous, murderous, extremist pro-life movement. Donald Spitz, of all people, is presented as "mainstream"; local papers (who have now redeemed themselves) ponder whether the pro-life movement secretly approves of guerrilla tactics to end abortion; and I - little old me who has a semi-popular website, and who doesn't even belong to a pro-life group - spends 5 days defending an action that I didn't commit, of which I most certainly do not approve, and for which act the perpetrator ought to be given swift and hearty punishment, preferably the death penalty.

I don't know a single pro-life person, online or "In Real Life", who supports the sort of action the pro-life extremists either propose or actually carry out. It's unfathomable idiocy, to say the least, that these radicals believe that their actions are just, or even justifiable. Their cold-blooded murder of a husband and a father of four, renders any pro-life sentiments they believe they have utterly meaningless, and makes suspect anything written or said by the mainstream pro-life movement.

They are sanctimonious assassins, self-appointed soldiers of a God with some sort of special dispensation to violate His laws, as well as the laws of society. They are an embarrassment to the pro-life cause, doing more to enhance the pro-choice movement than anything since Roe v. Wade. There is no group in society whose moral beliefs are so totally consumed by immoral actions.

These people are not "pro-life".

I totally, utterly and completely disown myself from anything they do, and I do so knowing I speak on the behalf of vast majority of pro-life supporters the world over.