It is not coincidental that the people behind terrorism aimed at shutting down access to reproductive health care are usually white, Christian, and middle class. That plays a significant role in why their actions, which involve things like threatening people with death, attempting to bomb facilities, and suggesting they have access to bioweapons, are apparently not considered terrorism. Quite simply, a failure to label domestic terrorism as such when it involves white, middle class Christians is a reflection of racism and the other -isms that dominate social attitudes in the US, because you can damn well bet that if the people involved were nonwhite or people of colour, low-income, and/or non-Christian, they would be treated as the enemy, and the government as well as the media would be vilifying them.

Instead, the vile tactics of the anti-abortion movement have been tolerated for an extended period of time, and this has given members of the movement a considerable degree of boldness and bravery. Dr. Tiller was shot in broad daylight in church. This is terrorism. And it’s time for everyone, not just the reproductive justice movement, to start talking about it like it is. This is terrorism. This is terrorism. This. Is. Terrorism.

When I pointed this out to my bosses, they were annoyed by my complaints. Errors didn’t matter. Grammatical errors — be they major or minor — didn’t matter. The brainless peons who read the website simply wouldn’t notice. What mattered was getting the “product” published.

What was happening was that words were starting not to matter. The words that we wrote didn’t matter, and the words that we got in response to them definitely didn’t matter.