US extremists bigger threat

Within the last few weeks, domestic terrorists have gunned down Planned Parenthood workers, cops and Black Lives Matter activists, yet we are expected to believe that Syrian refugees pose the greatest threat to our safety.

Busy counting enemies outside our borders, we miss a host of foes at home who continue to kill us with impunity, like anti-abortion right-wingers who, in attempting to annihilate the other side, transform ordinary trips to a health clinic into something charged, political, urgent, reminding us that the personal is political and that our bodies are battlegrounds.

This is where we are in 2015 in America. And it is not normal. Gun violence, a culture of fear, attacks on society's reproductive health – these are not normal.

"Not normal" may not sound like the most compelling argument or mode of analysis but it is when the ever-present threat of violence against the largest single provider of reproductive health services in the U.S. is so thoroughly normalized.

There is a direct link between the more than 240 laws passed since 2011 in state legislatures restricting women’s access to reproductive healthcare, and the recent shooting in Colorado, where another white man's whacked out anti-abortion agenda took the lives of three innocent people.

A woman’s social, economic and physical health are strongly tied to her ability access sexual education and family planning services like contraception and abortion.

Support your local Planned Parenthood in whatever way you can. Volunteer. Donate. Advocate.

We can’t let domestic terrorists win.

This story was originally published December 9, 2015 at 8:22 AM with the headline "US extremists bigger threat."