The Press-Democrat Discovers the English Language

Recently, South Dakota passed some fairly innocuous legislation amending the definition of “self defense” within their criminal code to make it clear that pregnant mothers and their spouses were legally justified to act in self defense if an assailant threatened the mother’s unborn child. Specifically the proposed language declared:

Homicide is justifiable if committed by any person in the lawful defense of such person, or of his or her husband, wife, parent, child, master, mistress, or servant, or the unborn child of any such enumerated person, if there is reasonable ground to apprehend a design to commit a felony, or to do some great personal injury, and imminent danger of such design being accomplished.

Now, of course, any person capable of reading the English language at a high school level would understand that for the above portion to apply, the person committing the homicide must be acting:

During the course of defending an ongoing assault on an unborn child, or
If such assault is in imminent danger of being completed in the immediate future, but
Only when such defense is “lawful.”

The Press-Democrat, who are more hopelessly biased in favor of legalized abortion than they are perhaps any other pet liberal issue, somehow read the above paragraph as permitting the ordinary citizens of South Dakota to kill abortion doctors vigilante style.

Seriously.

The completely fair Washington Post covered this story with the levelheaded headline, “South Dakota: Abortion isn’t illegal, but if you do it, we can kill you.” Salon calmly declared that this “South Dakota bill would legalize killing abortion doctors.” A Kansas news station managed to do a little better, at least managing to frame it as a loaded interrogative rather than a simple declarative.

By this time, the only thing surprising about this level of dishonest hackery from the Press-Democrat is that Greg Sargent was not involved in its production. It is still worth noting, at least in passing, that when it comes to abortion, not even the English language is safe from the machinations of the moral cretins who purport to be the arbiters of the information the uninformed public receives.