Come for the politics, stay for the snark.

After dobbs, women are no longer free.

They punch you in the face and then start crying because their fist hurts.

A sufficient plurality of insane, greedy people can tank any democratic system ever devised, apparently.

This must be what justice looks like, not vengeful, just peaceful exuberance.

There is no right way to do the wrong thing.

When I was faster i was always behind.

Make the republican party small enough to drown in a bathtub.

They want us to be overwhelmed and exhausted. Focus. Resist. Oppose.

He really is that stupid.

You can’t attract Republican voters. You can only out organize them.

This has so much WTF written all over it that it is hard to comprehend.

Since we are repeating ourselves, let me just say fuck that.

Optimism opens the door to great things.

Fight for a just cause, love your fellow man, live a good life.

You cannot shame the shameless.

Whoever he was, that guy was nuts.

It is not hopeless, and we are not helpless.

The words do not have to be perfect.

If you’re gonna whine, it’s time to resign!

Dear elected officials: Trump is temporary, dishonor is forever.

Someone should tell Republicans that violence is the last refuge of the incompetent, or possibly the first.

“They all knew.”

The worst democrat is better than the best republican.

It’s easy to sit in safety and prescribe what other people should be doing.

You are here: Home / Justice / Women's Rights / The War On Women / Republican Candidate for Sheriff in New Hampshire Would Use Deadly Force to Prevent Abortions

Republican Candidate for Sheriff in New Hampshire Would Use Deadly Force to Prevent Abortions

by | 72 Comments

This post is in: , , ,

Anti-choice zealots already think it well within their right to murder doctors who perform abortions (Dr. Tiller, anyone?). As it turns out, at least one individual aspiring to elected office (law enforcement, no less!) also thinks it well within his right.

Meet Frank Szabo, Republican candidate for Sheriff of Hillsborough County in New Hampshire. Frank announced today that he will stop at nothing — even deadly force — to prevent abortions from occurring in his jurisdiction (even though abortions are legal). He said he will arrest doctors performing abortions (even though abortions are legal). He also said he will do what it takes to prevent a doctor from reforming abortion (even though abortions are legal).

A Republican candidate for Hillsborough County Sheriff said Wednesday that he believes elective abortions are unlawful and he wouldn’t reject the use of deadly force to stop them.

Frank Szabo said that as sheriff, he would arrest any doctor performing elective or late-term abortions in his jurisdiction.

“There is a difference between legal and lawful,” Szabo said.

Szabo explained the difference by referring to the issue of slavery, which he said used to be legal but was never lawful under the Constitution. He said that even though elective abortions are legal in New Hampshire, with some restrictions, he doesn’t consider them lawful.

But Szabo may have inflamed the issue further when asked if he would use deadly force to prevent an abortion.

“I would respond specifically by saying that if someone is under threat, a full-grown human being, if they’re under threat, what should the sheriff do? Everything in their power to prevent them from being harmed,” he said.

When pressed about what he would do if he learned that a doctor was about to perform an elective abortion, Szabo replied he would do what it took to prevent that from happening.

“Absolutely,” he said. “Well, I would hope that it wouldn’t come to that, as with any situation where someone is in danger, but again, specifically talking about elective abortions and late-term abortions, that is an act that needs to be stopped.”


[read full post at ABLC]

Reader Interactions

72Comments

  2. 2.

    MikeJ

    “There is a difference between legal and lawful,” Szabo said.

    Statements like this are how you identify wingnuts. This and white people talking about the difference between niggers and black people.

  5. 5.

    KG

    @MikeJ: well, there is a difference between legal and lawful, or illegal and unlawful if you will… it’s the difference between criminal and civil liability. It’s not illegal to break a contract but it is unlawful. All this guy has to do is find someone that would have standing to enjoin an abortion and he’ll be fine.

    Ok, the legal tightrope walking aside, there is a whole new level of stupid there. You know why? Because I know something else that’s unlawful, it’s called “acting under the color of law”. And I’m going to go out on a limb and say trying to stop an otherwise legal abortion is acting under the color of law and the sort of thing that results in an officer having to turn in his badge and gun to a scruffy commander with a beer gut and coffee stains on his shirt.

  6. 6.

    burnspbesq

    @Lysana:

    Southerners don’t have a hammerlock on that sort of reactionary conduct

    No, but they earn royalties when Yankees do it, cuz they own the trademark.

  9. 9.

    Chris

    What the fuck is he talking about? Of course slavery was lawful under the constitution. Wrong, but perfectly lawful. Which should imply that the vaunted founding fathers may not have been perfect after all, but that’s another story.

  11. 11.

    The Dangerman

    Can we just give them Alaska or Hawaii and have them secede? Has to be one of those states because the fence around any of the contiguous states would be really expensive (sorry, Canada, you’d be the buffer).

  13. 13.

    Ash Can

    @SatanicPanic: I followed the link back to ABL’s joint. He already has the beard.

    I also followed the link back to the original news story. This shit-for-brains has no law enforcement experience and believes the sheriff is above the law, and the Republican state house speaker is calling on him to drop out of the race. We can only hope that the voters in this lowlife’s district do the right thing and send him back under the rock he crawled out from.

  15. 15.

    Keith

    Yet another amateur Constitutional scholar. I wasn’t aware that it gave ultimate power to local sheriffs (I love the reference to common law).

  18. 18.

    The Other Chuck

    Never mind that “common law” simply means “our legal system” (check the constitution sometime, it mentions it), what it means to wingnuts is “stuff that um should like be a law and shit and without any of them courts and judging and jurismydickshun and get me another beer and some skoal!”

  19. 19.

    Mark S.

    @Ash Can:

    I just read it too. The guy is fucking nuts.

    “The county attorney would then need to follow through on prosecuting,” Szabo said. “And if they choose not to do their duty and uphold the constitution, they can be brought up on charges before what is called a citizens grand jury, which is something that is not common in the United States, but again is something based in common law that is within the purview of the county sheriff.”

    So he plans to set up juries of like-minded idiots to prosecute anything he wants. Because it’s all there in the Constitution, or something.

  21. 21.

    SatanicPanic

    @Keith:

    Yet another amateur Constitutional scholar. I wasn’t aware that it gave ultimate power to local sheriffs (I love the reference to common law).

    The US Constitution is just the New New Testament of the Bible to these people. It’s a magic tome that means you are never wrong. The actual text is irrelevant.

  22. 22.

    Percysowner

    Helping slaves escape to Canada didn’t involve murdering the slave owners. When slave revolts got violent, everyone expected the violent ones to be punished. John Brown may have been a martyr, and gotten a song written about him, but he paid the price for killing 5 people. Is the good sheriff ready to stand trial for murder and be executed for premeditated murder, or will he expect pats on the shoulder and asylum somewhere?

  23. 23.

    mai naem

    @The Dangerman: Alaska but not Hawaii. Plus Alaska has the selling point of drill baybee drill.

    Do conservatives drink a different kind of water then the rest of the country? Is there some teabagger only water that they all drink? WTF makes them total whackjobs? Do they require extra oxygen that they’re not getting? Did they all eat lead as children? Did they play around with mercury when they were kids? Was there a huge rash of natural births where there was difficulty coming down the canal and oxygen was cut off a few crucial seconds?

  24. 24.

    dance around in your bones

    “I would respond specifically by saying that if someone is under threat, a full-grown human being, if they’re under threat, what should the sheriff do?

    I do not think these words mean what he thinks they mean.

  25. 25.

    amk

    why is america hunting for taliban in a distant land ? they are right there in their own backyard.

  26. 26.

    Roger Moore

    @Percysowner:

    Is the good sheriff ready to stand trial for murder and be executed for premeditated murder, or will he expect pats on the shoulder and asylum somewhere?

    I assume he expects the hearty congratulations of his constituents for protecting them from the abortionist menace. And if he can get elected on that platform, maybe he’s right to expect that. I don’t think he knows enough about the law to understand that won’t be enough to protect him, though.

  28. 28.

    Gozer

    @PeakVT: Damn…I’ve driven a lot around New England and NH always seemed pretty chill to me.

    This asshole sounds like one of those sovereign citizen freaks. Why can’t they all just move to Somalia or Afghanistan or some other place where “every man is a king”.

  29. 29.

    Starlit

    This is not terrorism. This is someone running for a position in public safety asserting that he will not, in fact, support the mission and role of the job.

  33. 33.

    Pen

    @Starlit: Terrorism definition: “The use of violence or intimidation In persuit of political aims”

    So how, exactly, is someone running for sheriff and claiming to have a license to kill to enforce their contra-legal beliefs not terrorism? Do we have to wait until he’s elected? Until he moves from threats to actually killing someone?

    The guy’s not just some nobody spouting off, he’s a political candidate for a position that gives him a gun. Threatening to kill people for doing something that’s legal because he doesn’t agree? Yeah, I’d say that fits the bill.

  34. 34.

    Quaker in a Basement

    “There is a difference between legal and lawful,” Szabo said.

    Uh, no. Those are the same. He musta slept through the first week of the Barney Fife Academy.

  35. 35.

    Citizen Alan

    @SatanicPanic:

    The US Constitution is just the New New Testament of the Bible to these people. It’s a magic tome that means you are never wrong. The actual text is irrelevant.

    I’ve made that point many times. These creatures understand the Constitution in exactly the same way they understand the Bible and Wealth of Nations. That is, not with any real understanding of the ideas contained within the document. Rather, they’re just to be waved around like a primative shaman would wave around a fetish bone to ward off the evil spirits of liberalism.

  37. 37.

    Grumpy Code Monkey

    You know, it’s not like abortion providers roam the countryside looking for innocent pregnancies to terminate; rather, it’s the pregnant women who seek their services. How does that play into this idiot’s fantasies? Is he going to arrest the women entering the clinic? Is he going to use deadly force on them?

  38. 38.

    Black Onion (formerly barely known as Blackfrancis)

    I live in this guy’s district, I am looking forward to voting against him, and making sure others know how bat shit insane he is. His facebook page is a fever swamp, but the commenters are mostly hammering him. He’s also going on about Agenda 21, and any other crazypants teahadist nonsense he can get his hands on.

    facebook.com/pages/Frank-W-Szabo-For-Sheriff-of-Hillsborough-County/277456675653327

    He’s a member of the Free State Project, too

    en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Free_State_Project

    I should get some of his signs and put them on my car after altering them to say he’s shoot your doctor or something. Not feeling clever at the moment. Too nauseous from this guy.

  39. 39.

    Calouste

    @Spaghetti Lee:

    New slogan: Live Free or Die, ‘Cept for the Womenfolk.

    Well, the Womenfolk can’t the “Live” or “Free”, but they can still have the “Die”. Maybe even the “or”.

  40. 40.

    mdblanche

    @PeakVT: New Hampshire is where Massachusetts dumps its wingnuts. I’ll give you one guess which county most of them wind up in.

  41. 41.

    Origuy

    @Gozer:

    This asshole sounds like one of those sovereign citizen freaks.

    Spot on. The bit about the county sheriff being the ultimate law is part of that nonsense.

  42. 42.

    TenguPhule

    Can we just give them Alaska or Hawaii and have them secede?

    Screw you Dangerman, we don’t want them!

  45. 45.

    karl

    Good heavens, don’t get your undies in a bundle; the guy’s running in the primary — any registered Repub can do that. He’s not in office now and surely won’t be nominated (that goes too far even for NH, I hope). Of course, if he wins then it’s a sign of the Apocalypse.

  46. 46.

    e.a.f.

    I couldn’t stop laughing when I read this. Then I realized it wasn’t a joke, it was in the U.S.A. which has its own version of the Taliban. Just another crack pot republican. So this guy is going shoot drs. who preform abortions. This should be good. So he shoots the dr. That is murder. So in his mind its o.k. to kill living human beings but end a pregnancy. I never did get that but I guess those “closest” to god know all.

    This candidate is right up there with Akin & his ilk.

    Abortion is legal in the U.S.A. as it is in Canada, England, most first world countries. Now the U.S.A. has people running for law officer positions so they can shoot & kill people they dont’ agree with. I thought they only did that in China & sometimes Russia. Oh, well the U.S.A. hasn’t been a true free country for some time. It just keeps getting worse.

    I know the U.S.A. has been building a wall between themselves & Mexico to keep people out of the U.S.A. I think we in canada might want to build a wall to keep out idiots like the guy running for sheriff & some of the other loonie republicans. Maybe it is just some genetic defect which causes people to become republicans & act this way.

  47. 47.

    Patricia Kayden

    Don’t the Rightwingers already support killing doctors who perform abortions? Not sure if Szabo’s stance is that controversial to people on the other side of the aisle. There have already been incidents where doctors have been murdered/harassed by anti-choice zealots.

  48. 48.

    danielx

    Well, I can see where his confusion over ‘legal’ and ‘lawful’ arises. There’s a lot of that going around these days. After all, there’s a big difference between unlawful acts that result in arrests and prosecution and unlawful acts that…don’t.

    After all, if you rob a gas station of a couple of hundred bucks and get caught, you’ve committed an illegal act and will spend some time in a 6 x 10 room with concrete walls. If you set up and commit an elaborate (and illegal) fraud by creating a deal you know will fail and then bet on the failure (*cough*Goldman Sachs*cough*), you’ll walk because it’s “too difficult” for the Department of Justice to prosecute you – ‘we know they committed an illegal act but it’s just too hard, dammit’.

    See how that works?

  50. 50.

    peggy

    Hillsborough County in New Hampshire is a suburb of Boston. It’s cheap and Rt.3 and 93 scoot right down to the Hub.

    This kook can parade, but he won’t win an election.

  52. 52.

    sherparick

    @mai naem: The sad thing is that 30% of the county will vote for this guy.

    As for the slavery not being lawful under the Constitution, there is so much wrong there, starting with this clause, still in the document, in Article IV, Section 2.

    “No person held to service or labor in one state, under the laws thereof, escaping into another, shall, in consequence of any law or regulation therein, be discharged from such service or labor, but shall be delivered up on claim of the party to whom such service or labor may be due.”

    AKA “The Fugitive Slave Clause,” which even Lincoln acknowledged before the Civil War obligated the Free States to deliver up escape slaves to their owners, as distasteful as that was.

  53. 53.

    Jay in Oregon

    @Yutsano:
    Yep, New Hampshire is the site of The Liberty Project.

    Are you frustrated at the loss of freedom and responsibility in America, while the growth of government and taxes continues unabated? Do you want to live in strong communities where your rights are respected, and people exercise responsibility for themselves and in their dealings with each other?
    __
    If you answered “yes” to those questions, then the Free State Project has a solution for you.
    __
    What the Free State Project is… The Free State Project is an effort to recruit 20,000 liberty-loving people to move to New Hampshire. We are looking for neighborly, productive, tolerant folks from all walks of life, of all ages, creeds, and colors who agree to the political philosophy expressed in our Statement of Intent, that government exists at most to protect people’s rights, and should neither provide for people nor punish them for activities that interfere with no one else.

    Hmm… looks like this guy missed a memo or two…

  54. 54.

    BigHank53

    To clear up a point for the non-natives: the county sheriff position in NH is a complete nothingburger of a job. He (or she) is responsible for the following: communications, serving summons & warrants, the county jail, and transporting prisoners. Every single town has its own police department, of the usual variable competence. But the county sheriffs have very little to do with everyday on-the-street law enforcement. Not only does he not have a keen grasp of the law, he doesn’t even know what’s in his future job description.

    New Hampshire has low barriers for elections, too: I’m willing to bet all he had to do was walk over to the county courthouse, pay his $200, and shazam!–he’s a candidate for sheriff.

  55. 55.

    Jennifer

    If I was running against this doofus, my campaign would revolve around asking voters if they wanted their taxes to go towards providing them with services, like roads, streetlights, water & sewer, etc., or if they wanted them to go to pay settlements for lawsuits against the county – because if this jerkoff gets elected, they’re going to end up paying a lot of those.

  56. 56.

    1badbaba3

    Hmmmm, more macho shitheads using hypothetical violence in improbable situations to fluff themselves to climax. God, I love the GOP. VICTORY.

  61. 61.

    Grumpy Code Monkey

    @dnfree:

    Good question; wonder how familiar he is with the various complications related to pregnancy, and which of those complications result in termination.

    If I had to guess, I’d wager his medical knowledge is at least as deep and vast as his understanding of the NH state constitution.

  63. 63.

    kindness

    It’s funny as New Hampshire’s motto is ‘Live Free or Die’. It’s on all their license plates.

  64. 64.

    Kathy in St. Louis

    Upon whom is this guy going to use deadly force, the abortion provider or the woman seeking the abortion? Is he going to shoot the doctors and nurses working in a legal situation to provide requested care, or the woman? Just curious how this guy’s alleged mind works. So far, nada.

  65. 65.

    r€nato

    I don’t necessarily have a problem with this point of view.

    (yes, I have a problem with acting upon it)

    If one is going to insist that abortion is murder, period, then of course one would have, at the very least, a moral duty to stop someone from committing a murder if it were within one’s power to do so. If you’re law enforcement, it would be part of your job to do so.

    Furthermore, at the very least this position also implies that women who choose elective abortion should be charged with being an accessory to murder, if not manslaughter or murder itself.

    Calling abortion ‘murder’ also ought to mean that there really shouldn’t be exceptions for rape or incest.

    Those who want to call it murder really need to own the consequences of that position, instead of trying to make it seem more humane than such a drastic statement really is.

  66. 66.

    celticdragonchick

    @The prophet Nostradumbass:

    Exactly. I have been wondering at what point does it become possible to actually defend yourself from tyrannical “conservatives” using the coercive power of the law to basically break the law.

  67. 67.

    Johannes

    The “common law” as used in the Constitution denotes the body of judicial precedent adopted by the colonies, then the states prior to ratification. In ordinary legal usage, it means judicial decisions construing statutes or the Constitution, or filling the interstices where no enacted law governs.

    It emphatically does not mean what some bohunk with a badge thinks is right, formal law be damned, “FREEDUMB!”

  68. 68.

    Matt McIrvin

    New Hampshire is a strange place. I live three miles away on the Massachusetts side and have family members there, so it’s endlessly fascinating.

    It’s been turning into a Democratic state in presidential elections, and there are a lot of liberals in Hillsborough County, but it’s also got this reserve of completely crazy libertarianism in its politics. The House of Representatives has about a zillion people in it who are essentially unpaid, so naturally it’s made up of politically amateur retirees who are constantly saying or doing bizarre things.

    There was an enormous Republican sweep in the 2010 Tea Party wave, and one of the things they wanted to do was repeal the same-sex marriage law that the Democrats had voted in previously, but they couldn’t do it, and it was partly because a significant fraction of them were hardcore libertarians who wanted to repeal state-sponsored marriage for everyone.

    By the way, the Nashuans who commute down to Boston do get socked when it comes to state taxes, because they have to pay NH property tax (NH gets much of its revenue this way, because of the lack of income or sales taxes) but they still have to pay Massachusetts income tax as well.

  69. 69.

    Ruckus

    @mai naem:
    Once again I have to say if it involves multiple choice about the wingnut/conservative position, then E. All of the above is the correct answer. Your question begs the answer that it has been a confluence of stupid for the last 40-60 yrs and it is swirling around the bowl right now and doing an Al Bundy.

  70. 70.

    Hungry Joe

    It’s great fun to get overwrought about this guy, but he’s just a loon who filed papers or did whatever you have to do to get on the ballot for a primary in a small section of New Hampshire and came up with a new twist on “twisted.” I get as much of a kick as anybody by passing along stuff like this (e.g., what that wacko judge in Texas said about defending his county from Obama’s U.N. troops) to friends, but it’s a sideshow: The ones we have to worry about, and fight, are those who don’t appear to be insane or have room-temperature IQ’s but get in there and do the real damage.

  71. 71.

    Matt

    @mai naem:

    I suspect that the cognitive strain of believing that there’s an angry invisible man in the sky who’s terribly concerned about sexytime because a bunch of Iron Age shepherds said so via a two-millenia-old transcription of the results of a centuries-long game of telephone might contribute… ;)

Comments are closed.

Trackbacks