Many people continue to insist that new Atlantic hire Kevin Williamson proposed hanging as a punishment for women who have abortions only because he was tweeting, and tweeting precludes thought. But as I've noted in previous posts, Williamson said the same thing in an interview with the anti-abortion site LifeSiteNews conducted after he posted his abortion tweets. And now Media Matters unearths a National Review podcast in which Williamson also advocated hanging women who have abortions:

... as Williamson himself explained in a September 2014 episode of his National Review podcast, “Mad Dogs and Englishmen,” he had no problem defending his view that he supported capital punishment for those who had an abortion and that what he “had in mind was hanging.”

KEVIN WILLIAMSON (CO-HOST): And someone challenged me on my views on abortion, saying, “If you really thought it was a crime you would support things like life in prison, no parole, for treating it as a homicide.” And I do support that, in fact, as I wrote, what I had in mind was hanging.

[...]

WILLIAMSON: My broader point here is, of course, that I am a -- as you know I’m kind of squishy on capital punishment in general -- but that I’m absolutely willing to see abortion treated like a regular homicide under the criminal code, sure.

... Later in the same episode of the podcast, Williamson continued that when it came to punishment for those who had abortions, he “would totally go with treating it like any other crime up to and including hanging” -- going so far as to say that he had “a soft spot for hanging as a form of capital punishment” because “if the state is going to do violence, let’s make it violence. Let’s not pretend like we’re doing something else.”

A key thing to note here is that Williamson says this even after his co-host on the podcast, National Review's Charles C.W. Cooke, argues that it would be fine to execute some murderers and not others (Cooke and Williamson agree that abortion is murder).



Cooke says:

Before we get on to the disagreement between us on this issue, it's worth saying that the presumption that you cannot believe something to be murder unless you agree with whatever response to that crime your interlocutor is proposing is ridiculous. [Williamson replies, "Sure."] The reality is that you can simultaneously believe that a crime is murder and that the person should be hanged or that the person should be put in prison for ten years or that the person should be not put in prison at all but rehabilitated by their family or that the person should go to a mental institution or that the person should be sent to Australia or exiled onto an island just off civilization's coast. You can believe all of these things.

If Williamson really wanted to walk his tweets back, this was his big chance: Here was a fellow anti-abortion conservative saying that it doesn't inevitably follow that if you believe abortion is murder you have to punish it the way you punish other murders. Cooke cites the public acceptance of abortion (which he finds regrettable) as a reason why you can't expect such consistency -- much of society doesn't think abortion is as bad as garden-variety murder, so it wouldn't be ready for a severe punishment. Cooke suggests that a pro-choice person who demands consistency on punishment from an anti-abortion person is playing a dirty liberal trick:

It's such an asinine suggestion that unless you think that summarily the state should come in and start behaving toward abortion the way it does to other forms of murder, then you don't believe that it's murder.

But even when Cooke gives Williamson this huge opportunity to revise and extend the remarks he made in his tweets, Williamson doesn't bite. Cooke knows he won't bite -- they make clear that they've discussed this and they simply disagree. Although Williamson says he doesn't expect society to be ready to execute women who have abortions anytime soon, he's ready right now.

WILLIAMSON: My broader point here is, of course, that I am a -- as you know I’m kind of squishy on capital punishment in general -- but that I’m absolutely willing to see abortion treated like a regular homicide under the criminal code, sure.

COOKE: Instantly?

WILLIAMSON: Sure.

COOKE: As of tomorrow?

WILLIAMSON: I would take it, yeah. Now, it's going to be 150 years before this happens....

But whenever society has the gallows ready, he's there for it. No walkback.