Personally, I would argue that the state does not have a vendetta against Robert Latimer. Robert had planned to murder his daughter Tracy 12 days before he actually killed her. This would make what he did technically, first-degree murder. Robert Latimer was, however, charged with second-degree murder. If the state was determined to go after Robert Latimer wouldn't they have charged him with first-degree murder?
A case similar to this, I think, is the Robert Pickton case. The courts only charged Pickton with second-degree murder when his actions two were premeditated, meaning he should have been charged with first-degree murder. Not only that, but when Pickton's victims were disappearing, the cops sat on their hands.
What Robert Latimer's victim and Pickton's victim have in common (apart from being killed in cold-blood) is the fact that they are both oppressed peoples. Pickton's victims were all female First Nation's prostitutes and Robert Latimer's victim, Tracy Latimer, was a mentally challenged girl with cerebral palsy. And as we know the Bourgeois state is not in the business of defending oppressed people.
It can not be denied that the Bourgeois state has unjustly jailed people. Notable examples would include Mumia Abu-Jamal, Leonard Peltier, Alison Bodine, the Cuban Five, the MOVE Eight, the Ohio Seven etc. What these people have in common is that they all fought for the oppressed. Robert Latimer, however, killed an oppressed person. Bigots that kill minorities, immigrants, natives, the disabled etc. are, in my opinion, are not class war prisoners and do not belong on your stipend program nor should they have the solidarity of the workers' movement.
I think I noted before that Tracy Latimer was not terminally ill, not brain-dead nor is their any evidence of her wanting to die or consenting to being killed. This is murder not assisted suicide. I'm all for suicide and assisted suicide being legal or at least decriminalized. Being disabled, however, does not make someone better off dead. Their is a big long history of people with disabilities being considered "better off dead". This has been the logic of the eugenics movement and of the Nazis. Hitler when "mercy killed" the sick and disabled described the disabled as "lives not worth living" and "life not worthy of life". Robert Latimer supporters describe Tracy as "dead the day she was born" which is quite simply not true. Tracy's life was not "nothing but pain".
The overwhelming majority of the disabled community as well as disability rights groups see what Robert Latimer did as an act of violence and ableist bigotry. If the Trotskyist League and/or the Workers' Movement supports Robert Latimer this will only drive a wedge between the worker's movement and the disabled. The disabled community would rightly see the Trotskyist League and the worker's movement as supporting their extermination. This in the past has at it worst forced sections of the oppressed into the hands of the Bourgeois. The betrayal of the Reformists, Centrists, Stalinists and Syndicalists of the popular front in Spain for the peasants and the Moroccan separatists into the hands of Franco. The betrayals of the Kremlin and Warsaw Stalinists forced the historically class-conscious Proletariat into the hands of Solidarnosc which was controlled by Washington, Wall Street, London, the Vatican and the IMF.
I get that this is a very sensitive issue for alot of people and I apologize if I have come off as too confrontational with you people but a revolutionary party that prides itself on fighting for all oppressed people must not capitulate to ableist bigotry and support the murderers of the disabled.
Comradely,
M.G.
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