His carefully considered views

This just in – The Atlantic has fired Kevin Williamson, the “women who get abortions should be hanged” guy.

That’s good, but why was he hired (or signed up) in the first place? It was already known that he thought and wrote that women should be executed for ending their own pregnancies. Would the Atlantic sign up a writer who had written that Jews should be murdered? Bosnians? Muslims? Atheists? Tutsis? I doubt it. It’s weird that women are apparently an exception.

The Daily Beast has more:

Goldberg initially defended Williamson’s hiring, dismissing the fringe view as simply “extreme tweeting” for which he deserved a “second chance.” New York Times conservative columnist Bret Stephens echoed that defense, writing, “[F]or heaven’s sake, it was a tweet.”

However, on Wednesday, Media Matters for America revealed that Williamson’s deadly solution for women who’ve had abortions wasn’t just an aberrant tweet. In a 2014 podcast, the liberal watchdog found, Williamson repeatedly and forcefully defended his view that those women should be executed.

He described current methods of execution—like lethal injection—to be “too antiseptic” and suggested that the state administer more “violent” forms of capital punishment befitting the “violence” of an abortion.

Goldberg decided that might make things awkward with female colleagues. Good call.

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