They Are Crazed--and Gaining Strength : Clinic murders: Attacks on women mark a new puritanism that condemns sexuality and holds that men must rule.

John Salvi III, the tormented loner accused of killing two women in a shooting spree at two Brookline, Mass., health clinics last week, is at the far lunatic end of a disturbing continuum: a rising tide of resistance to women’s rights.

Though Salvi may have been a disturbed individual, his action apparently was inspired by a movement that is gaining strength, a new puritanism that wants to punish women for sexuality and to insist that the only acceptable kind of family is the one in which men rule the roost.

The movement toward extremism among some who oppose choice has been steadily accelerating. Doctors who work at clinics have often found protesters near the doors of their homes, shrieking at their children; women going to clinics have been followed and have received threatening phone calls. A new militancy is growing among those who believe that they have a God-given right to take the law into their own hands. A group of “pro-life” activists staged a vigil outside the jail in Virginia where Salvi was being held, bearing signs reading “God Bless John Salvi.” They called Salvi a “hero” and said his slaughter of two innocent women was justifiable homicide. Like Paul Hill, the killer of a Florida doctor, who sees himself as a martyr and says he is eager to die in the electric chair, the lunatic fringe sees murder as doing God’s work.

Unfortunately, such crazed acts are fueled by a level of rhetoric and a hostility toward women that is becoming more pronounced. Women who try to visit health clinics where abortion is just one of the services never know if they will face harassment, with cries of “murderer” and “baby killer” ringing in the air.

I worry about what such rhetoric is doing to our respect for civility and tolerance, and to the idea that women have a right to make choices about their own lives. When clergymen say that people who support a woman’s right to choose are aiding murder, when they refuse to recognize the complex tangle of rights and morality at play in the issue of abortion, the tolerance for others’ beliefs is driven down just a little bit more.

The new puritanism also surfaces in the issue of sending children of poor women to orphanages. Conservatives have suggested that the first inhabitants of such homes should be the children of poor, unwed teen-age mothers. Is this really in the interest of the children--or is it a way to punish women who have sex without marriage? There is a long history in our culture of insisting that women must pay for sexual behavior. When anesthesia was first developed for use in childbirth, ministers argued that such relief to a laboring woman was a violation of the biblical injunction that women must bring forth children in pain and suffering, the punishment ordained for the sin of Eve. Opponents of birth control argue that women who try to limit the size of their families for their own health and economic survival are violating the will of God.

You also hear echoes of the new puritanism in the call for “family values.” Everybody is in favor of stronger families but many on the right say that the only acceptable family is the one in which male dominance is preserved. Religious conservatives decry feminism and link godliness with patriarchy. Beverly La Haye, founder of Concerned Women for America, said, “The woman who is truly spirit-filled will want to be totally submissive to her husband . . . . Submission is God’s design for women.” A minister at a gathering of a conservative Christian organization said that men had to tell their wives, “Honey, I’ve made a terrible mistake. I’ve given you my role. I gave up leading this family and I forced you to take that place. Now I must reclaim that role.” When Nation of Islam minister Louis Farrakhan spoke in Boston about the black family, he banned black women from the audience; he also has publicly disparaged the young black woman who accused boxer Mike Tyson of rape, saying that women drove men to such actions by their lascivious behavior.

The attack on women’s rights is often linked to religious fundamentalism, in which opposition to the political agenda of the group is tantamount to heresy. Around the world, women are among the first targets of fundamentalists. Women in Iran have been shot for not wearing the chador; an Algerian Olympic runner got death threats for exposing her limbs; a Bangladeshi author had to flee for her life after threats from Islamic hard-liners.

In this country, the clinic murders may be, as yet, only the fanaticism of a few, but the climate of opposition to women’s rights is building. Hillary Rodham Clinton is a regular target; the rage against this bright, independent woman often reaches a boiling point.

Even conservative women in politics are being smeared for stepping outside of woman’s proper role. One Republican who ran in Arizona with the endorsement of Barry Goldwater was astonished to find herself labeled a “feminazi.”

Does this hateful rhetoric have a link to the sort of violence that erupted in Brookline last week? Yes, by creating a climate in which it is perfectly OK to ridicule and harass women, to blame women’s drive for equal rights for all the excesses and problems of the modern world, and to call upon God as the architect of male dominance.

In 1986, Margaret Atwood wrote a chilling novel called “The Handmaid’s Tale,” about an America in which religious fundamentalists had gained power and doctors who performed abortions were publicly hanged. It’s only fiction--but the shots that rang out at the Brookline clinics last week were a grim reminder that dark and dangerous forces are at play in the land, and we disregard them at our peril.