It’s been quite awhile since I’ve posted, but yesterday’s murder of Dr. George Tiller — one of only two or three medical practitioners in the entire country who performed “late term” abortions –caught my attention in a way nothing has for some time.
Dr. Tiller had been the target of violence and threats and heated rhetoric for years. His clinic was bombed in 1985 and he was shot in both arms in 1993. There was a nearly constant campaign of harrassment against him, all with the goal of stopping his legal medical practice, and it all culminated in the unbelievably sacrilegious act of murder in his church yesterday.
I have no doubt that this was a religiously motivated political assassination.
Authorities have arrested (and charged) someone with the crime, and while the official stance at the moment is that they don’t know the motive, Scott Roeder (the alleged shooter), has a track record for nutso fringiness.
But before you breathe a big sigh of relief (just another crazy!), take a gander at some of the reactions to yesterday’s crime. The online world is flat-out bursting with twisted articles and comments (Charles Johnson at Little Green Footballs has compiled a toxic sample), and I find much of this more disturbing than the shooting itself.
It’s clear that Roeder, however crazy he may be, is not an isolated case at all.
Yes, as Michelle Malkin points out, the mainstream pro-life organizations have unequivocally denounced Dr. Tiller’s murder. That’s exactly what I’d expect of anyone who is actually “pro-life”. But there’s a vast world of difference between someone who legally tries to make changes to the system, and someone who terrorizes or bombs or shoots people who are working within that same law of the land.
Pro-life is not the same thing as anti-abortion, but thanks to years of blurred terminology in the trenches of the abortion battles, Dr. Tiller’s murder presents pro-life people with a serious problem. To avoid being lumped together with the scary numbers of the obviously unhinged, the pro-lifers need to draw some very clear lines in the sand between themselves and those extreme radicals.
Anti-abortionists who threaten and bomb and shoot are part of a wide-spread domestic terrorism movement, as are those who support such actions. They are not pro-life at all. They are anti-law zealots verging on anarchists.
And it looks to me as if there are an awful lot of them.
(Cross-posted from Polimom Too)