Domestic fundamentalist terrorism, perpetrated by a middle-aged white man (why does it always seem like it’s white men committing heinous acts against doctors who perform abortions, and never women? [edit: the person who shot but didn't kill manage to kill Dr. George Tiller in the 1990's was a middle-aged woman, it turns out]). If only we’d been recently warned that violence by far-outside-the-mainstream right-wingers was immanent. If only.
I have to say, George Tiller’s murder is deeply unsettling, especially the its circumstances. I’m not religious, but it seems to me one should be able to attend church services without being gunned down. I’m not the only one feeling sickened and angry and worried about escalation. Be they liberals…
We are, and have for a long time, been in a much more precarious position than we sometimes realize; we have spent too many years defending an ever-shrinking number of clinics and doctors against the repeated harassment, blockades, vandalism and guerrilla violence of the antis. We owe it to Dr. Tiller to remember him — to remember him and to remember Dr. Gunn, Dr. Patterson, Dr. Britton, James Barrett, Shannon Lowney, Lee Ann Nichols, Robert Sanderson, and Dr. Slepian — to remember our dead. But more than that, we need to work in honor of their memories, and to make sure that there are no more of whom we have nothing left but names.
Or better yet, rendition that Christian fundamentalist killer. Yeah, send him to Syria or Egypt, have them put him in some shithole prison where they can get Ottoman on his ass. Get those motherfuckin’ electrodes on his nuts, on his nipples. Whip him with stripped cables. Keep him in a space the size of a grave, letting the rats and the cockroaches crawl all over him. Then send him back to Guantanamo so he can perhaps one day face a tribunal. Or preventive detention. Real indefinite-like, until the abortion battle is settled
The problem with statements like Obama’s is that they presume each side is equally responsible for the contentiousness of the abortion ‘debate’—that the belief that women have a right to take part in a legal medical procedure without threats and intimidation is somehow equivalent to the belief that women should be forced to carry every child to term, even if it kills them.
…or conservatives.
The murder of George Tiller at his church is a heinous crime, without any sense or justice. Regardless of how one feels about George Tiller’s profession, his murderer is nothing more than a domestic terrorist — someone attempting to impose by force a policy that one cannot get in place through democratic means.
A pro-lifer who used to protest outside of Tiller’s abortion clinic:
And of course they always seemed to choose the passages talking about “the LORD shall bless the righteous but sinners he shall smite” and the like. They said it with force, like they meant it. After a while, it got incredibly eerie. Basically, the language O’Reilly or Operation Rescue uses to describe Tiller’s activities was not isolated, but was pervasive among the fundamentalists locally and only seemed to get worse as time went on. … It doesn’t matter that “baby killer” could be factually accurate. Once you start perpetuating these loaded memes that excite people’s emotions, all it takes is someone who is a bit crazier than the others for events like yesterday’s to happen. Sometimes I wonder if I need to come up with a new label for myself other than “pro life” just to distance myself from them.
It cannot be true, however much some pro-choicers may want it to be, that pro-lifers are obliged to shut up and go away because one violent kook killed an abortion doctor. Think about the harsh criticism of the US torture policy under Bush. If, God forbid, someone infuriated by that committed murder against one of the Bush officials who devised the policy, it would be a heinous crime, but most people would understand that torture critics could not be blamed for it. Nor would the severity of their moral indictment of torture be at issue. … But we can’t let ourselves off that easily. Our words are not spoken in a vacuum. In our media today, they are amplified to a degree previously unimaginable. It seems to me that this puts a special obligation on all of us, whatever our cause or political stance, to choose carefully what we say, and how we say it. .. This will not end well for us. It never has.
(A tip of the hat to anthropophagous and sexartandpolitics for the first three quotes)
