There’s a lot to unpack in this sentence:
Late-term abortion doctor George Tiller, a prominent advocate for abortion rights wounded by a protester more than a decade ago, was shot and killed Sunday at a church in Wichita where he was serving as an usher and his wife was in the choir, his attorney said.
I’m opposed to both late-term abortion and church. Still, presuming he was murdered by abortion opponents calling themselves pro-life and motivated by Christian teaching, it’s hard to imagine anything more twisted.
UPDATE (Monday morning): I’m going to be tied up today with meetings and panels but I wanted to add some quick points to this post I rapidly dashed off yesterday afternoon before getting on with my Sunday.
- Most late-term abortions are abhorrent, involving a viable child who could live outside the womb. Many, however, are not. I’ve gathered from what I’ve read since the news broke that Tiller mostly performed the latter, those heart-wrenching cases where the fetus, while late in its development, was either nonviable, horribly defective, or threatening the safety of its mother.
- Andrew Sullivan and a goodly number of left-of-center bloggers I read blame Bill O’Reilly and other more-or-less mainstream conservative commentators for adding to an environment that made murdering Tiller more likely. I reject that argument wholeheartedly. I’m by no means an O’Reilly fan but he’s not advocating murder. Indeed, the overwhelming number of even hard-right social conservatives condemn these anti-life crimes. The idea that holding forth passionately on one’s political views is tantamount to incitement to violence is incredibly dangerous to our continued freedom.
- While no commentator has yet taken it that way, I want to make clear that my opposition to “late-term abortion and church” was in no way intended to suggest an equivalence between the two. I think the former heinously immoral in most circumstances while I’m merely philosophically opposed to the latter for reasons I’ve explained previously but aren’t germane to this discussion.
- This was a plain old murder, not “terrorism” or an “assassination.”
