Murder of Dr. George Tiller

by Graham Email

Link: http://www.kwch.com/global/story.asp?s=10451609

When a society allows deeply dysfunctional individuals to conflate abortion with murder, without sufficient pushback from educated electors and opinion-formers who ought to be awake and alert, instead of mentally narcoleptic, this is the eventual result.
Let us not beat around the bush here. This, folks, is terrorism. I demand that the full weight of anti-terrorism laws in the USA be deployed to find the killers, bring them to justice, and marginalize and discredit the killer's supporters. They are nothing more than amoral, twisted, murdering jerks, and their support groups need to put away their fake apologies and Shut The Fuck Up (yes, Operation Rescue, I was referring to you, you dehumanizing bunch of scumbags).
UPDATE - The police have arrested a suspect, and, based on this article, it seems that the suspect was a disaster waiting to happen. Now, of course, we have a bunch of people who met him and became acquainted with him popping up saying stuff like "he was weird, wacky and had an obsession with abortion". All very interesting to know, but why was this guy allowed to graduate to terrorism? This is all somewhat reminiscent of Michael Ryan, and Timothy McVeigh.
Worse still is that there is a large body of evidence, in the form of threats and illegal behaviour (right up until the present day) towards abortion clinics and medical professionals. U.S. law enforcement has been wilfully and consistently ignoring these incidents and law enforcement issues for a long time. Any law enforcement official who expresses surprise at what has just happened is wilfully obtuse and deceitful, stupid, or both.
PZ Myers has a pretty good posting summarizing some thoughts about this disgraceful event:

In many ways, though, Roeder's religiosity is going to be a distraction. It simply doesn't matter, and the strongest conclusion we can draw from it is that religion fails to provide a reasonable framework for morality, since it is so easily and regularly subverted to rationalize evil. Focus instead on the root of the problem: Roeder was an amoral, obsessed nut who found support for his delusions among a particularly ugly American subculture. Gods don't matter. And when you think gods do, you lose sight of the truth: other people matter.

UPDATE 2 - David Neiwert, who has extensively studied domestic hate groups, weighs in with his thoughts on the Tiller murder.
UPDATE 3 - Jeffrey Feldman explains in this article how authoritarian fascists have succeeded in their attempts to frame abortion as murder. As he explains:

Dr. George Tiller was killed in his church because the right-wing has built a political movement around a violent idea: that America has been transformed by liberals into a culture that "murders" babies.
Like a giant river supported by millions of tiny underground streams, this movement is supported by everyone who defines those with whom they disagree on abortion policy as supporters of "murder."

As Feldman points out, the whole framing process has been perniciously supported and enabled, not only by dysfunctional politicians, but also by the media:

In political debates, right-wing voices almost always use certain controversial procedures to define abortion as "murder," but even when the subject moves beyond those procedures they continue to use "murder" to describe all other aspects of abortion. The phrase "baby murderer," then becomes short-hand for referring to "liberals" in other contexts.
This right-wing rhetorical strategy is used so often, people barely give it any notice anymore. Calling people "murderers" and "baby killers" has become a normal part of U.S. media. Guests on TV and radio shows who routinely accuse their debate opponents of supporting or condoning "murder" are invited back time and time again to repeat the accusation.


As Feldman concludes:

No matter how many or how few late term abortions are performed, so long as the right-wing anti-abortion movement continues to fold dissent into an ever-expanding definition of "murder," then the right-wing will continue to give rise to activists who kill doctors.

All of which begs the question: how long do we have to listen to scumbag bullies on radio and TV describing liberal supporters of reproductive rights as "baby-killers" and "murderers" before somebody in law enforcement decides that they might be inciting violence? Do we have to wait until a talk show host himself engages in violent behaviour before making this connection? Am I the the only person in the world who has noticed that the standard approach of authoritarian scumbags the world over, when faced with dissent, is to shout it down, and if that does not look like it is working, to threaten people with violence and other nasty personal consequences?
Wake up folks. The USA has a deadly undercurrent of acceptance of intolerance that is dangerously close to being out of control. There appears to be insufficient willingness on the part of a majority of the population to slap down, marginalize and ostracise offensive, authoritarian jerks.
Which brings us back to where we came in. Shooting an unarmed doctor in a crowded church in furtherance of a warped, murderous pathology is not merely murder. It is quite clearly a terrorist act, and needs to be treated as such. If animal rights protesters can be pursued by US and UK law enforcement using anti-terrorism laws, why are these laws not being deployed against the far more serious events that just occurred in Kansas?