June 2, 2009
George Tiller: Culture War Casualty?
The Nation: Coarsened Rhetoric From The Right On More Than Just The Abortion Front
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The body of Dr. George Tiller being removed from Reformation Lutheran Church (AP/Travis Heying, Wichita Eagle)
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Interactive Abortion Debate It's one of the most hotly debated political and social issues in America. Review a history of that debate since the historic Roe v. Wade decision.
In the summer of 1993, a housewife from Grants Pass, Oregon, named Rachelle Ranae (Shelly) Shannon traveled to Wichita, Kansas, with a Bible and a .25-caliber pistol and shot George Tiller, a 51-year-old doctor and abortion provider. Tiller was not the first physician so targeted--six months earlier, an abortion provider named David Gunn had been murdered outside his medical clinic in Pensacola, Florida--but, despite sustaining wounds in both arms, Tiller managed to survive the attack. Sixteen years later, while standing in the foyer of his church, where he was serving as an usher and distributing bulletins, Tiller was shot again. This time he wasn't so lucky.
The election of Barack Obama, it was said, would put the culture wars behind us, and two weeks ago, in a commencement address at the University of Notre Dame, President Obama tried to inject a note of civility into the debate about abortion. In his speech, Obama urged opponents and supporters of abortion rights to seek common ground by working to reduce the number of unintended pregnancies. He also told the story of an e-mail he'd received from a doctor who had voted for him in the Illinois primary but who'd taken offense at a passage on Obama's website describing "right-wing ideologues who want to take away a woman's right to choose." The doctor characterized himself as prolife and wrote, "I do not ask at this point that you oppose abortion, only that you speak about this issue in fair-minded words."
Obama wrote back to thank him and directed his staff to alter the wording, which, in its original form, was positively gracious compared to the language on www.stopobamanotredame.com, a website featuring the writings and video clips of Operation Rescue founder Randall Terry, who showed up at Notre Dame to protest and who compared Obama, unfavorably, to Herod. "Obama wants open ended child-killing," declared Terry on the website, promising to "raze hell" in the "war" to come. After the murder of Dr. Tiller, Terry came forward with more inflammatory words, calling Tiller "a mass murderer" and adding, "Those men and women who slaughter the unborn are murderers according to the Law of God. We must continue to expose them."
It is too early to say whether the murder of Dr. Tiller will trigger a wave of violent terrorism targeting abortion providers similar to the one that took place during the mid-1990s. It is not too early to be struck by the parallels. Then, as now, the violence came not in a moment of triumph for the pro-life movement but in the face of isolation and defeat. The year Shelly Shannon shot Dr. Tiller was the year that Bill Clinton assumed office. It was the year after the Supreme Court ruled, in the Casey decision, that the central holding of Roe v. Wade "should be affirmed." It was the year that a small band of militant antiabortion activists began openly endorsing murder and that a blueprint for violence and sabotage called the Army of God Manual declared, "All of the options have expired. Our Most Dread Sovereign Lord God requires that whosoever sheds man's blood, by man shall his blood be shed."
The Bush presidency brought John Roberts and Samuel Alito to the Supreme Court, but, for now, Roe remains the law of the land, and while opponents of abortion have managed to chip away at the right to choose in recent years, they have failed, even in states like South Dakota, to get the procedure banned by popular vote. For all the talk during the Bush years of the religious right's cultural and political resurgence, a firm majority of Americans continues to believe abortion should remain legal under at least some circumstances. The true believers who had their hopes for dramatic change raised and then dashed by Bush are not likely to be feeling optimistic right now.
"Fair-minded words" are what Barack Obama called for at Notre Dame. Yet his election has brought coarsened rhetoric from the right on more than just the abortion front. Sonia Sotomayor, the Puerto Rican woman Obama recently nominated to the Supreme Court, has been denounced as a "racist" and compared to David Duke by the likes of Rush Limbaugh and Newt Gingrich. "Terrorist" and "Kill him!" were among the shouts heard at right-wing rallies during last year's presidential campaign. Bullets kill. Inflammatory words merely incite. But those who deploy hateful language can hardly profess shock when their words are taken seriously, particularly over emotionally freighted issues that have sparked violence. Before he was murdered, George Tiller was a popular topic on Fox's O'Reilly Factor, with the host referring to him as "Tiller the Baby Killer," a man guilty of "Nazi stuff." These are not innocent words, as doctors targeted by antiabortion protesters have pointed out in the past. In a letter to his hometown newspaper some years ago, one such physician wrote:
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The members of the local non-violent, pro-life community may continue to picket my home. They may continue to scream that I am a murderer and a killer when I enter the clinics at which they 'peacefully' exercise their First Amendment Right of freedom of speech. They may do all of the above to me and other abortion providers of this community. But please don't feign surprise, dismay and certainly not innocence when a more volatile and less restrained member of the group decides to react to their inflammatory rhetoric by shooting an abortion provider.
It is too early to say whether the murder of Dr. Tiller will trigger a wave of violent terrorism targeting abortion providers similar to the one that took place during the mid-1990s.
Eyal PressThis letter appeared in The Buffalo News in 1994, one year after Shelly Shannon shot George Tiller. Its author, Barnett Slepian, a physician and abortion provider, was murdered four years later while standing in the kitchen of his home. He was the last abortion provider to be gunned down in America, until George Tiller was.
Eyal Press is a Nation contributing writer and the author of Absolute Convictions: My Father, a City, and the Conflict That Divided America.
By Eyal Press
Reprinted with permission from The Nation.
More From Opinion
Best-selling author Mitch Albom on his first nonfiction work since "Tuesdays with Morrie."
Amusing when we compare the percentage of violent felons who are members of both the Democratic Party and ACLU versus those who are members of the Republican party and NRA though . . . . I think your criteria are flawed. Membership in a single class or even two intersecting classes doesn't automatically predict what other classes are also included among those members without further data. Though in the case above you can make a generalization ( though yours was, as demonstrated, wrong ) you can't come down with universal condemnation of EITHER intersection, as you propose, without automatically being wrong in a significant number of cases. There is, by logic, no differentiation between the people who make such conclusions and other mass murderers save the will to actually implement their opinions. Lets hope you are as similarly impotent as most members of the class of people who think the way you do usually are.
Not that it's likely you'd have understood anything I've just said.
There was such a law in Natzi Germany too ,that Goverment too passed a law permiting such atrocities,barbarous ,. morally unconscionable. That people felt the wrath that was stored up for them.What kind of people can long go unpunished that have no twinge of conscience? Where haven't we been afflicted be cause of our gross sins which keep mounting up ? How long will we continue to flaunt our sins be fore our Creator until we be destroyed?Is there any room for this nation to repent ,from the President to the street sweeper?Is there any who can find a contrite heart,and turn fromtheir wicked ways?
Words do have power and this was an act of domestic terrorism. Not an isolated act by a deranged gunman. This was not the first time that someone enflamed by the rhetoric of the "Pro-Life" movement has decided to stop the "baby killing" and murder a law-abiding citizen of this country. The movement can not play the innocent. They can not claim the moral high ground.
When fanatical Islamic clerics preach hatred and violence against others we correctly put them in the pool with the terrorist gunmen that act upon this violent philosophy. For some reason the "Pro-Life" movement can not see themselves as being exactly like the Taliban. To either kill or give a wink and a nod to those that would kill for their ideology.
Many will diagree and many will agree with the above statement but it's time we quit hiding behind abortion as a "choice" and start calling it what it really is. The termination of life of the most innocent and powerless in our society.
This applies to both sides. A woman who claims "No-one has the right to limit what I may do with my own body" should acknowledge the falsehood of claiming that only one body is at stake. Within her is a second, living body, and its fate is not only significant, but at the crux of the entire abortion debate. On the other hand, I believe it is reprehensible for any pro-life activist to refer to abortion as the killing of an "unborn baby". Fetuses are not babies. In early pregnancy, when most abortions occur, the fetus bears almost no relationship to a baby. A baby has conscious awareness, hopes, dreams, wishes, even regrets and expectations. The nervous system of the early fetus is too primitive for any of these preciously human attributes, or even for the primitive awareness of pain. The beginnings of these elements of being human develop gradually starting in late pregnancy and continuing through childhood.
If pro-choice women stopped saying, "It's my body", and pro-life advocates stopped claiming "you're killing babies", the arguments will probably continue, but in a more respectful and less violence prone environment.
If we who claim to be humans don't stop, is being human something so precious that it truly deserves protection?
Fred Moolten