Do We Have Blood On Our Hands?

Leaders of the prolife movement have quickly and appropriately condemned the murder of Dr. George Tiller. Tiller, who was gunned down while serving in his Church in Wichita, Kansas, had long been one of the most vocal leaders of the pro-choice movement and was one of the few doctors still performing late term abortions.

Many in the prochoice world however are already rejecting these condemnations as insufficient, suggesting that the long campaign against Tiller’s clinic created a climate of incitement. Kelli Conlin, head of NARAL NY, has published an especially harsh statement:

[I]t is cold-blooded, vicious actions like today’s assassination that make it hard for those of us in the pro-choice community to find common ground with those on the other side. It is lawless, violent behavior like this that makes us fear for our lives and our families. When they sit down across from us, they have no reason to believe that we come to the table with violent intentions. Today is a brutal reminder that we are not privileged to have the same sense of security.

We therefore call upon the leaders of the anti-abortion movement to go beyond condemning today's action to actually committing to control and measure their own irresponsible and incendiary rhetoric and actions.

When these anti-abortions leaders stalk us, harass us and label physicians “murderers,” they fan the flames to create a setting where abhorrent acts such as today's can transpire.

Others in the prochoice world are singling out Bill O’Reilly for his vehement television campaign against Tiller.

Such accusations obviously carry a heavy political agenda. The scholar of religion Philip Jenkins observed three months ago that liberal presidencies have repeatedly seized upon individual incidents of extremism to condemn the whole conservative world.

As recently as a decade ago, “terrorism” in the American public consciousness meant, almost entirely, domestic right-wing activism. This was certainly the case in the fictional media, where filmmakers discovered to their cost that any treatment of Muslim or Middle Eastern misdeeds could provoke boycotts. How much easier, then, to choose notorious villains who lacked defense groups and anti-defamation organizations. That generally meant white right-wingers. Militias, skinheads, and neo-Nazis became stock villains in the popular culture of the era. On television, countless police and detective shows dealt with ultra-Right villains, who were usually on the verge of releasing weapons of mass destruction against a decent, liberal America too naïve to realize the forces arrayed against it. The high-water mark of fictional far-Right villainy occurred in the 1999 film “Arlington Road,” in which a terrorism expert comes to suspect that his too-perfect neighbors are in fact the masterminds of a deadly fascist conspiracy. (He should have known: after all, they listen to country music.) As the film’s publicity warns, “Your paranoia is real!”

Ideas have consequences, even if those ideas are dreadfully, embarrassingly wrong. In terms of American national interests, by far the worst consequence of the Militia Panic was the massive underplaying of Islamic terrorism in U.S. public discourse and the disproportionate focus on the domestic far Right. Liberal columnists scoffed knowingly at terrorism experts who warned about foreign militants like al-Qaeda, when every informed observer knew that the real menace was internal. That attitude naturally had its impact on policymakers and on intelligence agencies, who recognized just how sensitive investigations of Middle Eastern-related terror plots might be. Those overcautious attitudes go far to explaining the otherwise perplexing neglect of all the blaring alarm bells that the agencies should have heard in the lead-up to Sept. 11.

Rod Dreher argues

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. If torture -- or abortion, or war, or discrimination, or any other morally consequential issue -- is wrong, then we are obliged to speak out against it, no matter what.

On the other hand, Kathryn Jean Lopez, writing in National Review Online's "The Corner" has warned against "yes but" condemnations of Tiller.

Randall Terry is doing exactly what CAIR does. When someone dies at the hands of a Muslim, CAIR rushes to warn the rest of us not to use it as an excuse to scapegoat Islam.

More generally: We have noticed a disinclination in the right blogosphere to talk about the Tiller killing at all. There's a widespread feeling that the prochoice left will exploit the crime for political advantage. Dangerously, however, conservatives and prolifers seem to stop there - as if that fear has somehow paralyzed them. Tiller's kiling unfortunately is not the first violent crime committed by prolife extremists. This is not a uniquely horrific incident. A broader self-examination is called for if we wish to claim in good conscience that our hands are clean of the next victim's blood.

This emailer to Andrew Sullivan's blog expresses the point powerfully:

I was initially shocked about the news of Dr. Tiller’s slaying. However, I’m now a bit surprised it actually took this long to happen, the more I think about it. You see, for about 18 months (circa 2000—2002) I was one of the protestors at the clinic. ... Email newsletters from these people -- not just the higher ups -- spoke of Tiller being guilty of “blood libel”, aborted fetuses’ “blood crying out for vengeance”, “death mills”, etc. These people not only spoke the language of the Old Testament but saw themselves as part of its narrative. They are Jonah warning Ninevah (Wichita) prophesizing about its wickedness (Tiller’s clinic). They are David up against Goliath (Tiller). There were endless calls for this “atrocity to end” and that “abortion in Wichita will end when the Church of Jesus Christ decides it will end”. The radicalism seemed to endlessly feed back on itself.

This had been going on for years now. When these people said that Tiller’s practices must be “brought to an end” or whatever, I truly believe that the vast, vast, vast majority of them (including the OR president, whom I’ve talked to about this before) do not have homicide on their minds. However, it doesn’t matter. Operation Rescue or Bill O’Reilly do not qualify every statement about Tiller with a parenthetical stating “oh, by the way, killing him is not the way to stop him” for obvious reasons. But even if they did, they can’t stop someone from thinking that more drastic measures are “necessary”.