Frank Schaeffer thinks that people who speak strongly against abortion do share some of the blame for Tiller's murder:
My late father and I share part of the blame for the murder of Dr. George Tiller, the abortion doctor gunned down on Sunday.
Until I got out of the religious right (in the mid-1980s) and repented of my former hate-filled rhetoric, I was both a leader of the so-called pro-life movement and a part of a Republican Party hate machine masquerading as the moral conscience of America. [...]Like many writers of moral/political/religious theories, my father and I would have been shocked that someone took us at our word, walked into a Lutheran Church and pulled the trigger on an abortionist. But even if the murderer never read Dad's or my words, we helped create the climate that made this murder likely to happen. In fact, it has happened before. In 1994, Dr. John Bayard Britton and one of his volunteer escorts were shot and killed outside an abortion clinic in Pensacola, Fla., by Paul Hill, a former minister and an avid follower of my father's.
Angry speech has become the norm in American religion from both the right and the left. Words are spoken which, when taken seriously, lead directly to violence by the unhinged and/or the truly committed.
When evangelicals on the right call President Barack Obama a socialist, a racist, anti-American, an abortionist, not a real American - and, echoing the former vice president, someone who is weakening America's defenses and making us less safe - the logical conclusion is violence.
You can read the rest of Schaffer's apologia at the link above; but in the meantime, an editorial in the Los Angeles Times takes a different approach:
The assassination of Dr. George Tiller, long targeted by extremists because he performed late-term abortions, is a reminder that fringe adherents of the "pro-life" movement are willing to desecrate the very value they claim to champion. But it distorts reality to insinuate that millions of Americans who oppose abortion condone such tactics. Tiller's killing shouldn't be exploited by activists on either side to score political points. [...]
Sadly, Tiller's assailant is not one of a kind, but neither is he typical of the antiabortion movement. Prominent pro-life organizations long have condemned violence against abortion providers while working to restrict the late-term abortions for which Tiller was known. His killing was forthrightly condemned by the National Right to Life Committee, Americans United for Life and Kansas' four Catholic bishops. (A tasteless exception was the reaction of Randall Terry, the former head of Operation Rescue, who said that Tiller "reaped what he sowed.")Despite these statements, some pro-choice activists are suggesting, overtly or subtly, that the responsibility for Tiller's death is shared by the broader pro-life movement. The president of NARAL Pro-Choice America said: "We also call on opponents of a woman's right to choose to condemn this action completely and absolutely." The implication is that the mainstream pro-life movement has to be nudged into opposing violence. People for the American Way said that "it's impossible to separate today's tragedy from the violent language that has been directed for years at doctors like George Tiller. Those who have inflamed emotions and dehumanized their opponents should take pause before they continue such dangerous rhetoric."
Some "arguments" are thinly veiled incitements to violence against individuals and should be punished for the crimes they are. But the basic premise of the antiabortion movement -- that a fetus is a person -- is by definition a "dehumanization" of abortion providers, even if it's expressed in decorous language. The militancy of some pro-life groups constitutes an alarming assault on a constitutionally protected right, but the answer is not to limit expression. It's unfair to ask antiabortion activists to muffle their message because it might inspire an unbalanced individual to commit an atrocity.
I agree with the L.A. Times. Keep reading below the fold, please:
Discussing what abortion is, showing pictures of abortion, insisting that abortion is morally reprehensible and that those who act as abortion providers are doing something that is morally evil, is not designed to incite violence, but to tell the truth from the standpoint of traditional Christian morality.
When we discuss another moral evil, torture, those of us who are traditional Christians should (and more do than is generally known) denounce it with equal clarity. In fighting this particular moral evil we're joined by those on the other side of the ideological spectrum, and we do many of the same things that those of us who are pro-life do when talking about abortion: we discuss what torture really is and how it dehumanizes the person on whom it is being performed, we show pictures of it, we insist that it is morally reprehensible and that not only those who engage in it but those at the higher levels of government who approve of it are engaging in something that is gravely morally evil. If some crazed person shot and killed someone known to have been instrumental in approving torture or carrying it out, would we bear the responsibility for that--even if on occasion our rhetoric is heated and our passion for the moral truth of this issue of an uncomfortable level for those who'd rather not think about it?
A secular nation is not a moral vacuum. We form strong, morally guided opinions not only about abortion or torture or gay marriage but about a whole host of other things, from the morality of eating meat to the morality of nuclear proliferation to the morality of various forms of military action to the morality of the death penalty--the list never ends. And we form our moral convictions with reference to our religious beliefs, our philosophies, our life experiences, and many other things.
And sometimes we will argue passionately, with great conviction, about something because our moral views clash, because what it seems obvious to us must be wrong (e.g. torture, the death penalty, and even abortion) will seem to others, equally obviously, to be morally permissible.
No, morality isn't formed by consensus and compromise, the way that political issues can be resolved. But we continue to make our respective cases with a firm commitment to what we believe sincerely to be the truth--because there are some who haven't considered the issue, or have formed opinions without considering something important, or who grow to think that their initial ideas about the matter may, in fact, be wrong.
I've told the story before, but that's exactly what happened to me on the torture issue. I didn't really think torture was right, per se, but I was unaware of the Church's teaching on the matter; even when I began to discover it, I found myself, sadly, like other Catholics, trying to parse the matter, discuss whether coercive interrogation really equaled torture, entertain ideas about whether certain grave situations might excuse investigators for crossing the line, and surrounding myself with a fog of moral uncertainty.
No one dispelled that as efficiently and clearly as Catholic blogger Mark Shea, who isn't exactly Miss Manners when it comes to his strong, forceful, condemnations of torture--and of Catholics who rationalize themselves into accepting it. The growing conviction that he was right, and I wrong, on the matter was due at least in part to his fervent and passionate insistence on the moral truth of the torture debate, and my own weak and vacillating defense of it; truth doesn't lurk in shadows, but stands clear and unafraid in the light of day.
We may never reach a moral consensus about abortion in this nation. But blaming pro-life Americans and the passion with which we defend the humanity and dignity of the unborn human life in the womb for George Tiller's death comes uncomfortably close to insisting that we must become a morally blind society, in which no one is allowed to speak out strongly in defense of moral truths.
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That is to say, if pro-lifers were uniquely violent in response to rhetoric, there would be a whole lot MORE than five casualties, given the number of pro-lifers and the high volume of strong rhetoric in the debate. That's not a claim that the five don't matter, but that if Schaeffer's argument held water, things would be much, much be worse than they are.
Max, does your equal concern about violence against property extend to the many acts of vandalism and bombing of abortion clinics? All I hear from the pro-birth defenders is that "only 5 deaths" does not a massacre make.
Sig - misunderstood your question - I know of no pro life organization which has condemned Terry's tactics or the Nuremburg Files. I think it is more than time to do so. The Karen Black info is appalling.
I think Frank Schaeffer needs to be listened too. His interview with Rachel Maddow was very impactful.
Mr. Schaeffer is on a long, soul searching journey. I wish him well on this road he travels. Sadly, he turns and throws rocks, even at his departed father.
Perhaps Mr. Schaeffer's new found position on abortion is wrong, quite wrong, but the liable of people who disagree with him, including himself in past years and his father too, seems troubling.
I hope Mr. Schaeffer works out his beliefs and ideas. I hope he reaches achieves some measure of peace with his father.
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