Robert George on the Murder of George Tiller

I think this is exactly right:

Whoever murdered George Tiller has done a gravely wicked thing.  The evil of this action is in no way diminished by the blood George Tiller had on his own hands.  No private individual had the right to execute judgment against him.  We are a nation of laws.  Lawless violence breeds only more lawless violence.  Rightly or wrongly, George Tiller was acquitted by a jury of his peers.  "Vengeance is mine, says the Lord." For the sake of justice and right, the perpetrator of this evil deed must be prosecuted, convicted, and punished.  By word and deed, let us teach that violence against abortionists is not the answer to the violence of abortion.  Every human life is precious.  George Tiller's life was precious.  We do not teach the wrongness of taking human life by wrongfully taking a human life.  Let our "weapons" in the fight to defend the lives of abortion's tiny victims, be chaste weapons of the spirit.

Comments

[Beth from TN]

Well said.

[Ambivalent]

And sometimes God uses evildoers to execute judgement.

[Nick]

No doubt this man was wrong to take actions into his own hands, and he should be prosecuted, convicted, and punished. But let us not lose sight in the name of political correctness to the good that has been wrought today. Sometimes lawless violence breeds less lawful violence. Let us not forget that this man was murdering our innocent children, regardless of the preciousness of his own life. If Tiller instead was acquitted by a jury of his peers for rounding up our little elementary age children into his van and murdering them, what would be our response to a vigilante who decided to take matters into his own hands to protect the children in his neighborhood? It seems that we may still be valuing these precious human lives less than we should be. Dr. George is absolutely correct that vengeance is the Lord's, but let us not fail to notice that he has brought vengeance and judgment this day. And part of me can't help but rejoice. May God be with Mr. Tiller's family in the near future and may he teach them the preciousness of human life that their departed loved one failed to learn.

[john]

He was, perhaps, lucky not to have his skull punctured with a scissors, his brain sucked out, then his head crushed to ease his passage into a dumpster. I will pray that God have mercy on him, but he was certainly not an innocent victim.

[David Gray.]

Break their teeth, O God, in their mouth: break out the great teeth of the young lions, O LORD. Let them melt away as waters which run continually: when he bendeth his bow to shoot his arrows, let them be as cut in pieces. As a snail which melteth, let every one of them pass away: like the untimely birth of a woman, that they may not see the sun. Before your pots can feel the thorns, he shall take them away as with a whirlwind, both living, and in his wrath. The righteous shall rejoice when he seeth the vengeance: he shall wash his feet in the blood of the wicked. So that a man shall say, Verily there is a reward for the righteous: verily he is a God that judgeth in the earth.

[Karen]

Feminists do not kill pro life advocates, yet the prolife movement has produced Paul Hill, John Salvi, Eric Robert Rudolph, and the guy who did this, in a church no less. The fact that the first four comments on this post praise a man who committed a murder in a church should give your leaders pause. Why does your movement attract killers?

Also, please don't bring up Bill Ayers -- who never killed anyone -- eco terrorists, the Black Panthers, or the 1980 Brinks robbery. All of those causes are vaguely leftist, but otherwise unrelated. You have four killers on your side on this single issue. Why is that?

[Tony Esolen]

Woe to him by whom the offense cometh. It is dreadful to consider that this dismemberer of children now, for all we can reasonably suppose, finds himself among the ruins of dismembered humanity called hell. As for the killer, we should not forget that he has sinned before God and man and has violated the peace of the whole people. As had his victim -- but we are losing the sense that such crimes as murder are offenses against every human being individually and as a community. Chalk that up to the relativistic or machiavellian premises upon which the power plays of abortion, euthanasia, and embryonic cannibalism are based. Barbarians, that's what we are. I hope the murderer receives his due.

[Hunter Baker]

Oh my goodness. I hadn't known it was Tiller.

[Jim Kushiner]

http://abortionviolence.com/

In case it is of interest or use in refuting the portrayal of pro-lifers as violent.

[Benighted Savage]

Karen writes:
"Feminists do not kill pro life advocates..."

No, but many aid and abet, in word or in deed, the abortionists who murder many a small soul and the mothers who deliver them up to be murdered.

"Why does your movement attract killers?"

Compared to what other movements? The pro Roe v Wade abortion seekers and abortion providers have the deaths of 40+ million small souls on their conscience. One should instead ask, how is it that the anti-abortion movement -- whose members are very passionate -- has attracted so few killers to its ranks? The 19th century Abolitionist movement and the 19th-20th century labor movement were a LOT more violent.

The answer: for better or worse, it is because they take their pro-life beliefs seriously.

[R.C.]

In response to Karen...

You say, "feminists" (which is the wrong term; what you're looking for is "supporters of legal abortion") do not kill pro-life advocates.

You're quite right!

But you seem to conclude from that fact that supporters of legal abortion somehow hold the moral high ground as a result.

Which is utter nonsense.

Pro-life advocates are, to date, responsible for perhaps ten or twelve murders of abortionists. Those are not the kinds of numbers which inspire average citizens without military or law-enforcement experience to take up arms.

Moreover, the government rightly prosecutes those who commit those murders. So supporters of legal abortion are not left in the lurch by their government; the police power of the state does not neglect its responsibilities; justice is done on behalf of the fallen.

The converse is not true, for the pro-lifers. For them, the number of the slain is not a dozen or so: It is **fifty million**. The slain are not grown men with blood on their hands who had a fighting chance to defend themselves; they are **defenseless babies**. And the law does not seek justice on behalf of the slain; on the contrary, it looks the other way and forces peaceful protesters to maintain a significant distance from clinics and the like. Those who plead for justice on behalf of the unborn are utterly ignored.

Which shows why your comparison is utterly useless.

Consider, if you will, the following hypothetical scenario:

It is 1839, and a group of black former slaves working in the Underground Railroad are attempting to free a large number of blacks still in slavery in Virginia. Some of the slaves owned by eleven particular slave-owners are smuggled to freedom, but in the process, those eleven slave-owners are killed. These killings are not accidental, but were in fact anticipated as part of the escape plan for the slaves. Some time later, these Underground Railroad folk are captured by a group of white advocates of legal slavery, who turn them over to the local constabulary. The Underground Railroad folk are indicted for the deaths of the eleven slave-owners, tried, convicted, and executed by the Commonwealth of Virginia.

Karen, would you say, after hearing this, "Well the advocates of legal slavery were obviously morally superior to the Underground Railroad folks. After all, the slavers didn't go outside the law; they didn't stealthily assassinate the Underground Railroad folks or anything. No, they let the law handle it. So the slavers have the moral high ground."

Is that what you'd say?

If your response is, "Of course not," then you must ask yourself why you made a nearly identical statement, regarding the (admittedly wrongful) killing of abortionists by pro-lifers?

I do not think pro-lifers should kill abortionists. It amounts to a form of going to war...and for those who believe the Just War Doctrine, it would be an unjust war: Not because fifty million innocents aren't a harm dramatic enough to go to war over (obviously!), but for other reasons; e.g., there was no hope of significant reduction of those harms by picking off one or two abortionists, nor was the decision made by a valid authority...and the presence of a validly-empowered government (which, one hopes, may one day end legal abortion *without* violence) just clenches the issue. ("When in the course of human events," this ain't.)

Granted, legal abortion is an equally evil civil-rights nightmare to legal slavery, and we admittedly did have a war about *that* in the United States. So the analogy is not perfect.

But it's a lot more sensible than your original comparison.

[Benighted Savage]

Also, Karen, I think it rude and unfair to associate pro-life advocates like Robert George, or those who post on this blog, with the likes of those who affiliate themselves with fringe groups like the Army of God.

[Bill R]

"The evil of this action is in no way diminished by the blood George Tiller had on his own hands. No private individual had the right to execute judgment against him."

Perhaps. But then why do we regard those who sought to assassinate Adolph Hitler as heroes?

[breath]

Jesus stated "He without sin among you let him cast the first stone at her." Some religious still stone raped women & own women. Who should own them as a slave? Exodus describes no penalty for women who choose to terminate pregnancy, nor does any Bible verse.

Medically, a fetus becomes a baby at its first breath. Then, siblings recognize it & it's named, christened, given citizenship, & celebrates zero. Unless you're a surrogate, the only way to give rights to unborn is to take away women's.

[Truth Unites... and Divides]

Breath: "[T]he only way to give rights to unborn is to take away women's."

Such a comment is surely bound to raise the moral and intellectual level of discourse on this topic.

[Daniel D. De Haan]

Breath,

Aside from your blurry eyed categories of hominization, would you care to present what "rights" you might be asserting, before everyone assumes that your begging the question?

[David Gray.]

>The fact that the first four comments on this post praise a man who committed a murder in a church

You don't appear to have understood what you read.

[Christopher Hathaway]

Tiller was murdered, deliberately killed outside the law. that much is clear. So there can be no question of our approving of this act. It was an evil deed which we must condemn.

However, not all muders are equal. God himself makes distinctions. He particularly hates murder done in secret. I think abortion fits very closely in this category. I think it is perfectly natural, and probably right, that we also view murders differently depending on the nature of the victim.
The murder of a woman strikes all but the misogynists as more awful than the murder of a man. The murder of a child is more horrid still. And the muder of an innocent is always felt more deeply than the murder of a wicked man.

I do not know whether any future babies will have been spared by the death of this man. I do know that the blood of many have been avenged. But, alas, our society has not benefitted by the execution of this vengeance. Rather, we have been further diminished, both by the corruption of justice which allowed him to get away with his evil and by the corruption of justice in which an individual assumed the power which belongs to God alone and which is given only to the worldly authorities.

Still, God can still bring good out of the evil actions of men. Let us pray that he does.

[Rob G]

"Feminists do not kill pro life advocates, yet the prolife movement has produced Paul Hill, John Salvi, Eric Robert Rudolph, and the guy who did this."

Actually, I'd say that the fact that it's produced only four borders on the miraculous, considering the death toll on the other side and the emotions involved. Remember that even the noble cause of abolition produced an insane terrorist named John Brown.

That feminism hasn't produced any murderers is highly questionable. It may not have killed any pro-life activists, but what about all the women who've killed or abandoned their babies after birth? I lay that directly at the feet of feminism and the sexual revolution, because after all, if it's okay to kill them before they're born, how bad can it be to kill them afterwards?

This tally excludes, of course, the 40 million unborn that have been killed.

[David Layman]

Let's try this distinction (I'm open to discussion):

The ACT was just, but the ACTOR was unjust. Dr. Tiller, a killer of innocents, was killed. Under the moral law, he received his just deserts. But the murderer (yes, murderer) of Dr. Tiller lacked the authority--he was UNAUTHORIZED-- to carry out the act. Therefore he must be punished in accordance with the law.

Genesis 9:6--“Whoever sheds the blood of man, by man shall his blood be shed; for in the image of God has God made man."

Numbers 35:33--“‘Do not pollute the land where you are. Bloodshed pollutes the land, and atonement cannot be made for the land on which blood has been shed, except by the blood of the one who shed it.

I am less inclined to agree with Dr. George when he says: "George Tiller's life was precious." Dr. Tiller had vitiated the preciousness of his own life a long time ago, when he became a serial killer of unborn children. His own actions demonstrated he did not regard life as precious. But if life is not precious, then Tiller's life was not precious. He forfeited his own "preciousness" and intrinsic dignity by his own actions. TILLER then, if he could have protested to the murderer before his death, could not have JUSTLY protested: "this [my imminent death] is not FAIR." It most certainly was "fair." If Tiller could go around killing people (even if unborn) at whim, then his own life could be forfeited at ANOTHER'S whim.

(If one doesn't accept traditional morality, then read Kant.)

Again however; TILLER'S MURDERER WAS NOT AUTHORIZED TO "CALL" the forfeit.

In conclusion: we must distinguish between the justice of the act and the rightness (wrongness, in this case) of the actor.

[Beth from TN]

Tony and Mr. Hathaway have put it well. I especially like Mr. Hathaway's statement of the two injustices that have occurred here: the injustice that allowed Tiller to murder innocent babies, and the injustice of an individual playing God. I too hope that the murderer receives the appropriate justice of the state.

David Layman: God created George Tiller in his mother's womb; Jesus died for George Tiller: those facts alone make *his life* precious, despite the evil he chose to do with it. Men who have done great evil have repented. The state has the right to end that opportunity (to repent) under the law, but that gives the evil-doer time to repent before his death, which he knows is coming. If doing evil forfeited the preciousness of a man's life, none of our lives would be precious, all would be forfeit.

[smithra]

We can at least thank God that He and not any one nor any several of us will sort out these tragedies upon tragedies at the last day. For that, may Jesus Christ be praised. And Kyrie eleison, indeed!

[David Gray.]

>God created George Tiller in his mother's womb; Jesus died for George Tiller: those facts alone make *his life* precious

Precious in a sense but justly forfeit. It was the means, not the end, that was unjust. As we are not Bolsheviks it is a meaningful difference.

[David Gray.]

Arise, O Lord, in your anger; lift yourself up against the fury of my enemies; awake for me; you have appointed a judgment. Let the assembly of the peoples be gathered about you; over it return on high. The Lord judges the peoples; judge me, O Lord, according to my righteousness and according to the integrity that is in me. Oh, let the evil of the wicked come to an end, and may you establish the righteous—you who test the minds and hearts, O righteous God! My shield is with God, who saves the upright in heart. God is a righteous judge, and a God who feels indignation every day. If a man does not repent, God will whet his sword; he has bent and readied his bow; he has prepared for him his deadly weapons, making his arrows fiery shafts. Behold, the wicked man conceives evil
and is pregnant with mischief and gives birth to lies. He makes a pit, digging it out, and falls into the hole that he has made. His mischief returns upon his own head, and on his own skull his violence descends. I will give to the Lord the thanks due to his righteousness, and I will sing praise to the name of the Lord, the Most High.

[smithra]

Those who choose not to play by the rules (laws) of a state will be at least suspect and at most convicted and punished by that state. Those who choose not to play by the rules of the state are perhaps consciously submitting themselves and their deeds to the final Judge of the Kingdom of Heaven, and are fully prepared to sacrifice themselves to the effort to end an evil they see unfolding plainly before them. And so, we are left wondering about distinctions between those who would slay Hitler, and those who would slay a physician operating under the laws of the state. Does a state ever become "sufficiently evil" that returning evil for evil is not evil? I have some recollection of the Lord telling His followers not to return evil for evil to those who persecute them. But I am not competent to exegete the Greek on this. (Too bad scholars don't have the Aramaic.)

[Tony Esolen]

Feminists aren't responsible for deaths? You have got to be kidding.

Let's see. They are advocates for abortion on demand; and that lays many millions of deaths at their feet. In advocating for abortion on demand they have helped to corrupt a whole civilization, so that they are at least partly responsible for the general devaluing of supposedly "lebensunwerte Leben," to use the apt Hitlerian phrase, "life not worth living," or, more accurately, "life not worth being allowed to live."

And then: They are responsible for fueling a hatred of marriage, and for the so-called sexual rights of unmarried women, that has left women and children exceedingly vulnerable. In other words, they have for decades ignored the abundant evidence that the class of people least likely to suffer a violent crime are married women living with their husbands -- THAT doesn't fit their agenda. They prefer instead to slander the great majority of men and place women and children at risk. One might ask how many deaths are attributable to those men in prison who were born out of wedlock and who grew up in homes without their fathers.

And then: my sister the epidemiologist has long asserted that abortion places women at a significantly higher risk for developing breast cancer -- a twenty to one hundred percent higher risk, depending on which study you look at. And there is, of course, a perfectly good reason for this link. When a woman is pregnant, her body is filled with tissue-growing hormones. Suddenly and unnaturally you end the pregnancy, and then you find -- no surprise -- that the hormones do not automatically vanish, but do their work, unfortunately on organs that will not be adapting to give birth or to suckle a child. In miscarriages this doesn't happen, because a miscarriage is among other things the body's way of NOT preparing for the birth and the suckling. Now suppose the lower number is correct -- a mere twenty percent increase in risk. That wouldn't be much to worry about, if we were talking about a relatively uncommon cancer; but a twenty percent increase in the incidence of breast cancer means that thousands of women will be getting it each year who need not have, and they will be getting it at a younger age. But again, feminists have derided these studies -- abortion on demand is the sacrament that must be honored.

And then: not all women who procure abortions are happy about it; some of them find it really hard to ignore the fact that they have killed a child. The trauma afterwards, far from eliciting sympathy from self-appointed advocates for women, has instead elicited their derision and contempt. "Get over it!" they sneer. Some women will get over it by committing suicide. That is not what women do who bear their initially unwanted children to term.

And then: feminists happily put at increased risk of loss of life or limb every single man who fights in our military, or who polices our streets, or who protects our homes from fire and other disasters. Unless one believes that people with the strength of fourteen year old boys can do absolutely everything, in every situation, that grown men can do, and can do it absolutely as quickly and efficiently. That too is garbage.

No, I'm afraid that the whole feminist movement is over its head in blood. Add to it that it can go nowhere without the sexual revolution, to which it is absolutely committed.

[Bob]

" Exodus describes no penalty for women who choose to terminate pregnancy, nor does any Bible verse."

What on earth???

[Rob G]

"Exodus describes no penalty for women who choose to terminate pregnancy, nor does any Bible verse."

Even if this were true, I guess it doesn't matter that the entire Christian Church, E and W, from the earliest times has been univocal in its opposition to abortion and infanticide? As Sam Shoemaker once remarked, Christians over the centuries have disagreed on an awful lot of things, but abortion has never been one of them (until, of course, the contemporary era).

[Benighted Savage]

Bill R writes:
>>> But then why do we regard those who sought to assassinate Adolph Hitler as heroes? <<<

'cause old pagan ideas die hard? Cf. Seneca, esp. his "Hercules Furens," and folks like Milton who read and translated him. I remember Aquinas and Suarez (and many others) had something to say about the question of tyrannicide, too.

However, I don't think that Tiller would fit the classical definition of a tyrant.

[Tony Esolen]

Tyrannicide is theoretically licit on the grounds that it restores the state to its rightful rulers, whoever they may be -- it is a form of self-defense, or a form of war against an aggressor. Aquinas and Suarez do have a lot to say about it; it's Bossuet, late in the ballgame, at the court of Louis XIV, who suggests that one can only pray to God to remove the tyrant.

Oh, Exodus doesn't proscribe cannibalism, either. SOME things even the barbaric Israelites might have figured out on their own. But if you are in doubt about the attitude toward abortion in the apostolic age, check out the Didache.

One might suppose that Christians of all people would get it through their heads that the Incarnation occurred nine months before Christmas -- and then draw appopriate conclusions from that, if from nothing else.

[Kamilla]

Karen,

I wonder how manhy killers "Jane" spawned. Do you have any idea? I don't know the exact number, but I can assure you it's a bit higher than 4. And every death those women caused was just as unlawful, just as horriffic and just as final as the taking of Tiller's life yesterday.

Kamilla

[David Layman]

1. Dr. Tiller may not fit the role of tyrant. But he was the killer of my neighbor(s). Query: what is my duty to my neighbor? If someone is attempting to kill my neighbor, can I licitly use potentially lethal force to stop the attempt?

2. It is true that I have a supra-moral obligation to accept persecution without violent response. But the neighbor (here, the unborn child) is not being persecuted. He is simply being killed. Go back to the Query in 1.

[Dale]

To my friends and brothers and sisters in Christ who along with me both revile evil and pray for those who would be our enemies: ora et labora.

[Rob G]

Tiller was an usher at the Lutheran church he attended, and his wife sang in the choir. Luther and Melancthon would be appalled.

[Michael]

>>Tiller was an usher at the Lutheran church he attended, and his wife sang in the choir. Luther and Melanchthon would be appalled.<<

To be fair, let's not confuse the name "Evangelical Lutheran Church in America" with actually being Lutheran.

[LinkTheValiant]

>>>If someone is attempting to kill my neighbor, can I licitly use potentially lethal force to stop the attempt?<<<

Certainly, by all means, assuming he intends to commit his crime right then and there. Killing someone who plans to kill your neighbour three days from now would be wrong, regardless of whether or not the state would rise to defend your neighbour afterward.

(And no, this should not be seen as a call to murder abortionists in their own killing rooms.)

[Truth Unites... and Divides]

Michael: "To be fair, let's not confuse the name "Evangelical Lutheran Church in America" with actually being Lutheran."

Aren't there actual Lutherans in the Evangelical Lutheran Church in America?

[Francesca]

>>Medically, a fetus becomes a baby at its first breath. <<

Certainly doctors and theologians do not all agree as to when a fetus becomes a real baby. If I truly believed (which I don't) that a 10-week-old fetus was fully equivalent to a 6-month-old child, I would be in a panic. I would be giving up an enormous amount to help nurse and support pregnant women considering abortions, and I would open my home to them and offer to pay them to let me adopt their babies. I suspect other true believers would do the same. Yet I don't know how many "prolifers" go to these lengths. I'm sure there are some, but those I know mostly seem to oppose free health care for these women and public subsidies for poor women who are unable to take maternity leave or pay for child care. In addition, many of them are quite enthusiastic about the death penalty and the glories of war (particularly if they're cheering from the sidelines, rather than getting shot.) And now we again have a "prolifer" murdering a doctor and doing a wonderful job of tarnishing the reputation of prolifers as nutjobs. It would certainly help the "prolife" movement's at least partially deserved image problem if it could honestly try to help more. One sometimes wonders, given the apparent lethargy about doing anything constructive juxtaposed alongside an enthusiasm for demonizing anyone with different views, if they genuinely believe a child is being murdered or whether they're upset that they're unable to control someone else's sexual behavior. Perhaps the movement would gain more traction if it focused more on truly live-giving policies -- health care, peace, maternity and paternity leave, child care for children of single mothers, more comprehensive sex education, better protection for sexually abused girls, and other policies that would lead to a genuine reduction in abortion in particular and death in general.

[Tony Esolen]

Francesca, perhaps YOU would have more credibility if you bothered to check out just what pro-life activists ARE DOING to help unwed mothers. My family doctor, for example -- prays at the abortion clinic once a week, and gives hour after hour of medical care to the poor, free of charge (and that's just the start of what he does). Quit the personal smears already. How is one to respond? If I say, "I just contributed a big check last month to a home for unwed mothers," it's unseemly boasting. If I say nothing, it appears I have nothing to say.

ONCE AGAIN: what we find heinous is not only the fact of abortion but the principle that anybody has the right to dispense with another innocent human life. Some of us don't believe that nationalized health care, for instance, really DOES deliver people a greater chance for life and health -- we disagree about the prudential FACT. As for those around here who love the death penalty, where are they? Who are you talking about? Some of us resist having abortion lumped together with the death penalty, just as we'd resent having euthanasia lumped together with it. See the principle above.

Jesus came to this earth at the instant of his conception. That is when the Incarnation began. Nobody has the right to kill innocent human life. If the developing baby were a dog, we wouldn't have an argument. If it were canine, same thing.

[Kamilla]

Tony,

You're exactly right about Francesca's ignorance - I don't think she has a clue what folks really are doing. I have a dear friend who spends her only break time from work at the PP clinic in her town on the day they do abortions. I've been there with her and seen her amazing courage and gentle fearlessness - everyone who is willing to take it gets a brochure she designed herself with her home phone number on it, and the one of another family from her church. Neither one of them can really afford it, but they offer their homes to any mother willing to not go ahead with an abortion. I know their church has at least one child who escaped abortion among them because a family was willing to care for the mother during her pregnancy and adopt the child afterwards.

My friends who do this work are regularly reviled, shouted down and threatened. Yet they carry on because they know every life matters.

Kamilla

[Kamilla]

I daresay Francesca has never been called upon to carry the lifeless body of a 12-week old fetus from the emergency room to pathology - the result of a miscarriage after an auto-accident.

No one, and I mean NO ONE, without a black hole where their heart should be, could see that and not *know* it was a baby.

Kamilla

[David Gray.]

>In addition, many of them are quite enthusiastic about the death penalty and the glories of war (particularly if they're cheering from the sidelines, rather than getting shot.)

Another ignorant cheap shot.

You'd think the intellectual bankruptcy of comparing murdering the innocent with executing the guilty would eventually dawn on these people.

And "Francesca" doesn't appear to know the slightest thing about war. The chickenhawk cheap shot is another confession of mental sterility and with many years in uniform I think I'm in an adequate position to point that out.

[Bill R]

"Yet I don't know how many "prolifers" go to these lengths." -- Francesca

It's easy enough to find out. My wife, and others at our church, work hard at a charity they established, "Community's Child," formed in recognition of the fact that unwed mothers and their children belong to the community, and therefore the community must aid them in their times of distress. Community's Child built a transition home for unwed mothers, with a live-in "den mother," help with the pregnancy and he newborn child, and assistance in finding work and a permanent home in the community.

Sorry to shatter your stereotypes, Francesca. If you would but look, you'd see that many pro-lifers (no quotation marks necessary) indeed walk the walk.

[Francesca]

>>Some of us don't believe that nationalized health care, for instance, really DOES deliver people a greater chance for life and health -- we disagree about the prudential FACT. <<

And some of us don't believe that an early stage fetus is fully human and ensouled. One can respect the conviction of "prolifers" that abortion is murder without allowing them to impose that view on others who don't share it. Obama is no doubt correct when he asserts that the views of the two camps are basically irreconcilable.

As I made clear above, I'm sure there are pro-life activists who make genuine contributions. As I also made clear, most of those I know do very little, if anything, that is practical. One of my friends most keenly in favor of criminalizing abortion has had two (what would her mother have said?) -- both after she had vociferously articulated her anti-abortion stance and even picketed a Planned Parenthood Clinic. Her case is somehow different, apparently.

[The Rev. Steven P. Tibbetts, STS]

To be fair, we should remember that there are Feminists for Life. Most of us would have fundamental differences with them on many things, but they are brave defenders of pre-born children.

And, yes, there continue to be solidly confessional Lutherans in the ELCA. One is a Touchstone contributing editor. Some of us, alas not yet enough, are associated with Lutheran CORE.

[Benighted Savage]

David Layman writes:
"Dr. Tiller may not fit the role of tyrant. But he was the killer of my neighbor(s). Query: what is my duty to my neighbor? If someone is attempting to kill my neighbor, can I licitly use potentially lethal force to stop the attempt?"

I'd say the flaw in your line of reasoning is that you ignore the fact that, alas, Tiller is your neighbor, too. I'd argue that ones duty to a neighbor who is as lost in sin as an abortionist is, to the extent that one can, to reprove him for his murders and call him to abandon his reprobate path. I DON'T see how ones duty, or ones love, for a neighbor can justifiably call one to murder.

[Benighted Savage]

Francesca writes:
"One can respect the conviction of 'prolifers' that abortion is murder without allowing them to impose that view on others who don't share it."

Francesca, it saddens me to see that you would consider a law that would forbid a kind of murder to be an imposition. Sigh.

"Obama is no doubt correct when he asserts that the views of the two camps are basically irreconcilable."

Obama fiddles while Rome burns.

[TimC]

Francesca, you can count me with you as one of those who is shocked...SHOCKED...to find out that there exist people who may not consistently live out their confessed convictions.

You may also like to know that there are people who strongly oppose the war in Iraq who do nothing but vote for anti-war candidates and march in protest parades. You would think that if they really believed that the war was unjust and that innocent lives were being killed they would spend every waking hour working against the war, perhaps even going to Iraq to disrupt the coalition forces. But since I don't know anybody who has done that, I guess I can cross off the whole "anti-war" movement as just a group of people who like to meddle in other people's business. And now even a confessed "anti-torture" president has found himself unable to fulfill all of his campaign promises about the war.

But, yes, I'm looking forward to the day when you and I will be rid of all those nasty hypocrites! I'm thinking of having a party at my house if I can find anyone to invite.

[Rob G]

"If I truly believed (which I don't) that a 10-week-old fetus was fully equivalent to a 6-month-old child, I would be in a panic"

Sorry, but that old dog won't hunt, as several folks above have said. In addition, let's change the subject of your statement to one beloved of liberals, slavery. It now reads:

"If I truly believed (which I don't) that a Negro is fully equivalent to a white person, I would be in a panic"

Leaving aside how horrid that sounds on the face of it, would you fault all persons who did believe it for not being 'in a panic' as you put it? Was every single abolitionist involved with the underground railroad, for instance? Was the man writing articles and pamphlets guilty because he didn't go to the lengths of John Brown? Of course not.

You are (willfully) ignorant of the measures that many pro-lifers take. My own sister is currently in the process of getting a maternity/transitional home started for women that choose to keep their babies instead of killing them. I know one family personally who has had over 75 unwed mothers stay with them while they found housing and/or jobs. My own church does a biannual collection of baby-related goods -- diapers, formula, wipes, baby clothes, etc. -- in which hundreds of dollars' worth of items are collected for the local pregnancy center. You, my dear, need to ejukate yore self.

[Rob G]

"Perhaps the movement would gain more traction if it focused more on truly live-giving policies"

Yes, that's it! After all, government policies have worked wonders with poverty reduction, homelessness, education, etc. Oh wait...

"And some of us don't believe that an early stage fetus is fully human and ensouled"

Hmmm...then when did Jesus in the Virgin's womb become the Son of God? Answer this without espousing one of the major Christological heresies and I'll buy you a drink. Hell, I'm generous. Make it two.

By the way, you never responded to our calling you out on your horrendous comment from another thread that you'd rather have a hundred thousand first term abortions than one 6-month old baby killed in a war. I said that that's the kind of moral calculus that leads to gulags and death camps. It's what Richard Weaver rightly called "moral idiocy." Care to answer?

[Sally Thomas]

If we can't agree on the moment when ensoulment occurs, then it seems to me that the most morally sane and safe position is to assume that it occurs at the moment of conception. You can't go wrong with assuming, from the moment you know for sure that you carry a child inside you, that what you carry is in fact a human child -- unless you happen to want, actively, an excuse for killing what you're crossing your fingers and hoping to die isn't a human child.

Otherwise you're arbitrarily assigning a starting point, the very fact of whose arbitrariness means that it can be moved around at will: witness Peter Singer's arguments towards infanticide.

My five-year-old isn't as fully realized as her fifteen-year-old sister. Is she therefore less human? For that matter, is she substantially a different person from the five-week-old fetus she once was? She couldn't do Latin then, either. She couldn't wash the dishes. She didn't invent stories about seeing a hummingbird at the feeder and getting to pet it because it was a nice hummingbird. Her entertainment value and her contributions to the household and society were considerably less at that fetal stage than they are now; they are less now (well, maybe not the entertainment value) than they will be when she's fifteen or twenty-five.

If you start saying that a thing with human DNA and characteristics can exist without actually being human, then you set up this kind of comparative scale whereby you judge humanness by these performance standards. And we already know which way that scale tips.

[Francesca]

>>You, my dear, need to ejukate yore self.<<

This is somewhat ad hominem, but not to the extent that I would completely dismiss the author as an angry nutcase. I'm not upset by it. I would merely point out that we all believe we're right. The "other side" is not necessarily "ignorant" or "stupid" or "evil," but may have different beliefs and experiences. That goes for all sides. Opinions are cemented rather than changed by insults because the insulter discredits him/her-self in the eyes of the insultee. Given that we all think we're right, we're also all inclined to see insults where none are intended.

That said, to answer your question about something I brought up earlier (viz. the hypothetical question of whether one would, when confronted with the dilemma, save either a 6-month-old baby or a hundred thousand first-term fetuses from a fire if one could only save one or the other,) it was probably because I hadn't read your post asking it. My answer is already provided in this thread: I think the 6-month old is fully human, the fetuses are not. You may disagree, but that's how I see it. That is also why the slavery analogy doesn't work for me.

As I said earlier, Obama is right in that views on this topic are basically irreconcilable. It's probably pointless to even discuss the rights and wrongs of the matter. We've all considered them and made up our minds. However, given that the minority view (viz. that abortion should be criminalized) is not going to be imposed on the majority any time soon, could we not all agree to work toward policies that would reduce the numbers of abortions? Of all nations, the Netherlands usually comes out with the lowest annual abortion rate. Perhaps we should be looking at some of the ways that is achieved.

[Truth Unites... and Divides]

Francesca: "The "other side" is not necessarily "ignorant" or "stupid" or "evil," but may have different beliefs and experiences."

"Not necessarily"... true, not necessarily.

However, it still remains the possibility, even perhaps a likelihood, that the other side is "ignorant" or "stupid" or "evil," even with different beliefs and experiences.

Here's a different belief that's literally breath-taking: "I think the 6-month old is fully human, the fetuses are not."

[Mike K.]

I've thought a lot about this and I find it very hard to reconcile the fact that I strongly believe the murder of Tiller was an evil act with the fact that if he were pointing a rifle at a child I would not hesitate to kill him.

I've got two moral principles in direct opposition to each other, as I think most of us do who've given any thought to what happened Sunday.

I can't help but conclude that this unresolvable ambivalence is yet more evidence that the laws regarding abortion are unjust and need to be changed.

[Francesca]

>>Here's a different belief that's literally breath-taking: "I think the 6-month old is fully human, the fetuses are not."<<

TUAD, I respect your view, even if I don't share it. I think I fall into the majority of Americans when I say I'm not comfortable with abortion, but don't want to see it criminalized.

[TimC]

Francesca,

Quick question: Why should we work to reduce the number of abortions? Is it to pacify the politically active pro-lifers? Is there something bad about abortion?

[TimC]

Also, Francesca: (You raise more questions than you answer, it seems. :-)

>I think the 6-month old is fully human, the fetuses are not. You may disagree, but that's how I see it. That is also why the slavery analogy doesn't work for me.<

But that is precisely why the slavery analogy "works." In both cases, a class of human beings is deprived of full personhood. Whites were fully human; negroes were not. You may disagree with the slaveholders, but that's how they saw it.

And again: if a 6-month-old fetus is not fully human (let's use 50% to make the math easy), what then is the other half? Logically, something cannot simply be "half" by itself. It is either half one thing and half another, or it is nothing, or it is fully one thing. If a fetus is half-human, what then is the other half?

[Ethan C.]

And how, exactly, would you justify according full personhood to six-month old infant? What makes the infant human? What does it have that a fetus does not? Air in its lungs?

And as TIMC said, if you're correct about the non-humanity of the unborn, why should we be uncomfortable with abortion? We might as well be uncomfortable with appendectomies.

[Rob G]

**But that is precisely why the slavery analogy "works." In both cases, a class of human beings is deprived of full personhood. Whites were fully human; negroes were not. You may disagree with the slaveholders, but that's how they saw it.**

Exactly. Consider those slaveholders who, while thinking their slaves lesser specimens of humanity then they were, still managed to treat them with respect, educate them, keep their families together, provide for them, etc. (Thomas 'Stonewall' Jackson is a perfect example). That type of slaveholder would, I'm sure, not gain Francesca's praise, yet she somehow deems it acceptable actually to take the lives of the unborn? Is cognitive dissonance at play here, or what? In what sense is it "better" to kill an unborn child than to own another human being and treat him humanely and fairly? I'm not defending slavery at all here, just trying to understand the moral calculus.

[mcmoderator]

Comments deleted -- off topic. Questions about the moderating of MC should be e-mailed to the editor, not posted on threads.