Ding-Dong! and All That

You're a vicious bastard, Rotelli.
I'm glad you're dead.
-- The Joker, Tim Burton’s “Batman”

Pro-abortionists will try to further silence the pro-life movement with hysterical charges of hypocrisy and moral responsibility for George Tiller’s murder. Bill O'Reilly and Ann Coulter are being blamed. One Kansas City pro-abortion columnist is already writing that “the same bullet that killed George Tiller also shattered the moral underpinnings of the movement that inspired its firing.” (“Hendricks: Tiller's killers were many”). The killer's accomplices include "every one who has ever called Tiller's late term abortion clinic a murder mill."

Not quite. The movement that inspired firing that bullet wasn't led by Coulter or O'Reilly or John Paul II: it was Tiller's assembly-line infanticide. And I hope the prominent pro-lifers who are going to be grilled about this on the talk shows this week don’t come out all apologies and tears for Tiller.

There may be an inclination in these spokespersons, as they watch the media sharpening long knives for their necks, to panic and try to placate the pro-abortion media with hasty protests that we regret the loss of Tiller’s life as much as that of any innocent unborn--as if that's even true, or as if the media will care, anyway.

I've even heard pro-lifers saying they thought Tiller, though misguided, believed he was helping women. Oh, brother.

I think that approach would be the worst thing. It would also be an example of moral nonsense. We don't regret Tiller's death that much. Why would we? There’s a very big distinction between regretting that a murder happened, and regretting that the victim is dead. Especially a victim who needed killing as bad as George Tiller did.

How many child molesters get sent to prison, to a fate of being brutalized and even murdered by their fellow inmates, who share a special hatred for child molesters, and we shrug our shoulders and cluck our tongues, because, on some level, it is only fitting. It is only justice.

It’s a widely recognized divine principle that those who live by violence face a powerful tendency to die through violence themselves. That isn’t a prescription for murder. It's not an excuse for vigilantism. It's simply a statement of a long-recognized law of existence, like gravity. When a person of faith learns that one such violence-maker has met a violent end, there’s no commandment that requires him to mourn the loss of the shedder of blood.

Tiller murdered (there is no other proper word for what he did) as many as 60,000 unborn children. All indications were that he intended to keep adding, industriously, to that total, even as the last of all conceiveable obstacles against him were being cleared away. It is morally ludicrous to style his death as either a tragedy, or an injustice. Tragedy requires the death of a virtuous hero. Injustice requires a wrongful depriving of another's rights. Tiller was born with a right to live, but forfeited that right by squandering his life by living to kill.

No pro-lifer needs to regret Tiller’s death. George Tiller chose--chose--to live his life as one of the few abortionists in the country debased enough to practice this kind of infanticide. He chose to live his life so that every day he worked at his profession he was the instrument of tragic death and bloodguilt for someone else. It's moral nonsense to call his death tragic when the tragedy was in the way he chose to live. There are lives lived so savagely, with so much willfull harm that their endings are a cause for rejoicing -- or at least relief -- among people of good will. Hitler, Stalin, Arafat, Uday and Qsay, al-Zarqawi, every one of these guys had to die so that the deaths of others could finally be halted. (It didn't last long after Arafat's death: but I still remember that springtime feeling when that fiend finally left Earth).

The fact that Tiller today will be unavailable, (because dead), at his Wichita death house to perform partial-birth abortions will have the direct and immediate benefit of saving the lives of at least some of the infants slated to die at his hands. I am at a loss to understand how that qualifies as a human tragedy.

It means that for a lot of a mothers eight or nine months pregnant with a sudden whim that their lives might be better without that kid, those kids' chances of being alive and kicking in 3 months just improved dramatically.

Does that mean the ends justify the means? No. Does that mean murder is the answer to abortion? Of course not. Abortion is murder. That's the point.

I never called for Tiller's murder, nor advocated for it. All I'm saying is that now that someone's murdered him, I'm glad he's dead. Think of it as looking on the bright side. And I'm not going to stop calling myself pro-life because I feel that way.

Suppose a house fell on him? How many of the pro-life advocates lamenting his death today as a tragedy would feel justified in saying there was justice in his demise, and the world was a better place without him? Is it hard on his wife, children, grandchildren? Yes, and that's regrettable, but not a cosmic tragedy. Most condemned criminals leave loved ones behind. Do you really think his wife didn't know where her lifestyle was coming from? Do you really think Reformation Lutheran Church didn't know how Tiller earned the offerings he contributed?

No one is going to make me feel responsible for Tiller’s murder just because I’m opposed to abortion. More to the moral-equivalence point, I'm not the one who wants murder legalized to justify my private relief that a person I didn’t want around is now dead.

What I did want was Tiller and his serial murders stopped. I first wanted him stopped by seeing Roe v Wade overturned, and sanity restored to American civil rights. That didn't happen. Then I hoped for a national ban on the infanticide that Tiller practiced. But that ban wasn’t enough in Kansas, where it was never enforced by an apparently lawless government. Then I wanted him stopped by the Kansas prosecutor who launched a criminal investigation against him. But that was thwarted by Democrat politicians in Kansas, most prominently Obama’s new HHS director, Kathleen Sebelius.

Recently Tiller was acquitted on 19 misdemeanor charges for illegally using another doctor, one on his payroll, to provide “independent” second opinions that his late-term abortions were necessary. The trial was notable for a lack of rigor by the pro-choice attorney general, and observers predicted it was headed for acquittal. Tiller was acquitted.

Yes, Tiller’s murderer was wrong. Vigilantism is wrong. Still, being pro-life, in my view, doesn't mean that every death is equally tragic, equally wrong, or even that every murder is equally tragic, or even tragic. Even our basic laws have always recognized murder happens in degrees, even that, once in a while, some homicide victims "needed killing." Being pro-life, to me, means that each person is conceived, created, with equal rights to live and be born. No one compromised Tiller's right to be born. He was born and grew up and became a doctor, and turned his God-given life to depriving others, 60,000 others, of the same right.

The fact that I haven’t an ounce of regret that Tiller is dead, whether by fire, famine, disease, or homicide -- and that consequently the babies scheduled this coming week to have their skulls pierced and their brains sucked out by Tiller in his charnel house now have a fighting chance to be born -- doesn’t make me an accomplice to his murder.

I wanted him stopped, and something, somewhere, stopped him. I’m supposed to be sorry about that? Was God behind it? I don't know. I have serious doubts about how upset He is. I don't recall reading where the Apostles cried too hard over Judas' suicide. Was Satan behind it? Not a fucking chance. Old Scratch is crying tonight, too. As Jesus said, can Satan stand against Satan? A house divided against itself cannot stand.

The devil has been robbed of one of his best soldiers.

The Left will pretend that lack of regret by pro-lifers equals moral participation in Tiller's murder. That’s nonsense. The Left will pretend that the deliberate murder of one bloody, murdering professional baby-killer is the moral equivalent (no, they'll say it's worse), of the legalized abortion regime that has taken the lives of 50 million innocent unborn. They will posture that Tiller's murder now balances the scales for all those dead unborn, and that the pro-lifers have to shut up about abortion now. That’s nonsense, too.

Tiller is as responsible for how he died as the person who killed him is. Could Tiller really have believed that he could spend every day jabbing his weapons into helpless human beings with the intention of ending their lives, life after life, day after day, for decades, for money, and then go to church, and not have some inkling that one day, by means of some instrumentality, some spiritual reflex, some invisible justice, some karmic fruition, some anguish at the heart of creation wasn’t going to strike back?