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?

Eve Ensler's Polar Bear Monologues

The following article attacking Sarah Palin, written by Eve Ensler, appeared in The Huffington Post. WARNING, if it doesn't offend you, then my following remarks almost certainly will.

Drill, Drill, Drill

I am having Sarah Palin nightmares. I dreamt last night that she was a member of a club where they rode snowmobiles and wore the claws of drowned and starved polar bears around their necks. I have a particular thing for Polar Bears. Maybe it's their snowy whiteness or their bigness or the fact that they live in the arctic or that I have never seen one in person or touched one. Maybe it is the fact that they live so comfortably on ice. Whatever it is, I need the polar bears.

I don't like raging at women. I am a Feminist and have spent my life trying to build community, help empower women and stop violence against them. It is hard to write about Sarah Palin. This is why the Sarah Palin choice was all the more insidious and cynical. The people who made this choice count on the goodness and solidarity of Feminists.

But everything Sarah Palin believes in and practices is antithetical to Feminism which for me is part of one story -- connected to saving the earth, ending racism, empowering women, giving young girls options, opening our minds, deepening tolerance, and ending violence and war.

I believe that the McCain/Palin ticket is one of the most dangerous choices of my lifetime, and should this country chose those candidates the fall-out may be so great, the destruction so vast in so many areas that America may never recover. But what is equally disturbing is the impact that duo would have on the rest of the world. Unfortunately, this is not a joke. In my lifetime I have seen the clownish, the inept, the bizarre be elected to the presidency with regularity.

Sarah Palin does not believe in evolution. I take this as a metaphor. In her world and the world of Fundamentalists nothing changes or gets better or evolves. She does not believe in global warming. The melting of the arctic, the storms that are destroying our cities, the pollution and rise of cancers, are all part of God's plan. She is fighting to take the polar bears off the endangered species list. The earth, in Palin's view, is here to be taken and plundered. The wolves and the bears are here to be shot and plundered. The oil is here to be taken and plundered. Iraq is here to be taken and plundered. As she said herself of the Iraqi war, "It was a task from God."

Sarah Palin does not believe in abortion. She does not believe women who are raped and incested and ripped open against their will should have a right to determine whether they have their rapist's baby or not.

She obviously does not believe in sex education or birth control. I imagine her daughter was practicing abstinence and we know how many babies that makes.

Sarah Palin does not much believe in thinking. From what I gather she has tried to ban books from the library, has a tendency to dispense with people who think independently. She cannot tolerate an environment of ambiguity and difference. This is a woman who could and might very well be the next president of the United States. She would govern one of the most diverse populations on the earth.

Sarah believes in guns. She has her own custom Austrian hunting rifle. She has been known to kill 40 caribou at a clip. She has shot hundreds of wolves from the air.

Sarah believes in God. That is of course her right, her private right. But when God and Guns come together in the public sector, when war is declared in God's name, when the rights of women are denied in his name, that is the end of separation of church and state and the undoing of everything America has ever tried to be.

I write to my sisters. I write because I believe we hold this election in our hands. This vote is a vote that will determine the future not just of the U.S., but of the planet. It will determine whether we create policies to save the earth or make it forever uninhabitable for humans. It will determine whether we move towards dialogue and diplomacy in the world or whether we escalate violence through invasion, undermining and attack. It will determine whether we go for oil, strip mining, coal burning or invest our money in alternatives that will free us from dependency and destruction. It will determine if money gets spent on education and healthcare or whether we build more and more methods of killing. It will determine whether America is a free open tolerant society or a closed place of fear, fundamentalism and aggression.

If the Polar Bears don't move you to go and do everything in your power to get Obama elected then consider the chant that filled the hall after Palin spoke at the RNC, "Drill Drill Drill." I think of teeth when I think of drills. I think of rape. I think of destruction. I think of domination. I think of military exercises that force mindless repetition, emptying the brain of analysis, doubt, ambiguity or dissent. I think of pain.

Do we want a future of drilling? More holes in the ozone, in the floor of the sea, more holes in our thinking, in the trust between nations and peoples, more holes in the fabric of this precious thing we call life?
###

I thought I had a phobia about dentistry.

If you read this kind of thing head-on, the anger and irrationality of it make the idea of dialogue awfully hopeless. But then the creator of the Vagina Monologues isn’t welcoming every vagina to have a say, and I haven't got one anyway.

On the other hand, Ms. Ensler may simply be engaging in extremely heavy irony. For years I’ve been noticing how people whose career choices have put them seriously enough in debt to the Left can thereafter communicate with outsiders only by the most oblique form of code. Could this be Ms. Ensler’s anti-abortion manifesto in disguise?

Anyway, it goes without saying that Ms. Ensler would not be having her play produced on almost every campus in America (including Catholic campuses--AAARRRRGGHH!!), if she weren’t a champion of that most vagina-affirming and sacred activity known to womankind--of course I’m talking about going knees-up for a stranger in a lab coat while he excavates the womb of its unwanted contents, bills you, and disappears from your life forever, or until next time.

Because Ms. Ensler is someone widely recognized as an expert on the female organ, and who has conversed so widely with so many of them, I’m surprised at how shallow is her grasp of how, most of the time, babies come to be. (For example, “I imagine [Sarah Palin’s] daughter was practicing abstinence and we know how many babies that makes.” None, actually. It’s not practicing abstinence that makes babies.)

In Ensler's view, the remainder of babies, (when they don’t come from abstinence) come into being as the result of rape, or, in an odd verb choice, because of women being violently “incested.”

In this kind of emotional approach, where babies are always only the fruits of violence, it’s only fair they die by violence, n’est-ce-pas? Doesn’t it follow (speaking emotionally, that is), that if your father’s a rapist, it’s only simple justice that you deserve to die without mercy, not to mention without due process? It’s not as if you’re a cop killer or a terrorist, or some other practitioner of political speech, in which case you’d at least be entitled to the advocacy of an ACLU lawyer and a runway’s worth of Hollywood starlets.

Ms. Ensler’s precious self-image allows her to lecture the rest of us from the vantage of a person who is unimpeachably good (as in, “The people who made this choice [selecting Palin] count on the goodness and solidarity of Feminists”). Elsewhere, she casts herself as guardian of “saving the earth, ending racism, empowering women, giving young girls options, opening our minds, deepening tolerance, and ending violence and war.” (This kind of smugness does have an explanation, as I see it. Evolution, to compensate the liberal mind's diminished capacity to process facts, has provided for a defense mechanism a complete immunity to moral self-awareness.)

As one manifestation of Ms. Ensler’s goodness, she partakes mystically in the exquisite suffering of dumb nature at the hands of Republican enemies—for example, she feels for the ozone, for the seabed, for the peaceful Iraqi oil deposits that never did anything to us.

And then there are the Polar Bears, a relationship second only in bizarreness to her relationship with drills. “I have a particular thing for Polar Bears,” she writes. “Maybe it's their snowy whiteness or their bigness or the fact that they live in the arctic or that I have never seen one in person or touched one.”

(Maybe. Or maybe you don’t know a damned thing about polar bears, and you’re just a self-indulgent poseur. But I digress.)

Ms. Ensler actually thinks that telling you she has a thing for Polar Bears ought to convince you to vote Obama in 2008. (On second thought, I’ve heard lesser reasons to vote for him.) But, she continues, “If the Polar Bears don't move you to go and do everything in your power to get Obama elected then consider the chant that filled the hall after Palin spoke at the RNC, ‘Drill Drill Drill.’ I think of teeth when I think of drills. I think of rape.”

That’s funny. I think of teeth when I think of Polar Bears. I think of being eaten. I think of running.

But we’re talking about Ms. Ensler’s hang-ups, not mine. Drills make her think of teeth, and rape, so let’s work with that. Or better yet, let’s just leave that one for the Freudians, and whoever handles risk management at her dentist’s office. Still, I did hear the RNC speech myself, and was pretty sure Sarah Palin wasn’t calling for mandatory tooth fillings. Under the Obama health plan, however, mandatory anything can never be ruled out. . . .

When she’s not autohagiographizing as a lover of bears and the planet, Ms. Ensler shows a preference for harrowing, violent imagery:

“ripped open”

“forever uninhabitable for humans”

“violence through invasion”

“I think of destruction.”

“emptying the brain”

“I think of pain.”

“more holes in the fabric of this precious thing we call life.”

Now, combining these harsh images with Ms. Ensler’s lifelong study of both her own and other women’s vaginas, I have to conclude it’s no accident that her writing brings to mind the mayhem of abortion—the mayhem that Sarah “Nightmare” Palin and people like me want so much to see banned. It may be unconscious on Ms. Ensler’s part, I wouldn’t pretend to know. I do think she’s got some psychological issues, you know, like with the drills.

Take for example her jeremiad about a future of “more holes”: “More holes in the ozone. . . . more holes in the fabric of this precious thing we call life.” Taken along with her remark about “emptying the brain,” she’s just painted a fairly vivid picture of how a partial-birth abortion works. (A picture, by the way, that is kept a strict secret from the Feminist solidarity). In this perfectly legal procedure, a doctor pokes a hole in the back of the all-but-delivered baby’s skull before “emptying the brain,” thereby making it much easier to crush the head for final extraction from the cervix, safely dead, and no longer a threat to its mother’s lifestyle.

I ask you: Is she really talking about oil exploration? Are we really to believe it's drilling a hole in desert rock that harms the fabric of this precious thing called life?

Ms. Ensler's images also call forth other, more acceptable [sic] abortion procedures, the ones that still entail “violence through invasion,” like the “ripping” apart of the unborn in the womb and its removal piece by piece. Or abortions done in the earlier stages of pregnancy, where a "woman's physician" renders her uterus chemically “uninhabitable” for the human being innocently needing to inhabit there. All of which procedures, in their tens of millions, make me, and I’m hardly alone in this, “think of destruction,” and “think of pain.”

But Ms. Ensler doesn’t want us to think her hatred of Sarah Palin is based on her abortion views. She wants us to believe she’s been too busy having night terrors over the Alaskan caribou population to stoop to hating Sarah Palin for that. No, what has her tossing and turning on her bed of goodness and solidarity at night are images of those brutal Bush-Cheney Manbits ripping and penetrating the soft, dark she-thatch of the floor of the Gulf of Mexico. For Ms. Ensler, oil-drilling, like dentistry, is “rape.”

Rape? Well, you know what they say. If all you’ve got is a hammer, everything looks like a nail. And come to think of it, I don’t know what Ms. Ensler’s got that makes everything (even teeth) look to her like a vagina, and I guess I don’t want to know. (But I still think someone needs to take a closer look at her dentist.)

My point is that Eve Ensler is either kidding herself, or kidding you and me, when she tries to convince us her only motive in writing these screeds is her love of the Planet and her anxiety over drowning Polar Bears. Ms. Ensler’s white-hot anger at Sarah Palin has nothing to do with her imaginary love affair with Polar Bears she's never met or even seen, or with her psychotic fear of drills. What it has everything to do with is Sarah Palin’s opposition to abortion, an opposition lived out in both Sarah Palin’s own life and that of her pregnant daughter’s. Like every moral imbecile who brags about his virtue, the more Ms. Ensler actually credits herself as standing for “deepening tolerance,” the more intolerant her attacks become.

Obama and Capital Punishment

On Wednesday both Senators McCain and Obama expressed disagreement with the Supreme Court decision outlawing executions of people who rape children. (“McCain, Obama disagree with child rape ruling”).

Obama was at first wary of expressing support for any capital punishment penalty, clashing as it would with deeply-held liberal objections to executing convicted criminals.

But he became more comfortable with the idea when his campaign’s legal advisers explained how, since a criminal as vicious as serial child-rapist Patrick Kennedy invariably turns out to have been an “unwanted” child, putting him to death now could be justified as an extremely late-term abortion--a procedure Obama has always consistently supported.