News is breaking that Kansas physician George Tiller - known as one of the few doctors in America who perform late-term abortions - was murdered in his church today.
This is terrorism, pure and simple, and the federal government needs to devote antiterror resources to solving this crime and shutting down the people who committed and supported it.
I've been vocal that Muslims in America need to (and to a large extent have) take a firm stand on terrorism.
For conservatives to take that stance on Islamic terrorism and turn a blind eye to homegrown anti-abortion terrorism is rank hypocrisy.
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Yes, this is an awful, awful calamity and a terrorist act.
To divert anti-terrorist forces from their usual targets to solve this crime and shut down the people who committed and supported it would be wholly appropriate.
(link) to a morally sound and clearly expressed conservative response to this wicked killing.
So, this murder is equal to Islamic terrorism like, say, a suicide bombing in a crowded market? Wow, just a bit of hyperbole, don't you think? Listen, murder is murder, but that's pretty much where the comparison ends. This guy is NOT an innocent. A sizable percentage of Americans think that what this doctor did was murder himself. What percentage of Americans thought that the people working in the World Trade Center were murderers? That difference matters. It also matters that what the doctor did was not, in fact, illegal, and wasn't murder in the eyes of United States law. That makes this murder flat out wrong, and not simple vigilantism. But, to compare this to Islamic terrorism? Take a step back and think a bit more about it, OK?
It is useful, in a situation like this, to have a definition and argument that does not easily reduce to, "Lots of people and I agree with the murderer, so he can't be a terrorist."
Perhaps, "Public violence, as an act of theater, conducted against private citizens, to force a change in policy," would be a reasonable starting point.
Considering that the man (a private citizen) was gunned down (violence) in his church lobby as he was handing out church bulletains to fellow parishoners (public theater) and the authorities have made moves to protect other abortion performing doctors (in fear of more killings as an attempt to change policy) this seems to be pretty damn close.
Divert federal anti-terrorism resources? I couldn't say, without knowing more about budgets, allocations, and manpower available. But I am not inclined to consider this as "merely" a murder.
Terrorism by its very nature is intended to change people's behavior out of fear. 'Pour encourager les autres' taken to its sadistic conclusion.
Can one seriously say that this act was not intended to intimidate others who perform abortions that the perpetrator and any supporters oppose? Marc is correct, and #2 is turning a moral blind eye: This is an act of terrorism under color of religion just as much as any jihadi's.
Jason, I think that Tim summed up my reply pretty well.
You may be aghast at abortion, but the reality is that our society does not collectively believe it to be murder. You're free to try and convince us, and when you do, things will change.
But if the plan is to terrorize the practitioners of abortion into stopping, well, I really don't see the difference between those who hold those plans and those who believe that they can murder enough innocents to bring about a caliphate except capability.
Marc
Marc,
but the reality is that our society does not collectively believe it to be murder. You're free to try and convince us, and when you do, things will change.
sounds like a challenge. According to a recent gallup poll, this year pro-lifers beat pro-choicers 51 to 42. So the burden of proof is on you.
I'll start with a direct question: can you think of an argument for legal abortion that couldn't be applied for legal infanticide?
Your loving cousin,
-S
P.S. As far as the murderer, the updates said that he was caught. If he wasn't acting alone, I hope they get his accomplices. The last thing we need is to turn the abortion debate into a shooting war.
The last thing we need is to turn the abortion debate into a shooting war.
Just give the guy tenure in an education department, that should calm the waters.
It's not so much a "blind eye" as an eye capable of detecting contrast, Marc. Muslim terrorists have killed thousands in this country. It was in all the papers. There have been eight people killed in abortion-related violence in America, and that's if you take the enlightened, sensible position that a fetus with one foot still in the womb is fair game. In the same period, there have been at least a dozen rappers murdered. If I wanted to engage in absurd political point-scoring, I would claim that for a progressive to take your stance on anti-abortion terrorism but turn a blind eye to violence in the hip-hop community is rank hypocrisy as well as not-so-thinly disguised racism. But that would be unfair, so I won't.
There is a guy in custody for this already. What additional federal resources are called for, a SEAL team to do a snatch&grab on the Pope?
While I'm sure that intimidation was one of the purposes behind the killing, I'm just as positive that another -- probably more urgent -- driver was at play here for the shooter: stopping the doctor from aborting any more pregnancies. In the shooters eyes, they are directly saving any future lives that he would have ended. Can you say that a suicide bomber has the same intent?
Secondly, I'm sorry, but there's innocence and there's innocence. To compare this doctor to some office temp working at the World Trade Center or some person getting some vegetables at a Baghdad market is apples and oranges.
I think a much better analogy would be to compare this shooter with, say, a civilian in Iraq that attacks a U.S. Marine -- with a rife, not a bomb strapped to their chest. The Iraqi civilian kills the Marine: are they morally equal to the suicide bomber that snuffs out 100 lives in a Baghdad market? They broke the law, without a doubt, and would be classified as a murderer, just as the abortionist's killer. (And no, the analogies not perfect -- one is war, and the other isn't. I still think it holds up better than your comparison.)
Adam, there's a Grand-Canyon sized gap between people like me - who are disapproving of abortions and feel they should be closely regulated - and who might have answered the Gallup poll in the negative, and people who believe that abortion is murder and that those who practice it deserve the ultimate sanction.
Please don't assume that majority disapproval of abortion remotely supports your point.
Marc
Jason, I'm sure that the Islamists who stone women who have been raped to death both mean to discourage certain behaviors and to stop the specific woman from being immoral any more.
Look, it seems simple to me; either you believe that we are a society of laws or not. Either you believe that no one has to right to impose their values through violence or you believe that everyone does. And if everyone does, why - exactly - would you condemn the Islamists?
Marc
Marc is right, this was an act of terrorism. These "anti-abortion" murderers aren’t just targeting a person, they’re attacking the rule of law.
This murderer and the groups that inspire and occasionally shelter people like him should be treated the same way we treat mob bosses who target lawyers and cops - increase the severity of the punishments under RICO statutes, put the violent people away for life and do the investigations that are necessary to dismantle related terror-supporting institutions.
We should have that to Bill Ayers’ Weather Underground (in any just society, that bum would still be behind bars) and we should be doing it with Muslim Brotherhood related organizations like CAIR.
I have to say, this is an interesting discussion. Of course I believe in a society of laws. The problem is flipping to the nuclear option and yelling "terrorism!" and casting moral equivalency between Islamic terrorists and this shooter. Everything -- whether it be laws and their punishments or to cast this in a religious sense, sin -- has an infinite variety of shades of gray, and very rarely are black and white. Islamic terrorists blowing up a mall is a greater moral wrong than shooting this doctor which is a greater moral wrong than unintentional manslaughter. That's my contention. You're saying that by instantly going to the comparison, that the first two are the same moral wrong. I disagree.
And the public DOES impose their values through violence, by using the State as it's proxy. All laws that a moral contract behind them. So yes, people DO have a right to impose their values upon other people via the threat of violence, but only through the proxy of the State, and by enacting laws within the democratic framework. Everything from drug laws to age of consent laws fall within the definition of "people imposing their values through violence".
Great discussion.
Jason, thanks! that's what this place is all about.
And you're absolutely right that the state imposes power @gun ("at the point of a gun") but the key is that here only the state does it.
Marc
Marc,
I fear you missed my point. I tried to announce the recent Gallup poll like a sports score that could change next week. My intention was to point to the absurdity of using societal consensus as a way to determine what's a just killing, and what's not.
As far as "the ultimate sanction" for abortionists... The man who killed this one is a murderer, and still would be if the shooting were legal.
I'll assert that if you start from first principles, you'll end up with the conclusion that abortion is murder.
Similarly, I'll assert that it would be grossly unjust to execute an abortionist for being an abortionist.
I'll assert that if you start from first principles, you'll end up with the conclusion that abortion is murder.
And yet I haven't come to that conclusion. Strange.
Do you think it could be that we are different people with different sets of principles?
If that's true, then how do we decide who is right and who is wrong?
The problem with "moral equivalency" is that it's closely bound up with the moral peculiarities of two or more sides, which makes it very difficult for anyone to consider himself, or someone acting on his behalf, as an actual terrorist.
You, Jason, are this discussion's exemplar; your primary reason not to consider this a terrorist act is purely emotional and self-centered: "but this guy was guilty!" Read bin-Laden's writings, though, and you will find an elaborate justification why all Westerners are guilty-- because we (collectively) voted for governments he doesn't like and have not taken up arms against them.
Defining terrorism purely in terms of who you like and do not like is not only not helpful, it is actively harmful, because anyone with a sophomore level reading of western philosophy is going to point out quite rightly that you're removed all rational content from the word. Terrorism becomes purely an Us vs Them exercise.
There certainly does seem to be an equivalency of means, though. Despite your protests, I still consider this killing-- because it was done in public, in a place most people are trained to think of as "safe," rather than at the victim's home-- to have been a form of "violence theater." The goal of the murder may simply have been to prevent him from performing more abortions. But the goal of the "violence theater," itself was almost certainly to scare other doctors out of performing abortions and to scare pregnant women about of having them done.
Likewise, 9-11 was conceived in the same spirit-- a spectacular exercise of public violence, with the intent to get other people to change their daily policy through fear.
I see a great deal similarity between these two acts in means and motives. The differences are primarily scale.
Consider this a problem of hurried commenting before my first cup of coffee, but you've missed my point.
Tell you what: I'll concede that one of the purposes of the shooting matched the technical term for "terrorism". I still feel that reaching for this equivalency is mostly hyperbolic. A thug (not in organized crime) killing a store owner for not paying protection to "make a point" to the other store owners is obviously terrorism by definition. Even that, where 99% of the country would cry foul about, doesn't belong in the same sentence as Islamic terrorism as we know it. It's considerably closer, though, than what happened yesterday to the doctor. And still, to compare that thug to al Qaeda is a non-starter. Then to demand that the Italian-American community take a firm stand against the thug and for the Federal government to devote anti-terror resources to solving the storekeeper's murder...
What if someone pointed out that the thug's actions really aren't equivalent to Islamic terrorism? Are they emotional and self-centered?
I think one of the problems here is that "terrorism" is now a loaded word, on the way to being as misused as the term "fascist".
In addition to the differences in scale, there's a distinction to be drawn between the goal of changing one policy in a society (abortion) and the goal of overturning society on the whole. I wish I had time to unpack that thought.
Jason, I don't think so. You have a movement, with a specific doctrine of beliefs it intends to impose, legitimizing the use of illegal force. This guy isn't some random mucker who chose the doctor by chance.
And - just as I have, since starting this blog, opposed the idea that an Islamist movement within Islam should be able to terrorize its way to power, I'm going to say that we need to go after the components of the violence-legitimizing antiabortion movement (and the violence-legitimizing animal rights movement, and any other violence-legitimizing movements there are out there).
Marc
Alchemist,
By and large you can answer the question of which first principles are right and wrong by testing them.
If you think that you can come to the conclusion that abortion is not murder, then please address the question about infanticide.
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The real problem with talking about abortion is that everyone gets pissed off. It's almost impossible for either side to admit that they're wrong without admitting that their ideas were monstrous.
Adam - the obvious difference is that a child is viable on its own, while an embryo / fetus lives only as a parasite on the mother. Perhaps you don't think there's a meaningful difference there, but to ignore the possibility that others do is just disingenuous, and an attempt to presume your conclusion.
An argument in favor of abortion that doesn't apply to infanticide? Trivially simple. Here you go.
It's clear that a range of behaviors that a woman can engage in will have an affect on the health of a fetus; however, precisely what effect that will be is not necessarily clear. Nor are women informed automatically at the moment of conception; even their earliest biological reactions take a little time to be detected, assuming the woman is looking for them. A woman who does not suspect that she might be pregnant can get significantly into term before it becomes obvious.
We are not prepared to, under any circumstances, place culpability upon a woman for taking an act in the absence of knowledge of pregnancy that results in harm to a fertilized egg that might have become a person. Thus, from a legal perspective, conception cannot possibly serve as a "bright line" - it can be (and in fact, usually is) crossed unknowing, and we will not prosecute unknowing harm against an embryo.
But that's not the only bright line that exists, when it comes to the transition of embryo to human. Birth serves as an excellent bright line. You do NOT give birth without knowing about it. It's a clear separation, in logic and practice, between "fetus as dependent on mother's life processes for survival" and "independent human life". Given that the full assumption of human identity has to happen somewhere along the line, and that conception is eminently unsuitable due to its discovery only after the fact, birth makes an excellent point of legal distinction.
And, in fact, our laws do largely form that distinction around birth. For all that a fetus is a potential human life, a fetus does not have a legal interest separable from its mother.
That doesn't necessarily mean that all pre-birth abortions must be permitted. (Certainly you can make a case that a fetus that is capable of survival, yet has merely not been born yet, may present another ethical dimension. Many do. For that matter, it doesn't necessarily follow that abortion has to be permitted at all; that's a value judgment.) But the inconvenient fact of birth does provide a clear line to prevent the logic of allowing for abortions to extend into infanticide.
Tell you what: I'll concede that one of the purposes of the shooting matched the technical term for "terrorism". I still feel that reaching for this equivalency is mostly hyperbolic.
Perhaps. There are, after all, threats and there are threats.
At this time, the murderer has been caught, so there's no need in my opinion to mobilize a special task force to catch the guy. I do, however, think it would be very prudent to determine if the guy was part of a circle of drinking buddies with intent to kill other abortion doctors, and if so, bust the damn ring.
That's a fairly low resource activity, but does fall in the realm of an anti-terror investigation.
That also dovetails nicely with your extended example about killing shopkeepers-- if there were a brutal public execution of a shopkeeper as part of a protection racket, the proper response would absolutely include a high level investigation to determine if the thug were acting alone. Generally speaking, that sort of activity isn't a one-off. (I disagree with other aspects of your analogy, though.)
Adam, your question has already been answered, but just to beat a dead horse...
You can call anything murder if you want. Fur, meat, coal, plastics, vaccines; etc. But we have a legal definition for murder that is the only one that is important. We also have a legal definition for terrorism.
Despite the issue, the long intimidation racket against Dr. Tiller, written here that culminated in his death closely ran the line between legal opposition and illegal harrasement. If these murder is directly related to these groups, it's clearly terrorism.
At the very least, some connection should be tested. And I would expect the same for eco-terrorists, those guys who shot up the recruiting station later today, or any other planned attack on a specific person or place where typical motives do not apply.
Its terrorism, its murder, it should be looked at. But will Abdulhakim Mujahid Muhammad, who shot and killed a soldier in Little Rock in a grudge against the US military get as much publicity, much less attention from DHS? Probably not. Doesn't fit the narrative.
How many people have been murdered in the abortion feud in the last 10 years? How many have been killed by radical Islamicists in the US itself? Even excluding 911? Pretty sure Radical Islam wins hands down.
So yeah, the Islamic Fascists should get the lionshare of the resources.
Mark, just to play devil's advocate here...
Many conservatives argue that eco-terrorism is the largest domestic threat today. And on that I don't disagree. At the same time, how many people have been killed (domestically) by eco-terrorism? (For the sake of simplicity let's say attempted doesn't count).
Terrorism encompasses a window larger than just murder. Sure, Islamic terrorism is a bigger problem than domestic terrorism (which is why it consumes billions of dollars a month), but lower domestic forms of terrorism still need to be investigated.
After all, disasters almost never come from where you expect them to.
I 100% agree they need to be investigated, and investigated by the FBI- who traditionally has been very good at breaking these sorts of 'cells'. It worries me the Homeland Security is being used for these purposes, however. Today anti-abortion radicals get the microscope, next administration maybe its Reverend Wright's church, or the 700 club, or survivalists...
For that matter the FBI had a bad turn in the 60s when they were busy bugging MLK etc. But all that eventually came out in the wash. When will the DHS dirty laundry ever get examined, considering they have the investigative powers of an FBI combined with the secrecy aura of the CIA. This department honestly scares me more than anything else that our government has done in the last few decades. Its a ready made political weapon and spy network.
Ok mark, I think we're on agreement here.
AvatarADV,
That's a lot of words for something "Trivially simple".
Please let me know if I am being unfair to your arguments.
Your first paragraph seems to say that a woman may not know she's conceived and may harm her baby unknowingly. I agree.
Your second paragraphs seem to imply that no one would prosecute a crime that a person commits unknowingly. We already address that legally by having a spectrum from involuntary manslaughter up to murder. I'm sure that you can imagine a scenario where a mother would kill a two year year old through ignorance. This argument fails.
But that's not the only bright line that exists, when it comes to the transition of embryo to human. Birth serves as an excellent bright line. You do NOT give birth without knowing about it.
It's possible that a mother might be comatose during birth. Would this make the baby not a person? Clearly not. This argument fails.
It's a clear separation, in logic and practice, between "fetus as dependent on mother's life processes for survival" and "independent human life".
It's a continuum. New born babies are enormously dependent. Premature babies can survive, and this implies that many others could survive that are otherwise in-utero. It's not yet possible to raise a human being up from a fertilized egg entirely in a bioreactor, but there's very good reason to believe that it's only a matter of time.
And, in fact, our laws do largely form that distinction around birth. For all that a fetus is a potential human life, a fetus does not have a legal interest separable from its mother.
If this is an argument, it's circular reasoning. What's at stake here is what the laws ought to say. Potential human life is a silly thing to call a fetus as per the above continuum argument. An unfertilized egg is a potential human life.
But the inconvenient fact of birth does provide a clear line to prevent the logic of allowing for abortions to extend into infanticide.
This is circular reasoning. The difference between a fetus and an infant is that one is born and the other is not.
You might as well pick the growth of the first pubic hair as the line between "potential human being" and "independent human life".
Do you have any other arguments?
But we have a legal definition for murder that is the only one that is important.
Nonsense. If the only thing that is important is positive law, then the Nuremberg Trials would have been a farce. They were not. It was clear that the Nazi had laws that were horrible.
As for the rest, I think it's very good that our laws allow free speech and do not allow murder. Yes, I agree that we most certainly should investigate if there's any connection between the murder and various anti-abortion groups. A group planning murders would be bad for just about everyone.