Posted by
"Happy" Jake Greene on Monday, June 01, 2009 6:35:18 AM
Two wrongs don’t make a right, as we’ve often heard. Usually two wrongs just make matters worse. Such is the case of the late Dr. George Tiller. Tiller was an abortionist. As such, his entire career was devoted to performing great wrongs. Tiller was murdered yesterday in a Wichita, KS church, allegedly by Scott Roeder (51), apparently a militant anti-abortionist.
Anyone who has read either my blog or my postings on Townhall knows that I am about as anti-abortion as it gets. I believe that abortion is a gravely evil act and I am sickened by the support it gets from some people who purport to be mainstream, including our current Commander in Chief. The problem is that killing abortion doctors and burning abortion clinics is also wrong, and should be treated as such.
For the Conservatives: Christians are not like Muslims. We are not instructed to carry out God’s divine justice here on earth. We are to leave that to God. We are also not to carry out man’s temporal justice unless we are duly commissioned to do so as police, attorneys, judges, juries, etc. Roeder’s alleged act (he has not been convicted, so we can’t say for sure that he’s the guilty party) should be punished to the fullest extent of the law, and if Roeder was the culprit, he (or the actual perpetrator, if it wasn’t Roeder) should spend the rest of his miserable life in prison (whether or not the state hastens the end of his life sentence is inconsequential to me.) And he may be surprised to discover that he’s sharing a room with Tiller in the afterlife if he doesn’t make his amends to God. Those of us who are good, practicing Christians understand that what Roeder (or whoever) did puts his soul in mortal jeopardy of eternal damnation, and that’s reason number 1 not to go randomly killing abortionists.
For the Liberals, who don’t buy all this “immortal soul” garbage: Tiller’s murderer has done 3 things. He violated the law. He took a father and grandfather from a family that loved him. And he harmed the movement he purported to represent. On the first, murder is as serious a crime as it gets. That’s why we have death penalties in some states. Whether it was Scott Roeder or someone else, the perpetrator of this crime should be punished severely, precisely because a person was killed. It doesn’t matter what the person’s political beliefs, race, religion, sex, sexual orientation, job, criminal record, or whatever, were. A person was killed and the law needs to come down heavily on the killer. On the second, killing someone always has consequences outside the immediate victim. The victim’s family is gravely harmed, and society as a whole is harmed because law and order are reduced whenever anyone commits a crime. The only solution is to punish the criminal. On the third, of course the Left will take this one isolated incident and paint all people who think like I do with the broad brush of bigotry. Every time something like this happens, the Left pulls out the stereotype card, calling those who support the restriction of abortion “extremists” and lending credence to Janet Napolitano’s memo calling conservatives “dangerous.” Far from saving the innocent unborn lives that Roeder (or whoever) intended to save, it will now be harder to get anti-abortion laws passed, and there will always be another Dr. Tiller. These sorts of things just make the abortion problem worse, because it makes martyrs of abortionists.
And that’s my final point. While the murder of anyone is tragic, I am frustrated by the media’s portrayal of Dr. Tiller as some kind of hero. The manner of his death aside, he still performed a great evil that under other circumstances would rise to the level of a crime against humanity. He was no hero in any sense of the word. Those he killed were truly defenseless. He killed them neither quickly nor painlessly. He, in fact, enjoyed a much easier death than did any of his victims. He did a great disservice to society by perpetuating the lie that abortion is OK, and like all other abortion supporters, the blood of countless millions is on his hands.
Yes, Dr. Tiller’s death was tragic. Yes, his killer should be prosecuted to the fullest extent of the law. Yes, his family is right to grieve for their loss, and we are right to grieve with them. But to call him a hero, to prop him up as a martyr to a good cause is to ignore the evil that he has done, and to ignore that evil is the final disservice you can do him. Because if you don’t realize the evil he committed, you don’t know to pray for his soul.