Sarah Paretsky of The Guardian wants to talk numbers and lay the blame for George Tiller's death squarely on the heads of pro-life Christian men:
As of 30 May, abortion providers in America had experienced 15,124 acts of violence. On 31 May, the number rose to 15,125. Dr George Tiller was murdered at church in Wichita, Kansas. His wife, who was singing in the choir, was a witness. Tiller had been shot in 1993. His clinic has often been the target of violence and vandalism as one of only three places in the US where women could get late-term abortions, and he refused to turn his back on his patients.
Wow. So, it's not just Bill O'Reilly, Sean Hannity, Rush Limbaugh, and everyone in the pro-life movement who is to blame for the actions of an isolated and deeply mentally disturbed man (whose religious beliefs are apparently unclear or unknown), but also all Catholic bishops. Go figure. She then uses the ol' DotDotDot argument, which is based on the belief that skewing what someone actually says is just fine as long as the cause is worthy:
You can read Randall Terry's entire statement here. The pertinent paragraph says, "I believe George Tiller was one of the most evil men on the planet; every bit as vile as the Nazi war criminals who were hunted down, tried, and sentenced after they participated in the 'legal' murder of the Jews that fell into their hands. But even Mr. Tiller - like other murderers - deserved a trial of his peers, and a legal execution, not vigilantly justice." I have issues with Terry and his tactics, but Paresky's misuse of ellipses is pathetic. Take her "argument" to its logical conclusion and you have to figure that she and others will soon be calling for laws to outlaw any public statement that abortion is murder.
Ed West of The Telegraph takes on Paretsky's statistical argument, writing:
Further: the National Counter Terrorism Center reported (PDF file) that in 2008 alone there were 11,770 terrorist attacks, 8,284 of which were by Islamic extremists, resulting in a total of 15,765 dead; 932 attacks were by Christian extremists, and 2,513 were by anarchists. Even granting that those are global numbers, they are still quite revealing.
Yesterday, the AP reports (ht: Curt Jester) a convert to Islam gunned down "two uniformed soldiers outside an Arkansas military recruiting center", killing one and wounding the other. The killer, Abdulhakim Mujahid Muhammad, is said to have motivated by "political and religious motives." Jeffrey Goldberg of The Atlantic wonders why those motives were explained or elaborated upon or discussed in any way: "In other words, it could have been a radical Unitarian who gunned down the soldiers, or possibly a violent Presbyterian. Why the shyness? Why not tell people what is actually happening in the world?"
Douglas LeBlanc of GetReligion writes, "Here’s a journalistic mystery: Why the difference between news coverage about the murders of abortion specialist George Tiller of Wichita, Kansas, and Army recruiter Pvt. William Long of Conway, Arkansas? ... Where is the swarm-the-zone coverage of Pvt. Long’s murder? Where are the broad-brush mainstream commentaries on what this murder says about young converts to Islam? Is the murder of an Army recruiter less newsworthy than the murder of a physician who performs late-term abortions? Is the murder of an Army recruiter simply an inevitable aspect of American life in the 21st century?"
It is, as the Curt Jester rightly notes, a matter of selective outrage.
For many, many Americans, including a lot of journalists (the vast majority, I'd guess), the most sacred right of all is be as autonomous and "free" as one can be, especially with your body. "Freedom" is understood as the right to do whatever you wish as long as it's legal, for whatever is legal is considered moral. This "freedom" is the conforming of reality to our desires, not the controlling of our desires in pursuit of the greater good, which is authentic freedom. Thus the successful drive to legalize abortion, and the increasingly successful drive to legalize euthanasia and "same sex marriages." As the ever pragmatic political philosopher Dick Cheney said recently, "people ought to be free to enter into any kind of union they wish, any kind of arrangement they wish." Thus James Kalb notes in The Tyranny of Liberalism (ISI, 2008), "Freedom becomes freedom to be self-involved, self-indulgent, and politically correct. Anything else is oppression ... Liberalism makes every man his own Nietzche—only with health insurance, a retirement plan, and protection against discrimination" (pp 103, 110).
Abortion represents the apex of this false freedom, resting as it does on completely perverted notions of freedom, autonomy, personhood, life, and the good. In the word of Pope John Paul II:
For abortion supporters, the fatal attack on Tiller was not just about the unjust killing of a man, but an attempt to destroy their way of thinking, living, and acting. If abortion is an ultimate act of autonomous, individualistic freedom, then Tiller was a high priest of that freedom's religion, and his murder a bloody attack on that ardently held faith. And since traditional Christianity so obviously renounces this false freedom and stands against it, the opportunity to blame Tiller's death on all Christians who oppose abortion is simply too good to pass up for those who are committed to not only holding tightly to that freedom, but to expanding it ad extremum. Like all martyrs (whether true or false in character and nature), Tiller has quickly taken on a symbolic status; he represents the belief that abortion is a right which cannot be rescinded by man or God, a right rooted in radical individualism and leading, as John Paul II warns, "to a serious distortion of life in society."
The culture of death, the late pontiff wrote, "taken as a whole, betrays a completely individualistic concept of freedom, which ends up by becoming the freedom of 'the strong' against the weak who have no choice but to submit." The "strong" here relates, in part, to physical health and ability, but I think it also refers, on a deeper level, to a Nietzschean sort of "strong"—the strength of the philosopher's famous "superman", the immoral man who is willing to take life, morality, and justice into his own hands instead of humbly recognizing their origins and ends. In this very real sense, both George Tiller and Scott Roeder acted on behalf of and from the belly of the culture of death. For this reason, their actions are to be condemned.
Finally, another quote from John Paul II, this time from Crossing the Threshold of Hope:
• Can the killing of abortionists be justified? (May 31, 2009)
• Despicable. Cowardly. Evil. (May 31, 2009)
Her enormous "acts of violence" number must necessarily include all the non-violent incidents like people chaining themselves to clinic entrances, super-gluing door locks, etc.-- tactics approvingly described as non-violent resistance in any liberal-approved context like keeping a tree from being chopped down.
I don't mean to minimize the real numbers of the real acts of violence-- murder, arson, etc. are completely wrong responses to abortion-- but by conflating these with acts of civil disobedience, she loses all credibility in the first sentence, before she even has a chance to unleash her dizzying intellect (!) on the rest of us...
Posted by: Margaret | Tuesday, June 02, 2009 at 06:24 PM
The culture of death, the late pontiff wrote, "taken as a whole, betrays a completely individualistic concept of freedom, which ends up by becoming the freedom of 'the strong' against the weak who have no choice but to submit."
Sad to say, such a society inevitably will self-destruct. The paradigm of the freedom of the strong against the weak is age-old and history shows us the many ways that it plays out in practice politically and structurally. It is the antithesis of the freedom that most Americans still hold dear, and upon which the country was founded.
Posted by: LJ | Thursday, June 04, 2009 at 07:21 AM