As those who know me might imagine, I am not in the least bit sickened by Tiller's death. As an unapologetically pro-life libertarian/minarchist, I see no reason to mourn the death of a man who enriched himself by specializing in dismembering unborn children that were so developed that they could have just as easily been placed up for adoption. I would no more mourn him than I would mourn the loss of Dr. Mengele.
UPDATE: LGF wonders how those of us who are "gloating" can call ourselves Christians. I think the real question is, how can a "church" call itself Christian when it allows a man who makes a living this way to be an active member of its congregation? I'm probably expecting too much mental heavy lifting on the part of LGF and most of its readers who clearly think that the partial birth abortion isn't murderer based on the "geometric definition of human life" (the baby's 3D coordinates determine whether or not it's a human yet) employed by partial birth abortion defenders.
UPDATE: Cal Thomas would like us to believe that there is no difference between the man who killed Tiller, and the 9/11 attackers. I am curious. Is Thomas saying that the workers at the WTC and the Pentagon were engaged in work morally equivalent to providing partial birth abortions, or that partial birth abortions are morally indistinguishable from banking (and other activities at the WTC) and military service? For someone who says that abortion is a grave moral issue, he has a curious way of equivocating in a way that insinuates that Tiller was a swell, probably misunderstood guy who just filled a niche that was in hot demand.
UPDATE: Scott Roeder is a murderer. I agree with that statement from other pro-lifers. However, what separates him from run of the mill murderers is that the man he murdered was, himself, a serial murderer. Personally, I would not engage in a similar action because I cannot ever see myself being able to defy God's law against cold-blooded murder.
UPDATE: Andrew Sullivan uses this as yet another cudgel with which to beat up the dreaded "Christianists." I see that like Cal Thomas, he cannot appreciate the difference between men who blow up a building of innocent, law-abiding men and women trying to work for a living, and the execution of a man who made a living depriving viable children of the right to life. While Roeder is objectively still a murderer (his act was literally murder), it takes an extreme moral relativism to conflate his act with those of Islamists who murder innocent civilians. Roeder may be a murderer, but his target was certainly not one that can honestly be described as innocent.
UPDATE: I think El Borak has a great take on this from a moral and legal point of view. Both men, Roeder and Tiller are equally guilty of murder, and like El Borak, I would vote to hang Roeder. Despite rumors to the contrary, I am not one of those pro-lifers who the government needs to worry about. If a prosecutor showed me the evidence of this case, and it showed me that Roeder did it, I'd have no problem voting to execute him. I'd also not hesitate to turn in someone if I knew that they committed a similar act. I just happen to regard Tiller as someone whose profession rendered him as close to being a completely unsympathetic victim as has ever existed.
Nutjob. And I'm not referring to Roeder or Tiller. I'm referring to you, Mike.
Who can argue with that logic? I don't know what you do for a living now, Casey, but if all else fails, I think you'd make a great teacher of rhetoric at any liberal arts college.
Re: gloating. I see nothing to celebrate in Tillman's death, except that a certain unknown amount of children will live to breathe. I do not mourn his passing, except to note that he reaped what he sowed.
Re: moral equivalence. All the right-wingers are defensively coming out of the woodwork denouncing the slaying of Tillman because they know that the Left will be coming out like gangbusters against them, branding so-called right-wingers as terrorists. So I suppose they have to juke and jive to make themselves appear "mainstream". As for me, there is a huge difference between the guy that kills a murderer, and another that kills innocents. Tillman was the latter. Roeder is allegedly the former. As one of Vox's commenters noted, I hope that they float the Goodyear blimp over Kansas with FIJA pamphlets. Then the "vigilantism is bad" crowd will see what moral equivalence really looks like when the killer is tried.
Re: Murder. The killing of innocents is murder. The killing of anb admitted and practicing murderer is justice. I don't think this is a murder, although it will be charged and tried as such.
Re: Christianists. I suppose we Christianists are so very bad, given that, what, 4 abortion docs have been assassinated in this country, and close to 50M innocent babies have died at the hands of the non-Christianists out there?
Perhaps KJL is sick over the news of Tillman's death because she knows of the RICO-fuelled witch hunt that will ensue?
I think it's safe to say that if KJL were sick over the possible RICO issues or anything even remotely related to that, she would have said as much.
Here's an interesting comment from EW's blog regarding what the Bible has to say about killers of murderers:
It was most likely a Christian who brought justice to this man so I think perhaps some perspective should be brought.
Numbers 35:16 And if he smite him with an instrument of iron, so that he die, he [is] a murderer: the murderer shall surely be put to death. Well, that describes our "victim" quite well. One who used iron instruments to intentionally kill.
Numbers 35:19 The revenger of blood himself shall slay the murderer: when he meeteth him, he shall slay him. This passage speaks of the man who finally brought justice to Tiller.
The Bible sets up cities of refuge where this "slayer" can flee too to remain safe but he is to stay within that city as it is his only protection.
Numbers 35:26-27 But if the slayer shall at any time come without the border of the city of his refuge, whither he was fled; And the revenger of blood find him without the borders of the city of his refuge, and the revenger of blood kill the slayer; he shall not be guilty of blood:I think it is important to note that the revenger is not guilty of blood or, better, murder. While our current law pays next to no heed to the Law, as Christians we should be more worried about the latter than the former. The revenger will pay a price in this world for killing Tiller, but this act will not be accounted to him as sin in the next.
Oh, and killing someone is rarely a "cowardly act." I wish people would stop saying that.
I think it's even simpler than that. If Tiller were walking around a nursery chopping up babies with machetes, you wouldn't see any outrage over Roeder shooting him. Yet you see a lot of it over him killing equally viable children that were only about 6-9 inches away from being outside of their mother's womb and in her arms. Hence my saying that defense of partial birth abortionists as something other than cold-blooded murderers is based on geometry (the baby's coordinates in 3 dimensional space), a level of legalism that not even the craziest religions ever stoop to.
I've been quoted on the web! That make me famous right?
That's an interesting thought, CC. I appriciate you using scripture to justify your logic, but I think you may have missed the mark.
Don't get me wrong, I'm not mourning the deat of this murderer. (I'm mourning the likely current state of his soul, but that's a different discussion for a different day.) I digress.
The scripture you pointed out, is all civil law, given to the state of Israel. There is a pretty good case for that not applying directly to us now. Should a Christian be taking a matter like this into his own hands, or should he obey the laws of his governing authority? I would argue that as much as we hate abortion, we need to accept that for now, it is legal in our country. Try this scripture on for size; "If it be possible, as much as lieth in you, live peaceably with all men. Dearly beloved, avenge not yourselves, but rather give place unto wrath: for it is written, Vengeance is mine; I will repay, saith the Lord. Therefore if thine enemy hunger, feed him; if he thirst, give him drink: for in so doing thou shalt heap coals of fire on his head." --Romans 12:18-20
I personally like Waynedawg's response to this whole mess. The proper christian response might be to pray that the government and the pro-choice movement might come to repentance and a saving faith in Jesus Christ. After they do, the rest should follow.
I am curious, Timm. If the government legalized child molestation, would you feel the same way if you knew that your neighbor was raping their child every night with the full permission of the government? How about if the law allowed the right of "Prima Nocte" for any federal employee at GS12 or higher in occupied territories or even in the United States? At some point, as a Christian, you have to say in highly technical, philosophical parlance "that $hit just ain't right" and say that society has crossed a line.
I agree with you that murder is not technically right here, but I would point out that a society that legalizes murder, pederasty or any other extremely serious moral infraction is perilously close to being an illegitimate one by even the most conservative take on Romans 13.
Would I feel what way? That I should not murder the man? Obviously this is a hypothetical situation, but I would say no, murdering the man is still not OK. I might pray that God might swiften his judgment against them:
"Let death seize upon them, and let them go down quick into hell: for wickedness is in their dwellings, and among them." --Psalm 55:15
"And he shall bring upon them their own iniquity, and shall cut them off in their own wickedness; yea, the LORD our God shall cut them off." -- Psalm 94:23
I will not argue that there is a fine line, but I'm glad to hear you say that murder is not the proper response. I still respectfully disagree with CC. While it is not really my place to judge, I suspect that God will, in fact, view this as murder when this man comes before Him for judgment.
He may have thought that he was doing the world, the pro-life community and the christian faith a favor by murdering this man, but in fact, he is hindering our cause. This makes us no better than them.
I am not saying that you should murder him, but if you knew that he was raping his daughter every night, wouldn't you offer her shelter until someone could take her away to be safe from her family? If her family came looking to violently take her back, with the intent of continuing to rape her as was their legal right under that perverted new law, wouldn't you be willing as a Christian to use violence to keep her from being violated, including taking the lives of her family members who showed up to take her back at all costs?
Timm you quote Scripture in response to CC's reposting of my original post. You respond with this <i>"Dearly beloved, avenge not yourselves"</i>
Nowhere in the Scriptures I quoted from did it ever mention avenging yourself. In fact the revenger had to specifically be someone else because the person so afflicted was dead. Tiller's killer was acting as the revenger and not avenging wrongs done to himself and as such need not wait for the vengeance of G-d because G-d already laid out, in black and white, the form He wants His vengeance to take in these cases. We do ourselves a grave disservice by misapplying Scriptures and this is what I believe you are doing.
As for your allusion to the Old Testament no longer applying, I think that is the reason that the modern Christian church allows to much apostasy. We only want to hold to the feel good, ear-tickling things, and leave the meat and potatoes of our faith, meaning everything except perhaps the books of Genesis and Psalms (but of course only the feel good psalms) But that is off topic and I think any more discussion should be on an appropriate post.
You pegged me wrong, Erik. I do not believe that the old testament no longer applies. I do, however, believe that the civil laws given to the state of Israel apply to Israel. They are certainly the ideal set of laws for any other state, but obviously the US does not strictly abide by those laws. Would you argue that we are forbiden to get tatooes or eat medium rare steaks?
What I'm attempting to do is find a middle ground between Leviticus and Romans 13. Plain and simple, I think that the obvious conclusion is that to repay this man's acts with his own murder is probably not the proper course of action.
You left out the second half of that verse;
"Vengence is Mine; I will repay, sayeth the Lord."
Wether the crime is committed against you, me or thousands of inocent lives, the vengence still belongs to the Lord.
I still maintain that a more proper response to these doctors who propetuate this evil may be a prayer such as the likes found in Psalm 55 or Psalm 94.
I think Erik is arguing this from a natural law point of view. The government cannot legalize murder under natural law theory. Once it steps over that boundary, it loses some of its legitimacy because it openly sanctions evil. I think there is definitely truth to that. If any state legalized formal infanticide, as Peter Singer has suggested, I would break from my normal states rights position and urge the federal government to place that state under military occupation, disband its government and impose a new system in keeping with the Constitution's guarantee that all states shall have a republican government. In fact, I would go so far as to say that the state should first be placed under marshal law because such an act would tantamount to a formal insurrection against the United States and the spirit of its Constitution.
Can't argue with you there, Mike.
On a side note, one of us really should have the discussion on the civil and cerimonial laws given to the Israelites. Or even broader, Old covenant vs. New covenant. I must admit, I haven't actually studied it very in-depth yet. I would be interested in you guy's points of view.
I'm looking like I'm in Genesis for the next couple of weaks, so I nominate Mike or Erik. =P
P.S. Sorry about hi-jacking your comment thread, Mike. I suppose we haven't gotten too far off topic.
No problem. My stance on the matter is that the Old Testament law forms the foundation for much of our knowledge of what the natural law is. The Mosaic Law is still in effect in a moral sense, since it is a codification of the essence of the natural law.
I agree with your take on this, and the premptive hand-wringing from such "luminaries" as Cal Thomas is just a sign of weakness. Yeah, Christians shouldn't be going around murdering people but in this very exceptional case it's really not difficult at all to see how this will benefit society.
Abortionists and secularists will of course never see your disdain for Tiller since they have been deludeded into thinking (through several decades of programming) that a fetus is not human.
Deludeded? I must be deludedededed to have missed that typo.
I fear I might be misunderstood. That is strictly in Mike's hypothetical situation. If I ever caught a man trying to do anything like that to one of my four daughters, I think I'd shoot him without a second thought.
Just wanted to clear that up.
And just to clear things up, I was never saying you should walk into his house and shoot him dead which is murder.
Hi, Mike, I agree with you, except perhaps for this part:
Murder is unjustified killing, and I think it's at least debatable whether the killing of Tiller was justified or not.
Few people argue, for instance, that attempts on Hitler's life by other Germans during the Holocaust were evil, simply because Hitler happened to be the guy with the most power in Germany, so that the "law" was on his side. Nor would anybody condemn a German who defected and joined the allies in the fight against his "leader". Most people reason, quite sensibly, that he was a monster who was in the very process of murdering millions of Jews.
In the wild west, nobody would condemn a brave sheriff who went into an area dominated and controlled by bandits, and started kicking butt and taking names to establish law and order. Nobody would call him a "vigilante" for taking out the most powerful players in the area. In a lawless no-man's land of competing wills, the rules are different.
And in our own country, if some monster were to take over and start legalizing the killing of children aged 10 and under, I don't think any of us, from our vantage point in this time and place, would object to the use of force when necessary in such a nightmare scenario, in order to protect innocent children who were about to be "legally" murdered.
Such a lawless scenario strikes us as so horrible that we believe it would be justified to do almost anything to fight it, and to rescue those children, even if the government condoned their killers. Well, I'll bet you'd get a similar reaction if you were to tell people 50 years ago about a horror scenario in which the government condoned the murder of near-born infants by sticking scissors through their necks. That so many pro-lifers consider Roede's act to be terribly henious, on par with the murder of innocents, is a testament to how the abortion regime in our country has corrupted the way even pro-lifers think about the issue. If what Roeder did is wrong, it's not by much, and it is surely no tragedy.
Robert P. George objects to Tiller's killing on the basis that "we are a nation of laws". But are we? When was the "law" permitting the murder of fully grown infants passed, and who voted for it? Of course, no such thing happened. There is no such "law", and the government endorsement of such actions did not happen in a lawful manner. There were merely a handful of guys in robes who went outside their job description to declare it so, and everyone else followed. It's a mere expression of power by the strong against the weak, like Hitler's, or the brigands dominating some town in the Wild West before the lawman comes to stop them. The mere fact that they have power doesn't transform their raw will into legitimate law.
Some people think that this lawless no-mans-land will be fixed in a lawful manner, and worry that Roede's actions endanger the peaceful resolution that was about to be arrived at. If we really are close to achieving a government that strives for justice on this issue, or that at least operates in a lawful manner, then I can appreciate that argument from a practical standpoint. But I am not so optimistic. As I see it, we're getting a government that's ever more remote from answerability to the people.
I think that those pro-lifers need to accept the fact that responsibility and guilt are not zero sum games. It's possible for both the victim and perpetrator to be 100% guilty in their own right. In this case, if Tiller had never performed partial birth abortions the odds are insignificant that Roeder would have targeted him over any other abortionist. The fact that he engaged in a practice that even many pro-choicers admit is infanticide, and made good money doing it, made him a target. I think that justice can easily be satisfied by having both men wind up dead.
I agree that both people can be 100% guilty, but I'm not sure that they are in this case.
Let's look at another example. Say that our government had gone mad, and that the courts had released Ted Bundy to the streets, and not only that, but had declared that murder of women was legal for him, that he had free reign to kill, and that they would not prosecute him no matter what.
In such a situation, if somebody had killed Bundy to protect his future targets, do you think any sane person would consider that person a murderer? I don't. Would anybody argue that it was a tragedy because it "didn't give Bundy a chance to repent" or say that it wasn't really defense because Bundy wasn't actively murdering a woman at the particular moment he was killed? Again, no and no.
Quite reasonably, people would understand that you give Bundy a chance to repent *after* he has been caught and removed as a threat, and that if the proper authorities refuse to do so, you must do what you must. And the fact that he wasn't murdering at that very moment wouldn't hold water either. Clearly, he would still be in the midst of his murder spree. It's irresponsible to wait for the next body to drop before removing the killer.
Would anybody argue that the killing of Bundy under such circumstances was not justice, because "we are a nation of laws", and law had, rightly or wrongly, been decided in his favor? No, people would quite sensibly understand that we were *not* a nation of laws, at least not where Ted Bundy was concerned, and would recognize the courts' sponsorship of him as an illegitimate power grab, not an actual law. They would recognize that the legal system had simply broken down in this area, that it was a chaotic legal no-man's land as a result, and that (as with the Wild West), when there is no law and order or system of justice, it is necessary for citizens to step up and establish justice.
The way you and I think about this Ted Bundy nightmare scenario is the same way people would have thought about Tiller and partial-birth abortion 50+ years ago. Had somebody at the time started killing babies during the birth process, and had the courts cravenly refused to prosecute, he would've been dead before he made down the steps of the courthouse, and the person who did it would be a hero.
The only reason it's different is that we've been lulled into complacency, because the abortion regime has been built up little by little, adding successively more outrageous practices over time, while the pro-life movement continues to hold on to the desperate belief that they will overturn the illegitimately enforced will of 7 renegade justices using legitimate means any day now.
As an aside, far more sickening than Tiller's killing, in my opinion, is therapeutic garbage like this from emasculated Christians. Roeder's act was worse than Tiller's multiple murders of innocent children, because it didn't give him a chance to repent of the actions he was still engaging in daily? Really? And where was he going to repent? At the "church" that happily condoned his actions? Tiller was a brother in Christ, "bound to our union of faith forever? Please, gag me with a spoon.
The difference between Tiller and Bundy is different in a practical and public order way, not in a moral manner. It's just enough that it leaves me gritting my teeth saying "ehhhhh I don't think Tiller has quite crossed that line." See, here's the difference. Bundy was like a wild, rabid animal that went around targeting random people. Tiller was like a hitman. If no one went to him for his services, he'd stop killing. Furthermore, his services are popular with or supported by a lot of people, which poses a threat of disruption to civil society if people engage in vigilantism against him.
All I can say beyond that is that I agree with you that abortion inherently undermines the rule of law on par with a level commonly associated with vigilantism.