The Tiller Murder Wasn't a Lone Killer's Sick Plot; It Came Out of the Radical Anti-Abortion Movement

By Jill Filipovic, Comment Is Free. Posted June 1, 2009.

When you convince your followers that abortion providers are the equivalent of SS officers slaughtering innocents by the millions, tell them that "it's all-out WAR" against pro-choicers and then provide the home addresses and personal information of the "monster" "late-term baby-killer" abortion providers you're supposedly at war against, you can't act surprised when those followers conclude that it's morally justified to use the information to kill doctors.

These are not fringe groups. Conservative television personality Bill O'Reilly called Tiller's clinic a "death mill", referred to Tiller as a "baby killer" who was "executing babies about to be born" and said Tiller was doing "Nazi stuff" for which he "had blood on his hands".

Frank Pavone, a Roman Catholic priest, member of James Dobson's Focus on the Family and director of Priests for Life, posted a YouTube video on Sunday to say that he "abhors" the violence committed against Tiller but "we just don't know and we shouldn't jump to conclusions" in assuming that an anti-choice terrorist may have murdered Tiller -- although, he concedes, someone may have assassinated him "in order to stop Tiller from killing more babies". He continued: "When we talk about abortion, we are taking about killing. There's no two ways about it. ... This is a massive holocaust, it is killing."

Pavone is chummy with Operation Rescue founder Randall Terry, who had this to say about Tiller's assassination:

George Tiller was a mass-murderer. We grieve for him that he did not have time to properly prepare his soul to face God. I am more concerned that the Obama administration will use Tiller's killing to intimidate pro-lifers into surrendering our most effective rhetoric and actions. Abortion is still murder. And we still must call abortion by its proper name: murder.

Those men and women who slaughter the unborn are murderers according to the law of God. We must continue to expose them in our communities and peacefully protest them at their offices and homes, and yes, even their churches.

That's some definition of "peacefully protesting".

The prime suspect in Tiller's murder appears to have frequented the Operation Rescue website (which had it's own "Tiller Watch" section), and took part in some of those "peaceful protests" that anti-choicers hold so dear. Far from a random extremist, he appears to have been fairly entrenched in the anti-choice movement.

And if he is the person who murdered Tiller, he isn't alone among pro-lifers who embrace Terry's directive that "If you think abortion is murder, act like it." (After all, Terry has posited, "Wouldn't it have been OK to kill Hitler if you knew you could save millions of Jews?").

See more stories tagged with: abortion, choice, radicals, late-term abortion, extremists, george tiller, randall terry, frank pavone

Jill Filipovic is a lawyer in Manhattan who formerly served as the Gender and Reproductive Justice editor at AlterNet. More of her writing is available online at her blog, Feministe.

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