Here’s a round-up of some remembrances of Dr. Tiller from around the internet. They’re almost unbearably heartbreaking stories and well worth reading.
I’m still not quite sure what you’re getting at, Jason. I’m not saying the anti-abortion crowd are wrong to condemn the murder of an abortion doctor. I’m saying that the contrast between that condemnation and their usual rhetoric seems cognitively dissonant. That’s all.
Yep. You can’t genuinely believe that “abortion is murder” and at the same time condemn what this man did, because if abortion is murder, then this man did just put away a mass-murderer.
By the same token, Pro-Choice activists go too far when they say “it’s MY body.” Well, no, it’s IN your body, but that thing in your body is something else, and if it weren’t for the placenta, the mother’s immune system will be all over it. (And if the placenta isn’t doing its job or the mother has an immunological disease, this actually happens and can cause miscarriage. Related: preeclampsia.)
What I think most people can agree on is that this is a case that shows how ridiculous and far out of hand the rhetoric about the whole thing has gotten.
Erm, since when is it moral to commit vigilante justice? If you grant the priors that he appears to be a murder (which is not exactly straightforward, but whatever), it no more follows you have an obligation to kill him than you have an obligation to hunt down unindicted criminals.
It’s largely the same problem as John Brown - was it moral to kill a bunch of slaveowners to free their slaves? Especially when slavery is legal? The usual answer is “no.”
Since the Old Testament, I think.
I fail to see how this is in contrast to what I’ve been saying.
The contrast is I don’t see how it’s cognitive dissonance at all. I personally think society’s treatment of its poor is appallingly immoral, but that doesn’t give me the right to go around killing people to rectify it, and there’s nothing conflicting about that. Society has rules for disagreeing.
At some point it obviously breaks down and you either separate from society or have a revolution, but the anti-abortion people never act like they think it’s that big of a deal.
Jason, in both of those counter-examples you list, nobody is dying. In THIS example, at least if you believe the rhetoric, people ARE dying – innocents, no less.
That said, I’m not entirely disagreeing with you; two wrongs don’t make a right.
None of your previous comments required on it being a symmetrical crime, Mr. epicycles. :)
If it’s a single murder, you might have a case. However, given the rhetoric they did use (“Holocaust”, “hitlerian”, “mass-murder”, etc.) they well & truly do have a moral obligation to commit vigilante justice. Just as I applaud the White Rose Society that attempted to violently oppose the evil of the nazis, I should applaud the murder of Dr. Tiller if I believe that his actions are “hitlerian” and “mass-murder”. To do anything other than applaud such violent opposition (since non-violent opposition has failed) would be the worst form of hypocrisy.
Of course, that means that if you don’t think the murder of Dr. Tiller is a laudable thing, then you shouldn’t use such extreme language.
BTW, here’s some more info about this disgusting crime. It turns out Operation Rescue (the group which Randall Terry heads) was somewhat involved with the killer. God, I hope these people hang. (metaphorically or by due process of law)
I understand what you are arguing, but it is still possible to retain an ethical adherence to nonviolence even in the face of acts that you believe are absolutely intolerable. Nonviolence is not necessarily a passive choice, and it can definitely include an element that condemns violence when it serves your cause.
However, I don’t believe the backhanded condemnations of Tiller’s murderer reflect that, so in this case you are correct. But I would be wary of trying to draw a more broadly applicable lesson from it.
I think that covers it perfectly.
NPR had some guy from the Army of God on this morning to talk about justifiable homicide. They just interviewed him like they were giving the other side of the story. I guess the Army of God sure is the other side of the story, since they believe in justifiable homicide. I was just flabbergasted and furrrrrious.
If you think Operation Rescue is bad, Army of God is like in a league of its own in terms of scary fucking shit. [Inflammatory language alert] It was like they just interviewed some Al Qaeda members, like it was no big deal.[/inflammatory language alert] Alright, sorry, now I got that out of my system.
The key difference is that Al Qaeda has concrete, demonstrable grievances* well in proportion to the response they have engineered, whereas there is much less consensus about the Army of God’s rationale for violence. And, of course, they run into the problem that conditions in the US are simply not as favorable for homegrown violent extremism to be strategically effective.
But I don’t think your comparison is outrageous.
*see: any Al Qaeda message, or the Michael Scheuer recaps in Imperial Hubris and other works. The two sides to the history of western intervention in the middle east can be boiled down to “this is a goddamned travesty” and “this is a goddamned travesty that we will attempt to euphemize away and contain via further meddling”. But the travesty itself is not really up for debate by most informed observers.
If your rhetoric describes something as an evil on the scale of the Holocaust, how can you possibly not be advocating an immediate extreme violent response to oppose it? If you’re telling people that what’s going on is as bad as, as evil as the holocaust, you are telling those people that they have a moral responsibility to stop it by any means necessary. The fact that the majority of their listeners either rationalize that away or lack the courage to act on those convictions in no way changes the fact that it’s an extreme message that implicitly advocates violent response. To claim that they mean every word of their rhetoric, but that someone following it to the logical moral conclusion is insane and they disavow them - that’s craven political maneuvering, or it’s despicable hypocrisy.
Absolutely. Pacificism is a viable outlook. However, if you’re not a pacifist, and you’re facing something as extremely evil as the Holocaust, you’re obligated to to offer resistance. Up to & including violent resistance. Anything less is a moral failure.
It’s a perfectly valid comparison. Both are extremist religious groups seeking violent means to resolve their disputes.
Well, there’s the whole Ghandi approach: We feel that what you are doing is wrong, but we so abhor violence that we will not lower ourselves to your level in order to prevent it.
It’s fine to believe that there are non-violent means to end violent acts. And it’s not at all hypocritical. Believe it or not, quatoria, but some people believe that even mass-murderers should be spared the death penalty as well!
I think that’s already been covered in this thread, so I’ll just hit the two bullet points that capture my take on the topic.
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Nonviolent responses to heinous evil are quite defensible and appropriate.
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Even in the context of response to heinous evil, there’s still such a thing as a disproportionate response.
I’m sorry, but those are ridiculous contortions to attempt to support a position you’re sympathetic to. For a group to claim that abortion is an evil on the scale of the holocaust, a systemic act of ongoing mass-murder that must be stopped at any cost, and then claim that they’re only referring to peaceful political agitation - it’s laughable. These are the same groups that hunt down the home addresses of abortion doctors and publish them. I assume you think that they do this so their members can sit down and have a serious heart to heart about the merits of their position. They’re culpable in this act, their rhetoric fueled this act, and as long as they continue to incite their base with this extreme rhetoric, this will not be the last murder done in their name.
Particularly when so many people are clearly satisfied with their ridiculous PR spin of ‘oh what an unfortunate tragedy, dude’s crazy, nothing to do with us!’
Where did I say I was sympathetic to it?
Did you skip your pain meds today? You seem a little overexcited on this topic.