Having it Both Ways

It has taken me a day to write something about the assassination of Dr. Tiller, a provider of late-term abortions because I was reviewing many of the on- and off-line responses to it in comparison with rhetoric previously espoused by the same individuals or groups.

I have a few questions.

1. How can a broadcaster name Dr. Tiller 28 times in his broadcasts, using terms like, "he has blood on his hands" and then disavow any responsibility in his killing? How can anti-choice organizations now condemn this act when their rhetoric created the environment for it to happen? How can the very people who would like to ban obscenity and pornography due to their deleterious effects on society (ie, speech influences people negatively), now claim that their speech and actions did not have that same effect?

2. Why does the pro-life movement not just change its name to what it really is: Pro-Fetus.

3. Do any of the people protesting Dr. Tiller's clinic and demonizing Dr. Tiller understand--on a personal and painful level--what he does? Do they really think it's 18 year old welfare queens claiming "mental distress" getting all the late-term abortions? Why not read aheartbreakingchoice.com, where actual, normal, just-like-you-and-me families write of their anguish as they learned their unborn baby would suffer and die within days of birth, or would require 3 surgeries before the age of one, only to prepare it for heart transplantation by age 5, if the child survived the initial surgeries? What about the priest who counseled the family that they were not killing their baby, they were simply deciding the time? It's easy to forget in all the rhetoric that real families and real pain are involved in the decision, especially late-term. Groups that reduce it to anything less than that show, as I said, concern for fetuses but not for born humans who wish to spare that baby a short life of suffering.

4. If the man who shot the army sergeant in Arkansas is an "Islamic militant" why is the murderer of Dr. Tiller not a "Christian militant"? Or would that be unfair to paint all people of a single faith with the same brush?

5. How can the United States allow doctors to live in fear while performing a LEGAL procedure that, by HIPAA regulations, one would assume is confidential. How is it okay for American citizens to use violence to intimidate, harass and--yes--terrorize other American citizens based on their differing religious and social beliefs? How can this be happening, where a legal procedure is becoming essentially extinct simply because the providers live in fear for their lives? How do we allow this to happen in Germany 1939, I mean, the USA 2009?

Just asking.