RSSJustifiable Murder? Who Was George Tiller?
Gene Lalor | March 3, 2010
Ah, Bartleby! Ah, humanity! (”Bartleby the Scrivener,” Herman Melville)
That fatalistic sense of imminent doom, of forlorn despair and depression over one’s life and over the state of the human animal for different reasons must have afflicted both George Tiller and the man who killed him last May, Scott Roeder.
Roeder, according to his ex-wife, was upset over his inability to pay bills; he went from job to job seeking something, anything, that would fulfill his failed life and give it purpose.
He finally settled on what he saw as the greatest evil in America that he felt was in his power to somehow rectify: abortion. A particular purpose he embraced was fellow Kansan Tiller and Tiller’s chosen occupation of snuffing out the lives of infants in partial birth abortions.
Dr. George Tiller was living a life that was the virtual antithesis of Roeder’s, but was he any less disturbed?
A physician son of an abortionist with an inherited and successful abortion practice, he was married and active in his new church, the Reformation Lutheran Church in Wichita.
Indeed, almost every account of his murder includes within the first few paragraphs the fact he was killed while serving as an usher, handing out church bulletins in the lobby after Sunday services when Roeder accosted him, put one bullet into his eye and fled.
What’s rarely included in obituaries or articles on the slain Dr. Tiller is that he was handing out those bulletins at Reformation Lutheran because he had been excommunicated from his previous church, the Lutheran Church-Missouri Synod: http://bit.ly/awWKwL
That latter church had expelled him because of the nature of his medical practice at Women’s Health Care Services.
Tiller’s world hadn’t been devoid of violence before the church attack on May 31st, 2009. He had been shot five times by another pro-life protester sixteen years earlier http://bit.ly/9heesp.
He was no stranger to courtrooms and the legal system, either. He had been brought up on charges of killing a 19 year old woman who died of sepsis after he aborted her baby. He also had been tried and acquitted in March, 2009 of numerous charges arising from his partial birth abortion practice: http://bit.ly/d5JML3
Dr. Tiller has been compared to Martin Luther King, an inane comparison considering Tiller spent his life killing while King spent his liberating his race. That parallel was also drawn by Roeder’s defense attorney with respect to his client, which was equally inane.
I’m not about to interpret George Tiller’s motivations in choosing to devote his life to aborting pre-born babies and electing to focus on pre-borns who were close to birth, and close to becoming full-fledged human beings according to America’s laws.
He took his motives to the grave.
However, it’s worth noting that his victims were not what other abortionists refer to as gelatinous masses and undeveloped globs of tissue but rather full-grown infants who weren’t quite ready to signal their moms that they wanted to make their grand appearance on the world’s stage.
That would obviously mean they were replete with arms, legs, hungry bellies and fully-formed brains, vascular, digestive, and nervous systems–and capable of feeling pain.
They were prepared and ready to go when Dr. No, Dr. Tiller, effectively said, “Oh, no, you don’t” and began the gory process of dismembering them.
That takes a singular man, as crazy as Scott Roeder. I won’t say Tiller deserved his fate since vigilante justice can never be condoned. Nor will I say that Roeder failed in his goal since Women’s Health Services was shuttered soon after Tiller’s death.
I will say, Ah, George and Scott! Ah, humanity!
Contributor's website: http://www.genelalor.com/
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