Scott Roeder, a "person of interest," in the murder of George Tiller, M.D. allegedly has a history of mental illness. Friends of his reported said he was a good ol' boy but was an anti-abortion fanatic.
The murder of Dr. Tiller, who provided women with late term abortions, comes close to a Washington Post article that asks if "extreme bias" or extreme attitudes about race, homophobia, and I suppose other notions that we would call, as Richard Hofstadter did, "the paranoid style" in American politics is a mental illness or more mildly a personality disorder. Do we have to limit it to politics? How about life issues?
Those people that you run into in your day to day life may really be as disturbed as you think they are.
Abortion is a constitutionally protected right. Equal rights for women means an equal ability to regulate reproduction. Men cannot be forced to be biological fathers. If women are going to be equal before the law then the government cannot force them to be biological mothers. Or carry a fetus to term if the pregnancy will kill her.
So "pro-lifers" are for killing doctors who provide late term abortions. They aren't pro-life. They are anti-equality for women. They fear that women will have an equal place in society, in employment, in reproduction. They don't want women to make their own choices, their own lives. Because these anti-equality types don't believe that there is enough pie to go around. If God made woman from Adam's rib then what else will women want to make on their own? It must come out of men, right?
How can a person dialogue with a person who will kill a man who is helping terminate a crisis pregnancy? The Attorney General has now sent federal marshals to protect Dr. Tiller's colleagues. Empty barn, meet the new lock on the door. Of course President Bush wouldn't send marshals but neither would states' attorneys generals. Because government officials court the lunatic fringe vote, too.
There is no dialogue with deeply mentally disturbed persons. There is protecting them from themselves and protecting others from them. How would that commencement speech at Notre Dame go down now?
This isn't a free speech issue, either. Anti-equality protesters like Bill O'Reilly and the professional, organized misogynists like Operation Rescue would like people to believe that they have a right to call doctors like George Tiller, "murderers" with "blood on their hands." But speech means responsibility and does not mean the incitement of violence against another human being. And when abortion providers are murdered, the surging God like power these murderers or misogynists feel must be enormous.
