An American hero.
"I chose to become an abortion doctor
because abortion is the single greatest issue
of civil rights and personal freedom for women."
- George Tiller, August 8, 1941 to May 31, 2009
I don't normally get upset over current events. Annoyed, disgusted, angry, even enraged, sure. But right now I wish I could cry, except that I'm too tired and somewhat in shock.Dr. George Tiller, who remained one of the nation's few providers of late-term abortions despite decades of protests and attacks, was shot and killed Sunday in a church where he was serving as an usher.
I'm not religious, not even Christian ... but they shot him in the foyer of his church.
In his church.
What good Christians they are.The gunman fled, but a 51-year-old suspect was arrested some 170 miles away in suburban Kansas City three hours after the shooting, Wichita Deputy Police Chief Tom Stolz said.
Another article:Tiller, 67, was shot once just after 10 a.m. in the lobby of Reformation Lutheran Church at 7601 E. 13th St., where he was a member of the congregation...There were three or four eyewitnesses, he said. Six to 12 people were in the foyer at the time of the shooting.
Two men attempted to apprehend the suspect, but he pointed a gun at them and threatened them before fleeing, Stolz said.
Any wingnut or mealy-mouthed "I'm pro-choice, but..." type who wrings their hands over late-term abortions should read this op-ed from 2004. Ultrasound showed that the author's fetus had an unclosed spinal column.Instead of cinnamon and spice, our child came with technical terms like hydrocephalus and spina bifida. The spine, she said, had not closed properly, and because of the location of the opening, it was as bad as it got. What they knew -- that the baby would certainly be paralyzed and incontinent, that the baby's brain was being tugged against the opening in the base of the skull and the cranium was full of fluid -- was awful. What they didn't know -- whether the baby would live at all, and if so, with what sort of mental and developmental defects -- was devastating. Countless surgeries would be required if the baby did live. None of them would repair the damage that was already done.
Gretchen Voss chose to abort.I wrote my doctor a long thank-you note on my good, wedding stationery. I thanked him for his compassion and his kindness. I wrote that it must be hard, what he does, but that I hoped he found consolation in the fact that he was helping vulnerable women in their most vulnerable of times. He keeps my note, along with all the others he's received, in a large bundle. And he keeps that bundle right next to his stack of hate mail. They are about the same size.
bites_the_sun, from whom I got the photo of and quote from Tiller above, calls his killer a terrorist. He is, and all who aided and abetted him are guilty of aiding and abetting terrorism.
Dana Houle agrees (bold is my emphasis):Even if he only provided more common family planning and abortion services, Tiller would have been subject to tremendous pressure in Wichita, Kansas. But as a provider of late-term abortions, he was a major target of domestic terrorists. In 1985 his clinic was bombed. In 1993, he was shot in both arms by Shelly Shannon, whose arrest eventually exposed a far right domestic terrorist network called the Army of God. Earlier this month Tiller reported damage to his clinic, including sliced wires to surveillance cameras.
Today the rightwing domestic terrorists finally succeeded in assassinating Tiller...Surely whichever terrorist committed this assassination, and whichever fellow-terrorists may have been involved in planning and perpetrating the act, will claim that their murder in a church was done to enact God's will.
I want to see Obama nail Operation Rescue and their ilk to the wall. As champloo4u, a Wichita resident and long-time observer of these pieces of shit says, there's no way in hell the shooter didn't have connections to OR or similar groups. Eric Rudolph stayed at large for as long as he did because, in part, there was no shortage of people willing to hide him and feed him.
The PATRIOT ACT and other anti-terror legislation of the last decade might be bad law, but as long as it's in place, and as long as we're locking up brown people and throwing away the key without even trying them, then we ought to be putting these Operation Rescue scum under the jail.
Oh, and shit like this really challenges my commitment to free speech. The dKos commenter links to a blogger who wrote, "Dr. George Tiller aborted! Late term. [...] This happy event is the beginning of the re norming of America." That blogger has since taken down that content and is claiming that the DHS has labeled him a "suspected terrorist." This is my sympathetic face. No, really.
Finally (for now), what the fuck, AP? And apparently CNN and other news outlets are carrying the same "story." Fuck them and their concern trolling for the wingnuts, and fuck any brainwashed dumbfuck who still thinks the mainstream media is "liberal."
Unfiltered, and unlocked. And purposefully not LJ-cut.