I don't believe you do. If you thought that, you would be in jail with Roeder. So would I. I can mouth that kind of rhetoric all day long. It is easy to say, but if you really believed that abortion is equal to the killing of your own children, then no law on earth would stop you from making sure it did not happen again.
Obviously Roeder believed it.
I don't.
Neither do you.
Please don't speak for me.
If you thought that, you would be in jail with Roeder.
No. There are a lot of people who believe that abortion is murder but who don't believe that it is on them to take unilateral vendetta action on murderers.
There are a lot of people who believe that murder of an adult is murder, but they don't go and perform vigilante justice for that either.
The analogue of what you suggest is for me to go out and unilaterally put a cap in every gang banger I run into...after all, many of them will commit murder at some point in their lives.
but if you really believed that abortion is equal to the killing of your own children, then no law on earth would stop you from making sure it did not happen again.
If I saw somebody who presented an immediate threat to my daughter, I would do what I need to do to prevent it from happening, that is true.
That doesn't mean that I would eliminate any potential threat to her before it had a chance to be manifested.
For example, if somebody she knew made a death threat against her, I would contact the police as well as go to court and petition for a restraining order. If I thought the threat was extremely credible and imminent, I would make sure that she presented the minimal target possible (for example, lie down in the back seat of the car so as not to be observed, don't go out in public, don't stand in front of a window, etc.). We might even go to the degree of disappearing.
However, the only way I would use lethal force is if somebody had a gun drawn on her, a knife at her neck, or the like.
And I would hope that you would have a similar reaction.
The difference between people like you and I and Tiller's killer is that you and I have a basic ethical framework from which to operate. I would submit that Tiller's Killer does not have that basic ethical framework. And likely he felt perfectly justified to pursue an illicit means to achieve what he believed to be a good end.
No matter what your rhetoric here, I don't believe that you have that twisted view of the world.
You raise an excellent question, but give your answer in a series of false dichotomies.
Let's deal with this one first. Forgive me for paraphrasing you a little, but what I understand you to say, in part, runs roughly as:
- If one believes that abortion is murder, one will praise Mr. Roeder, and indeed, will kill an abortionist oneself, and wind up, along with Mr. Roeder, in jail. If one does NOT kill abortionists, then one doesn't believe that abortion is murder.
I disagree.
I believe abortion is murder.
But there could be two or three reasons why I don't kill abortionists:
1. I'm a coward (a not altogether unlikely conclusion, at least in my case). Although I might have the physical courage to kill someone, perhaps I don't have the courage to endure the penalties that society will impose upon me for my otherwise courageous act. I have no wish to spend much or all of the rest of my life in a maximum security prison. I have no wish to see my life otherwise ruined, my family ruined, the loss of my business (which is the support of my family), and the consequent loss of our home and all the good things that I provide for my family precisely because I'm not a convicted felon in prison.
2. I believe that the act is mostly futile. Although I may save a few babies from being killed, I see that other times, when abortionists have been killed, abortion went on at the very same clinic. Thus, perhaps a few babies may be saved, or perhaps the women who would have had this particular abortionist kill them on particular dates will go elsewhere and procure the killing of their children, on another day.
Against that, against maybe saving a few lives, or maybe not, I take prison, ruin and grievous harm to my family.
As well, there are folks who go to give witness outside abortion clinics. Many of these folks have, by their witness, persuaded many young women not to procure the murder of their babies. It may be that these particular people are far more effective OUT of prison than IN it.
3. I believe that killing an abortionist will likely help prolong the legality of abortion, if only by one more day. Killing one abortionist will not save the four thousand children murdered in a single day.
Let's face it - the way that the killing of an abortionist is played in the mass media, it does harm to the cause of life. Folks scream “extremist,” “vigilante,” and other, sometimes less delicate words. I know folks who view themselves as staunchly PRO-LIFE who have adopted the mantra that we pro-lifers are too mean, too extreme, perhaps even hypocritical because we want to go out and kill abortionists.
It isn't an unreasonable belief that killing abortionists in small numbers will prolong the time that abortion on demand in the United States is kept legal, and that under that legal protection, another three or four thousand babies will be killed each DAY. Personally, I can't kill enough abortionists to make up the difference there. Even if this Tiller killer was killing an average of 200 babies per month, even if absolutely no abortion that he would have performed would occur for a span of six months, one day's extra day of legal abortion on demand would triple the number of lives he would have killed in six months.
There - three reasons why someone who believes that abortion is murder might not the less not kill abortionists.
There are other issues that play into the question, and I think that your arguments present other false dichotomies, but this post is for this particular argument - that one must either kill abortionists or one cannot believe that abortion is murder.
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