The Murder of James Pouillon

Yesterday afternoon I was online, and I got a message from a friend. Apparently a man who was known in his hometown as the 'sign man' because he was so frequently seen demonstrating with a giant pro-life sign had been shot to death while protesting. It took a few hours for the national media to pick up the story, but when they did, the headline on the New York Times page read, 'Man Killed Over Anti-Abortion Stance'. That man was James Pouillon.

As it turned out, he wasn't the only one who was murdered. Harlan Drake killed two people yesterday. After the first shooting, Drake sought out Michael Fuoss at his business and shot and killed him too. They allegedly had a financial dispute. Drake is believed to have intended to kill a third person, but the police caught him before he was able to do so.

Prosecutors gave a statement which said that Drake had been angered by Pouillon's protest, and had killed him because of it. After Scott Roeder murdered George Tiller, many within the pro-choice community condemned not just Roeder himself, but also the pro-life movement at large which they felt contributed to the death by using inflammatory rhetoric. They also contended that the pro-life community either was not sufficiently condemning the act or that the condemnations showed too little vehemence. It will be interesting to watch the reactions to yesterday's event.

-My sympathies to the friends and family of James Pouillon and Michael Fuoss.-

The Murder of George Tiller

Not long ago, I had an idea for a new pro-life group. I found some people who have expressed an interest in it, and I've been planning on creating a web site. I wanted to make something that wouldn't look amateurish, and that meant that I couldn't just throw it together in an afternoon. I've put it off because I have been quite unwell recently, and when I've had the energy to work on something it always seemed like other things needed to take priority. On Sunday, however, I was listening to All Things Considered and I heard this story. I feel that if I want to participate in the conversation on the abortion issue in the future, then I cannot stay silent today- which is why I'm starting this blog.

I feel very strongly that treating human lives as disposable because they have not yet developed enough to meet some arbitrary criterion is fundamentally immoral. Seven men decided that there was a fundamental right to privacy which compelled the government to allow the 'termination' of prenatal lives in all 50 states, and as a result I have lived my entire life in a country where the justice system actively promotes injustice. On an intellectual level, I find this to be pretty appalling- but this is an issue which is difficult to view solely from an intellectual perspective. I have to admit that this is a situation that can make me pretty angry. It's an anger which is unwelcome because I think that it is counter-productive. Even 'righteous' anger tends to impair one's ability to be rational and analytical (and I value my rationality just as much as I value my integrity).

At this point, I can only speculate about the man who killed Dr. Tiller, but I suspect that he chose to embrace his anger. I suspect that he nurtured his anger over the injustice of our laws and the taking of innocent lives until he felt that he was justified in becoming a law unto himself. In doing so, he lost whatever moral authority he might previously have had. Abortion is immoral because it permits the arbitrary taking of human life- but if you violate the rule of law and end someone's life because you have personally decided that he deserves to die, then your actions are immoral for precisely the same reason.

I imagine that he was motivated by an anger that many people feel, but that in his case he encouraged that anger until he was no longer fit to live in civilized society. If I'm right, then he is a murderer. Of course, I don't know what he was thinking. There is a possibility that I could be judging him too harshly. It could be that he was mentally ill and lacked the ability to truly understand what he was doing. If that is the case, then in an odd way, he would be a kind of victim of his own crime. There is another possibility that I find very worrisome. He might have acted not out of anger or madness, but with calculation and a wish to intimidate. If that is the case, then he isn't merely a murderer; he is also a terrorist.

-My sympathies to the friends and family of Dr. George Tiller-