Nation-Building >> Tiller's killers | return to front page

The reaction to the murder of George Tiller from the pro-life community is mostly one of horror and condemnation - but there is a substantial minority who aren't quite as interested in principle so much as vengeance.

Some of the raw emotion and hatred lurking beneath the surface erupted into public, ugly view on Twitter, where pro-lifers thought nothing of praising the death of "Tiller the Killer" and tagging their posts #tcot. There's also a lot of chatter about Tiller's murderer "performing a late-term abortion" - a moral equivalence argument intended to blunt criticism.

But the lunacy is not just confined to the Twitter fringe. World Net Daily, a mainstream conservative forum, is running a poll with some truly disturbing results - I just took a screenshot and with 2264 votes, a shocking 16% approve of the "baby killer being brought to justice", praising Tiller's murderer as a "righteous hero" or applauding the fact that the murder helps the pro-life cause because it "sends a signal to other abortionists". Another 14%, even though given other choices to denounce or disavow the murder, chose instead to lament that it was merely "bad news for the pro-life movement", in other words, more concerned with the PR aspects than the moral implications. And there's an additional 12% who admit the murder was wrong, but still "can understand how some might justify" it. This means 42% are simply unable to bring themselves to denounce this act of terrorism, full stop, as others with far more intellectual honesty have done immediately and without reservation.

Here's my screenshot of the poll results, as of this writing (with 2,337 votes). Note that you must be a registered forum member of WND to particpate. I myself voted for the first option, "Murdering any human being is wrong, period."

Labels: abortion, conservatism