Evangelicals Respond to The Death of Abortion Doctor George Tiller

Jim

Tue, 06/02/09 12:25 pm

“Conservative hate speech”?

NYTimes: Doctor’s Killer Is Not Alone in the Blame, Some Say

Within hours of the shooting that left Dr. Tiller dead on Sunday, Mr. O’Reilly found himself under attack from liberal journalists and bloggers who accused him of inciting violence. By early Monday, some Web sites were asking, as a newsletter from the Air America radio network did, “Is Bill O’Reilly to Blame for Murder Of Kansas Doctor?”

Mr. O’Reilly responded to the critics on his program on Monday night, saying that “clear-thinking Americans should condemn” the killing. He defended his remarks about Dr. Tiller, declaring that “every single thing we said about Tiller was true, and my analysis was based on those facts.”

Finger-pointing is nothing new, but the nature of the accusations thrown at Mr. O’Reilly show the swiftness and vociferousness with which the blame game is now played.

Within nine hours of Dr. Tiller’s death, Salon magazine had catalogued references to him on 29 episodes of “The O’Reilly Factor” from 2005 to 2009. In one, Mr. O’Reilly talks about him and the lawmakers who supported his “business of destruction,” saying, “I wouldn’t want to be these people if there is a Judgment Day.”

Bloggers quickly found new examples of Mr. O’Reilly’s condemnation of Dr. Tiller. A commenter on Daily Kos noted that Mr. O’Reilly once sent a producer to ambush the doctor at his home in Kansas. After the producer told him that some people called him a “baby killer,” the doctor tried to leave his house and called 911. The camera crew ended the confrontation.

On Monday, Media Matters for America, a left-wing group that catalogs what it calls “conservative hate speech,” published a 2006 clip from Mr. O’Reilly’s radio show in which he said, “If I could get my hands on Tiller,” followed quickly by: “Well, you know. Can’t be vigilantes. Can’t do that. It’s just a figure of speech.”

Entire article is worthwhile.

Article concludes:

Burt Neuborne, a professor of law at New York University and a former legal director for the American Civil Liberties Union, said that while the debate was not new, “the ability to technologically call up snippets of speech” is.

Mr. Neuborne said that a commentator’s language, no matter how colorful, generally cannot be treated as an incitement unless it directly instructs individuals to commit violence.

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Jim

Tue, 06/02/09 1:20 pm

In my view, the wrong response

Former SBC officer says Tiller murder answer to prayer

Excerpt:

While most pro-life leaders condemned the May 31 murder of a controversial abortion provider inside his Wichita, Kan., church, one former Southern Baptist Convention official called it an answer to prayer.

“I am glad George Tiller is dead,” Wiley Drake, the SBC’s former second vice president, said on his Crusade Radio program June 1.

Tiller, one of only a few doctors in America who still performed a controversial late-term procedure termed “partial-birth” abortion by critics, was gunned down in the foyer of Reformation Lutheran Church just after the morning worship service began. He was serving as an usher for the congregation, where he was a long-time member.

Drake, pastor of First Southern Baptist Church in Buena Park, Calif., called Tiller “a brutal, murdering monster” and said he is “grateful to God” that the physician is no longer around.

“There may be a lot who would say, ‘Oh that is mean. You shouldn’t be that way,’” Drake said. “Well, no, it’s an answer to prayer.”

Drake said he prayed nearly 10 years for the salvation of Tiller, medical director of the Women’s Health Care Services clinic and an outspoken advocate for abortion rights. About a year ago, Drake said, he switched to what he called “imprecatory prayer.”

“I said to the Lord, ‘Lord I pray back to you the Psalms, where it says that they are to become widowers and their children are to become orphans and so forth.’ And we began calling for those imprecatory prayers, because he had obviously turned his back on God again and again and again,” Drake said.

Drake called Tiller “a reprobate” and a “brutal, arrogant murderer” who “bragged on his own website how many babies he had killed.”

“Would you have rejoiced when Adolf Hitler died during the war?” Drake asked. “Or would you have said, ‘Oh that is terrible for him to be killed’? No, I would have said, ‘Amen, praise the Lord, hallelujah, I’m glad he’s dead.’”

“This man, George Tiller, was far greater in his atrocities than Adolf Hitler,” Drake said. “So I am happy. I am glad that he is dead. Now I am sad that he went to hell, because he had a choice just like everybody else did. He could have chosen Jesus Christ and when he died went to heaven. But he chose the devil. He chose to neglect, he chose to reject Jesus Christ. And therefore on Sunday morning when he breathed his last breath there in the Lutheran church, he breathed his last breath, and he slipped into the presence of the devil. And I have a strange hunch and a strange feeling that there is a special, superheated, super-hot place in hell for people like George Tiller.”