{"id":511,"date":"2009-05-31T20:36:26","date_gmt":"2009-05-31T20:36:26","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/blog.beliefnet.com\/pontifications\/2009\/05\/tiller-killing-suspects-may-ha.html"},"modified":"2009-05-31T20:36:26","modified_gmt":"2009-05-31T20:36:26","slug":"tiller-killing-suspects-may-ha","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/pontifications\/2009\/05\/tiller-killing-suspects-may-ha.html","title":{"rendered":"Tiller killing: Suspect may have right-wing ties"},"content":{"rendered":"

Local TV reports<\/strong><\/a> are naming the 51-year-old suspect as Scott Roeder, and other reports<\/a> indicate he may have been a member of the anti-government Freemen group <\/a>who was arrested in 1996 after authorities found what were apparently bomb-making materials in his car. <\/p>\n

News reports at the time identified him as Scott Roeder, 38, of Silver Lake, Kan., which would make him 51 today, the same age as the suspect in the Tiller killing<\/a>. Other reports are tying him to anti-abortion groups like Operation Rescue whose site, including its “Tiller Watch,” is down), but no confirmation on that, and the links appear thin; he may have posted comments on the site, e.g. <\/p>\n

The Daily Kos folk are already pushing the TERRORIST meme<\/strong><\/a>. Others are citing the April Homeland Security Department report <\/a>on concerns about right-wing extremism that made a brief mention of anti-abortion groups. <\/p>\n

Andrew Sullivan has several good posts<\/a>, with links to the kind of language that can lead to such killings, saying, “Christianist terrorism is no more defensible than Islamist terrorism.”<\/p>\n

dotCommonweal also has a vigorous discussion<\/a> on the power of words and what this could mean for the pro-life movement–and the responsibility of everyone who is pro-life to condemn it, not just the movement types. <\/p>\n

The Wichita Eagle<\/a> continues to be all over this story. <\/p>\n

My Beliefnet colleague Rod Dreher<\/a> condemns the killing but adds, ” I would hate to be George Tiller facing judgment with those grave sins to explain.”<\/p>\n

He also has a statement from Robert George at National Review’s Corner<\/a> saying “Whoever murdered George Tiller has done a gravely wicked thing,” and ending: “Let our ‘weapons’ in the fight to defend the lives of abortion’s tiny victims, be chaste weapons of the spirit.”  <\/p>\n

It’s a race between the likes of George and the Daily Kos to see who defines this story first. Much will depend on who Scott Roeder turns out to be. But the anti-abortion folks are playing defense, and they’ve been down this road before. <\/p>\n

This statment by Operation Rescue founder Randall Terry won’t help:<\/p>\n

\n

“George Tiller was a mass-murderer. We grieve for him that he did not have time to properly prepare his soul to face God. I am more concerned that the Obama Administration will use Tiller’s killing to intimidate pro-lifers into surrendering our most effective rhetoric and actions. Abortion is still murder. And we still must call abortion by its proper name; murder.”<\/strong><\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n

Kathryn Jean Lopez<\/a>, who passes it on, also doesn’t help the cause by comparing Terry to legit Muslim advocacy gorups. Huh?<\/p>\n

\n

What George Tiller did was evil and that should not be glossed over or sugarcoated. But here Randall Terry is doing exactly what CAIR does. When someone dies at the hands of a Muslim, CAIR rushes to warn the rest of us not to use it as an excuse to scapegoat Islam. <\/p>\n

An evil thing has happened–a man has been killed–and to jump to points of politics and media criticism is wrong. Evil begot more of it here.<\/strong><\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n

More to come…<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Local TV reports are naming the 51-year-old suspect as Scott Roeder, and other reports indicate he may have been a member of the anti-government Freemen group who was arrested in 1996 after authorities found what were apparently bomb-making materials in his car. 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He came by all those vocations by accident, or Providence, during a longer-than-expected sojourn in Rome in the 1980s. Gibson began his journalistic career as a walk-on sports editor and columnist at The International Courier, a small daily in Rome serving Italy's English-language community. He then found a job as a newscaster and writer across the Tiber at the English Programme at Vatican Radio, an entity he describes as a cross between NPR and Armed Forces Radio for the pope. The Jesuits who ran the radio were charitable enough to hire Gibson even though he had no radio background, could not pronounce the name \"Karol Wojtyla,\" and wasn't Catholic. Time and experience overcame all those challenges, and Gibson went on to cover dozens of John Paul II's overseas trips, including papal visits to Africa, Europe, Latin America and the United States. When Gibson returned to the United States in 1990 he returned to print journalism to cover the religion beat in his native New Jersey for two dailies. He worked first for The Record of Hackensack, and then for The Star-Ledger of New Jersey, winning the nation's top awards in religion writing at both places. In 1999 he won the Supple Religion Writer of the Year contest, and in 2000 he was chosen as the Templeton Religion Reporter of the Year. Gibson is a longtime board member of the Religion Newswriters Association and he is a contributor to ReligionLink, a service of the Religion Newswriters Foundation. Since 2003, David Gibson has been an independent writer specializing in Catholicism, religion in contemporary America, and early Christian history. His work has appeared in The New York Times, The Wall Street Journal, Fortune, Boston Magazine, Commonweal, America, The New York Observer, Beliefnet and Religion News Service. He has produced documentaries on early Christianity for CNN and other networks and has traveled on assignment to dozens of countries, with an emphasis on reporting from Europe and the Middle East. He is a frequent television commentator and has appeared on the major cable and broadcast networks. He is also a regular speaker at conferences and seminars on Catholicism, religion in America, and journalism. Gibson's first book, The Coming Catholic Church: How the Faithful are Shaping a New American Catholicism (HarperSanFrancisco), was published in 2003 and deals with the church-wide crisis revealed by the clergy sexual abuse crisis. The book was widely hailed as a \"powerful\" and \"first-rate\" treatment of the crisis from \"an academically informed journalist of the highest caliber.\" His second book, The Rule of Benedict: Pope Benedict XVI and His Battle with the Modern World (HarperSanFrancisco), came out in 2006 and is the first full-scale treatment of the Ratzinger papacy--how it happened, who he is, and what it means for the Catholic Church. The Rule of Benedict has been praised as \"an exceptionally interesting and illuminating book\" from \"a master storyeller.\" Born and raised in New Jersey, David Gibson studied European history at Furman University in South Carolina and spent a year working on Capitol Hill before moving to Italy. He lives in Brooklyn with his wife and daughter and is working on a book about conversion, and on several film and television projects.","url":"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/pontifications\/author\/dgibson"}]}},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/pontifications\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/511","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/pontifications\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/pontifications\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/pontifications\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/128"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/pontifications\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=511"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/pontifications\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/511\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/pontifications\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=511"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/pontifications\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=511"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/pontifications\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=511"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}