Jun 5, 2009 
The Justice Department said today that the feds are investigating the murder of Dr. George Tiller.
The agency “will work tirelessly to determine the full involvement of any and all actors in this horrible crime, and to ensure that anyone who played a role in the offense is prosecuted to the full extent of federal law,” said Loretta King, an acting assistant attorney general at the department.
I’m hearing from various sources, none official, that suspect Scott Roeder had long and more-than-casual association with a number of right-wing groups, in particular Operation Save America, which seems to be some kind of offshoot of Operation Rescue. Hmm.
Ellen Goodman produced a powerful piece of writing on the “myth of the lone shooter.”
IT IS believed that the shooter acted alone. … But Michael Griffin also acted alone when he killed David Gunn in 1993. Paul Hill acted alone when he killed John Britton in 1994. John Salvi acted alone and so did Eric Rudolph and James Kopp. This suspect is hardly lonely in this murderous cast of lone actors.
It was an isolated incident.
So it was. There was no grand scheme of assassinations. But it was also an isolated incident when Tiller’s clinic was first bombed in 1986. It was an isolated incident when he was shot in both arms in 1993. Each anthrax threat, each invasion, even the vandalizing that took place last month at his Wichita clinic were all linked in a daisy chain of “isolated incidents.”
As Goodman says, after each of these isolated incidents the major anti-reproductive rights organizations react with shock and denounce the murder or threats. But they don’t denounce the extremist groups or the rhetoric that validates violence against abortion clinics and staff.
It seems to me that people like Michael Griffin and Paul Hill were not isolated at all. They are cocooned in an extremist culture that permits — nay, encourages and celebrates — thoughts, words and actions that hurt abortion providers and intimidate their patients. And any part of the anti-reproductive rights movement that tolerates that culture, that refuses to condemn it, is feeding the passions that lead to murder.
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