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.
It will be a great day, a great awakening even, when people stop playing games about the fact that no one acts alone, in anything. Everyone is connected to everyone else. All of us are immersed in various cultures and subcultures of many kinds, a sea of messages and energies. The instance of the anti-reproductive rights people influencing those who are willing to act out their demonizations is but a special instance.
This Tony Auth cartoon captures your argument perfectly.
Since these are terrorist acts, why not lock them up in the same facility with the Gitmo ‘terrorists’ – let them play basketball together, exchange religious ideas, get to know each other. I am sure they would get along swell, since they have so much in common. WIth the one exception, the Christian terrorists are guilty & convicted – the Gitmo terrorists are guilty because they have beards.
Let’s see, this guy’s unemployed, yet can afford a gun, bullets, and several trips to Wichita.
Uhm, yeah, if nobody helped him, how was he able to afford any of that?
Hmmmm…I detect a pattern and I’m hardly Sherlock Holmes. I never considered myself a conspiracy theorist either, until now.
When are these groups going to be treated like the terrorists they are? Of course they don’t act alone. I bet a lot of people “loaned” him money-cash is hard to trace, knowing what he might do with it. Even if they didn’t know specifics-he had enough of a history of violent behavior to know that he was likely to do something that would have landed him in jail.
But another way to afford this just occurred to me. Most of us couldn’t afford something like this because we are trying to live a normal life. For fanatics like him, giving up everything but survival stuff is easy. Work, and stuff every extra dime besides survival into a coffee can buried in the back yard. Work 3 jobs at at time, sleeping only between shifts, eating sardines and crackers, sleeping in the car. All of that works too along with “borrowing” every dime you can from true believers, getting supplies from them, and getting a few “favors” from them too. Favors can be anything from a free hotel room to free groceries, to being allowed to sleep over at a true believer’s house. Unless he told them of his complete intentions, they probably can’t be liable for anything that happened leater.