Religious Freedom and Murder

Who would choose today to Reconsider the Morality of Killing Abortion Doctors?

Happy Independence Day! I was going to languish on my lawn chair with a G and T and watch more energetic people roast meat and release their inner pyromania. But a sharp-eyed tipster sent a link that begs to be shared. Would you celebrate Independence Day by republishing a bunch of academics and politicos giving serious consideration to the morality of killing abortion doctors?

If your answer is no, then you are not the intended audience of the First Things Journal, a publication of the Institute on Religion and Public Life. The Institute, a 501(c)3 nonprofit was founded in 1989 by a Richard John Neuhaus, a Lutheran pastor who became a Catholic priest. According to its website, The Institute’s mission “is to advance a religiously informed public philosophy for the ordering of society.”

So, in the name of ordering society, the editors of the online version of the journal decided to mark the nation’s 247th birthday by republishing on their homepage a discussion between anti-choice activists and academics on the morality of killing an abortion doctor.

Normally, I’m not alarmist about the religious right’s physical threat to my own personal autonomy - yet. The Christians I know personally are not armed and dangerous. But I very much fear for pregnant women and girls and I fear for my LGBTQ friends, who are facing a firehose of medical neglect, public abuse and legalized discrimination.

The Christofascist soldier militant wing never sleeps. Even with Roe overturned, they fulminate and plot.

The discussion included a who’s who of American anti-choice activists, from Catholic archbishops to academics to political activists like Ralph Reed, Jr.

They were asked to discuss the statement by Paul J. Hill, a defrocked pastor convicted of killing an abortionist and his security guard in Pensacola, Florida, excusing his action: “Whatever force is legitimate in defending a born child is legitimate in defending an unborn child.”

Introducing their symposium, the editors wrote: “For some who believe that the moral status of the unborn is the same as that of the born, Hill’s axiom is persuasive.”

To their credit, none of the esteemed respondents supported murdering doctors. But they all evinced sympathy with Hill, some more outrageously than others.

“If a person understood that innocent human lives were being destroyed in abortion clinics, without the need even to render a justification, what kinds of things, after all, might we expect him to do?” wrote Hadley Arkes, an American political scientist and the Edward N. Ney Professor of Jurisprudence and American Institutions emeritus at Amherst College. “Would the media, for instance, have been filled as they have in this case with reports of “religious zealots” if a band of Jews had killed guards and executioners on their way to work in Auschwitz? Would we have heard stories of the killing of innocent workers, who were merely carrying out orders, and pursuing a policy that was fully “lawful” under the laws of the Third Reich?”

Of course decades on, we know Mr. Hill was only the first of the abortion-doctor killers, who managed to murder 11 people between 1991 and 2015. That murderous club was just the most notorious vanguard of hundreds of menacing extremists who tirelessly attacked Planned Parenthood, harassed patients seeking care, and organized fake clinic to trick pregnant girls.

According to a tally in Forbes last year, besides the murders, anti-abortion violence since the 1970s included a42 bombings, 196 arsons, and 491 assaults against abortion providers. The violence was rewarded last year when the Supreme Court, led by a majority of fanatical Catholics, shoved health care for women in the richest nation on earth, back into the Stone Age.

Having won that battle, these gangsters march onward, in priestly collars, judicial robes, MAGA hats or wearing the pearls and sweaters of the Moms 4 Liberty set. Their zombie eyeballs are fixated on some dystopic future beyond Margaret Atwood’s wildest nightmare.

So … on this July 4th afternoon, let’s remember these freaks are in the minority. Hold fast to your voting rights and get others involved.

As their side so loves to repeat, Freedom is never free.

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Forbes tally of anti-abortion violence.

Department of Justice tally of anti-abortion violence.

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