Okay Mikey...I can't not reply to this...but I don't know what to say...I mean is it an eye for...I dunno...maybe I should shut up...

While I'm anti-abortion and don't agree with that dr, I think it is wrong to kill them. It's sad to see people perverting the pro-life stance that way. And even sadder to see they chose a church to kill him in. Not all pro-lifers are like that nut who killed him. Peace and God be with his family at this time...

After decades of hate-mongering, what should we expect but acts of terrorism such as this.

Why aren't those against abortion attacking the fertility clinics? What they discard every year by the MILLIONS is no different and is every bit as potentially viable as what is medically aborted one by one in a clinic. What terrorists like Roeder are really against is the audacity--the temerity--of some uppity women to think they should be in charge of themselves. And so they kill to terrorize the rest of us into compliance.

None of us is "for" abortion. It's a terrible thing to be in a position to have to make that decision. But until I am in someone else's exact circumstances, I have no right to make their medical decisions for them, and neither does anyone else, for me.

Great post, Ceashel!

Often the Cause is self-loathing combined with a terrible desperate need for power and attention. The wife of the murderer described him as a man with a considerable set of anti-isms and abortion was one of them. The rage cycling inside him found a target and prompted him to act out that one assertion of dominance.

We are entering a period in which forces of anti-spirit and faux spirit will collide to tear down their power centers. Secular craving will be as hateful in its harrangues as any voice from the pulpits of the demonic. One discovers all the good has been winnowed out by fear and desperation for redress of hurts by perpetrators long dead and ghosting in the eyes of those who can only see their pasts while their futures slide past in the tiki light of obscure justice.

Absolutes are the fake flowers on the patio tables of a garden party. Rage makers are the florists.

I'm a florist, and I can promise you, I'm not making rage or thinking "rage" when I'm in the zone and doing my thing in front of the Guthrie Center!


...and none of 'em was plastic, either!!

@sue: Thus the full heart and the empty hand.

In college sociology many moons ago, our professor cited studies that the downwardly mobile tend to be the best recruits for these rage cults (at that time, The John Birch Society). I've been telling my family to expect the kinds of incidents we are seeing right now. The edge gets thinner and anyone standing near it goes over, and everyone else gets closer. Classic feedback cycle. I don't think the 'rhetoric' per se is the reason; the signal cycling is. Repetitive imaging coupled to the endocrine stimulation is a pretty potent addiction.

I see the 'slinger is spending time with his guru and that she teaches means to clear out this sort of past-wound-driven anger. Not that he seems to be angry, but it is a fine example to set right now.

I was sitting for a short while at a party Saturday night with old colleagues from a former job and realized the comfort of being among wolves with no dog in the hunt. It is the satisfaction of the experience of realizing that I hang on to with the actual memory fading. Letting go is a warm puppy.

I should send my host flowers except he probably wants a power drill.

Psycosociopathy and Ignorance are the parents of Fundamentalism. Fundamentalism named its twin offspring Intolerance and Terrorism.

I grew up in a very pro-life family. We prayed at clinics and worked on hotlines. As in any other group of people that I have ever been in, there has been beautiful and ugly people involved. But, I have never felt that anyone was in it because they felt they wanted to rule over anyone else. The reason for being against abortion is because we believe it is killing a baby. That's it. Nothing else.

Ceashel, my husband and I struggled for years over people pressuring us to try ivf. We were perfect candidates. Unfortunately, we just couldn't do it for the reason you mentioned.

It is as horrrific to me to see someone to use anti-abortion sentiment as an excuse for murder as it is when people claim to be prolife and prodeath penalty and prowar. I can only speak for my own Catholic faith, but when prayers are said to stop abortion, other prolife issues as I just said are always included.

no one is immune? (that has always been my take on this song anyhow)

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=AuK2A1ZqoWs

a lot of potential for good generally...but no one is immune

From the news accounts, Dr. Tiller performed late term abortions when the mother's health or life was in danger or the fetus was so deformed or underdeveloped that its chance of survival and/or quality of life was nil.

Keith Olbermann commented tonight that the media, specifically Fox News and Bill O'Reilly, is complicit to being a possible catalyst to Dr. Tiller's murder. It's the "Olbermann: Fox News' killer complicity" link:

http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/3036677#31053883

It has always been hard for me to grasp that the very people who use the "sanctity of life" the most seldom live by that phrase. Sometimes it seems that the phrase "pro life" is often times used by the same who are "pro war" and "pro death penalty".

While I most definitely do not endorse "culling the herd", it seems that we're all so quick to invoke that phrase, "sanctity of life" for our individual selves, we seem to have forgotten that it also applies to Mother Earth. It took until the middle 1800s to reach an estimated world population of one billion people. By 1970 it was over 3.5 billion. And now it's double that.

We're "sanctifying" ourselves and the planet to death, literally. Famine, disease, poverty, pollution, global climate change, dwindling resources .... none of it's going away any time soon, folks. Not until we cut way down on the birth rate .... or develop warp drive and start colonizing other solar systems soon .... real soon.

Ceashel brought out some interesting stuff onthe fertility clinincs. And so did Diance. I had no idea that abortion dr was doing the abortion cuz the babies or the moms life was in danger. The way the media made him out, he was killing babies cuz the moms didn't want them...

When the baby is post viable the health of the mother is a nonissue in most cases. From what I read Dr. Tiller delivered "miscarried" babies which he gave to the family to be buried. The procedure is long and difficult on the mother.

Believe me, I deplore his murder as much as my own cousin's murder, but late term abortions are just sickening to me and I can't just sit here and not say something.

Thanks Agnes. That's the perspective. We've built these big signalling systems that are now always on and while we can talk across big neighborhoods, as in the day of two cans tied, we tend to taunt for domination, the infernal currency of attention.

Punishment won't stop abortions. It never has. It ratchets up the pain. Acceptance and alternatives do stop some abortions.

So within human law, we do have solutions that do not require draconian measures. For the absolutists who assert that abortion contravenes God's law, there is the punishment of eternal dammnation: Hell or Gehenna (as separate from Sheol).

It comes down to the problem of hell for Abrahamic theologies excluding Judaism: can God be all-powerful, all-knowing and all-benevolent and accept or provide Hell as eternal damnation?

1. No unless Hell is not eternal.

2. Yes if if the third term is everywhere-present instead of all- benevolent.

3. Yes if free will is inviolate and a person can choose to defy God and be separate.

4. No if in the presence of all-benevolence free will always makes the same choice freely.