On the murder of Dr. George Tiller

I was traveling home this afternoon from a weekend celebrating my wife's parents 60th wedding anniversary when I learned that Dr. George Tiller was shot and killed during the morning worship service at his church while he was serving as an usher. Just a couple hours earlier I was congratulating my father-in-law on surviving the Battle of the Bulge and nearly two hundred days on the front lines of the Second World War to come home, raise four children, put them through college, and now enjoy being surrounded by a dozen grandchildren and one great-grandson. To go from a joyous celebration of life and affirmation of children to hearing about an assassination in a place of worship, a murder probably carried out in the name of God and rationalized as a way to save lives, leaves me once again trying to make sense of my world.

I was still in local church ministry back in 1993 when Rachelle Shannon shot Dr. Tiller in both his arms at his clinic in Wichita, Kansas. I was serving two congregations less than a hundred miles away. Operation Rescue was staging highly charged protests at Dr. Tiller's abortion clinic, which were on the television news most every evening. The Old Testament lesson for the Sunday following the 1993 shooting was from the story from book of Exodus of Pharaoh ordering the death of all the Hebrew infant males and how Moses was spared that fate. It seemed to me that the Scripture called for a sermon addressing abortion, valuing life, and social responsibility. 

The point of my sermon was that I wished that Dr. Tiller was unemployed for a lack of demand for his services, but that as long as our society was willing to devalue children through the acceptance of poverty, lack of universal health care, and keeping education as a low priority, then the services of Dr. Tiller would always be in demand. The problem was not Dr. Tiller, the problem was and continues to be us. 

More than one child in ten in this country does not have health insurance. Nearly 30% of young adults aged 18-24, a likely time for pregnancy, are without health insurance (http://www.nchc.org/facts/coverage.shtml/). Over 3 billion people in our world live on less than $2.50 per day and less than 1% of what our world spends on weapons could put every child in school (http://www.globalissues.org/issue/2/causes-of-poverty). These are the problems we can and must address.

I did not know Dr. Tiller and I admit that I was a little surprised to read that he was an active church member. I admired the man and now I admire his congregation for refusing to give in to the protesters who have tried to shut him down for years. He and his congregation respected the free speech rights of the protesters even as those opposed to his work vandalized his property and sought to intimidate his clients and fellow church members. Dr. Tiller refused to be the scapegoat for our society. Now we must avoid the temptation to make his assassin a scapegoat and dismiss this violent act as the unfortunate act of a crazy man. The anti-abortion rhetoric and vitriol must be turned off, tuned out, and held accountable for the fear and reactionary violence that it creates.

Resist the fear mongers, embrace freedom, and celebrate life.