Abortion Provider Shot Dead in Church
Supporters of reproductive rights are mourning the killing of the abortion provider Dr. George Tiller. The sixty-seven-year-old Tiller was shot Sunday as he attended services at his Wichita, Kansas church. (he was a GREETER/USHER- HANDING OUT BULLETINS!!) The gunman fled the scene, but a suspect was later caught in a Kansas City suburb. The suspect, fifty-one-year-old Scott Roeder, has a history of involvement in anti-abortion activism and was once arrested and jailed on explosives charges. He has ties to the right-wing separatist group known as the Freemen.
There have been more than 6,100 acts of violence commited against abortion providers in the US since 1977. These have included eight murders, four of which were against doctors- including good Christian doctors like Tiller, who are in the business of SAVING lives everyday.
I am angry about this. Geoge Tiller was a very brave man. He saved many women's lives, including -women with advanced kinds of cancer, whose pregnancy threatened their own lives -young girls, who were raped, too young to bear children of their own, not even known to be pregnant until late term, not allowed in their own home states to do anything about their seriously life-threatening pregnancies. He's been demonized for years by so-called Christians. Constantly harrassed. His life, repeatedly threatened. He's been shot at and seriously wounded before.
I've never been "pro abortion". I'm one of those persons who'd call myself 'pro life' (if understood in the wholistic way meant).But I have always been for reproductive rights too- pro-choice.
When people are well-educated about sex (including condoms) and therefore make wise, rational choices, abortion happens a whole lot less.Fewer abortions take place in Massachusetts than in Mississippi. Bible-thumping and moralistic decrees just don't work. People die all the time because of peoples' sex fears and phobias, and because of the rigid dogmas of some churches. For every wack job nut murderer like this latest one, there are thousands more who to some extent emotionally identify with him. Or if not identifying, still pushing the party line about how condoms are the real sin, etc...
Frankly, I'm dumbfounded by this. There's something very, very sick about this whole way of thinking (way of feeling).To me, none of this has anything to do with being 'pro life'.
Please pray for greater sanity, reproductive choice, respect for different opinions, please!
-Pastor Dan
http://www.truthout.org/060109KRobert Barnes, The Washington Post: "George Tiller, perhaps the most prominent of the handful of doctors in the United States who perform late-term abortions, was shot and killed at his Wichita, Kan., church this morning, his lawyer said. Police arrested a suspect in the slaying several hours later, the Wichita Eagle reported. Tiller was shot as he served as an usher during Sunday morning services at Reformation Lutheran Church."
Labels: abortion, pro-life killers, saving lives, sex education
