The Terrorists Among Us

In a Wichita, Kansas church on Sunday, radical anti-abortion wingnut Scott Roeder allegedly gunned down a physician named George Tiller in cold blood. Because Dr. Tiller provided abortion services to women whose right to decide whether or not to have a child has been the ‘Law of the Land’ since 1973. Roeder (and his ilk) don’t like it.

We know these murdering terrorists all too well, as Tiller isn’t the first doctor they’ve attacked and/or killed. The goal of killing doctors who provide legal medical services is not to end abortion. Abortion is as old as the hills. Safe medical abortion is relatively new.

Humans of course have more choices than bears and deer and burrowing critters who consume certain plants to induce abortion. Humans decide to have sex (most of the time), then they decide to have or not have a baby. It is apparently the freedom to choose that the antis so vehemently disagree with, so they engage in acts of terrorism with the intent to scare doctors away from providing the safe medical procedure.

Now, the denizens of Operation Rescue and other anti-abortion groups don’t offer to cover the costs of prenatal and delivery care for those who think abortion is the best answer to their life-dilemma. Nor are they noted for assuming responsibility to care for the children they demand be born, by support, adoption or fostering. And they don’t much care about the heartache they’d visit on women and families faced with the birth of a child that is seriously compromised genetically or developmentally and has no chance for a decent life.

The specter of innocent fetuses (or just collections of rapidly-dividing cells) being removed is a much more powerful incentive to opposition than the true reasons for the fundamentalist religious objection to this medical procedure. Let’s face it – God is the #1 abortionist in the universe, causing at least a third of all pregnancies to end in ’spontaneous’ abortion. And there’s no evidence whatsoever that life – or even human life – has ever been considered “precious” to the Judeo-Christian God who demanded blood sacrifice, or to his fervent followers.

The FBI defines terrorism as:

The unlawful use of force or violence against persons or property to intimidate or coerce a Government, the civilian population, or any segment thereof, in furtherance of political or social objectives.

That’s clear enough. The government ruled in 1973 that women have a right to choose whether or not to have a baby, up until viability when states may exert their interest in the unborn child. In Jesus’s Jihadists Sara Robinson wrote:

The fact that this shooting occurred in a church (again) suggests that this tactic is now being tried out on more closely related faith groups whose views don’t comport with the fundamentalist party line. As Dave has often pointed out, bringing violence to houses of worship is usually an overtly eliminationist act.  They are trying to terrify liberals by making us feel at risk and unsafe inside our own spiritual sanctuaries — the very places we go to feel the most security and peace. This is terrorism, plain and simple — Christian fundamentalist terrorism, committed by people Sam Smith has started referring to as “Jesus’s Jihadis.”

The surest, quickest way for radical fundamentalist wingnut-ism to go away is for them to turn terrorist against other members of the faith. Make no mistake – Roeder’s choice of setting for his crime means as much as who the target was. After the Department of Homeland Security issued its Report on Rightwing Extremism naming anti-abortion groups as an example of the genre, Jay Sekulow of the right wing American Center for Law and Justice issued a statement:

“This is an outrageous characterization that raises serious questions about the leadership and direction of the agency charged with protecting Americans in the ongoing battle against terrorism. Why would the Department of Homeland Security single out groups like pro-life supporters when they should be focusing on identifying and apprehending the real terrorists – like al-Qaeda – groups that have vowed to destroy America?

Well, fact is that the United States government is a democratic republic by charter, does not recognize any state religion or denomination, and prohibits agents of the state to proselytize religion on government’s dime. It has three branches, one of those to decide matters of law, and it decided a long time ago that women have a right to privacy in terms of their reproductive functions. Religion has gifted American law with many of its most blatantly useless and/or actively harmful legislation over the years, and these eventually came to be struck down. Prohibition, slavery, eugenics, miscegenation, anti-abortion. Because forcing everyone to abide by one’s own religious beliefs doesn’t work.

What these religious terrorists want is to “destroy America.” They want to abolish the Constitution and the entire body of US law in order to erect something quite else in their place. A theocracy – government by religious authority and religious law – is not a democratic republic. These extremists are every bit as dangerous to the body politic as al-Qaeda, moreso because they live among us rather than in caves in Central Asia. These people share our schools and workplaces and streets and neighborhoods. They are invisible because they look just like us.

So yeah, I think religious and other extremists in our midst DO need attention from DHS. Hopefully before any one or more of them pulls a Timothy McVeigh and kills a lot of innocent citizens. I figure if the anti-terror apparatus is going to waste time and money spying on groups of overage pacifist Quakers, they ought to be spying on the really dangerous groups too.

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Filed under Constitution, Hate Crime, Outrage, Politics of Hate, Religion, Terrorism | Comment (1)