Totally worth watching this until the end. It makes me a little jealous. My college commencement speaker was a minor radio celebrity, plus I had mono.
Saturday, June 06, 2009
Monday, June 01, 2009
Sunday, May 31, 2009
George Tiller murdered
George Tiller, a Kansas physician who was one of few late-term abortion providers in the country, was shot to death as he entered church this morning in Wichita.
Dr. Tiller has provided women with much-needed reproductive health care services for many years at the cost of his own safety and privacy. Now he is dead. His clinic has been bombed, he has been shot in both arms, and most recently was acquitted on yet another series of trumped-up charges. He continued to go to work every day in an armored car, performing vitally important work every day. No one forced Dr. Tiller to open his clinic every day and to continue performing this procedure. But he did, and by all accounts with the utmost compassion and respect for his patients, all of whom were going through an extremely difficult and dark time.
Contrary to what the anti-choice movement insists, there is no such thing as partial-birth abortion. This is an invention meant to conjure mental images of a nearly full-term live infant who is half-delivered and then murdered by a heartless doctor with the eager consent of an equally heartless mother. Such a procedure does not exist and it strikes me as unlikely that it ever will. However, there is a procedure called late-term abortion, which women most commonly obtain because something has gone horribly wrong in a pregnancy they would have otherwise carried to term. There are a few other reasons as well, all of them equally valid and most of them unknown to any except those who have bothered to learn. Dr. Tiller provided this procedure and supported his patients in their grief.
It seems likely that the murderer was an extreme anti-choice activist and like other murderers who targeted abortion providers, carry the sort of savior complex that pervades the entire movement. Troy Newman, the despicable leader of Operation Rescue in Wichita, dogged Dr. Tiller and his employees for years; camping outside their homes, rifling through their garbage to find personal information, following them around the community and generally making their lives hell. In the face of Dr. Tiller's death, he condemned the acts as "cowardly", but also hints that Dr. Tiller deserved to face some kind of justice. I expect he's not really sorry that this happened. I wonder how he would feel if someone refused to allow him to lead a peaceful and anonymous life.
This is appalling hypocrisy of the highest degree and it sickens me. A movement which claims to stand for life eventually murdered a man who bravely saved so many. The anti-choice movement is really about selfishness, ignorance, misogyny, bigotry and death.
Dr. Tiller has provided women with much-needed reproductive health care services for many years at the cost of his own safety and privacy. Now he is dead. His clinic has been bombed, he has been shot in both arms, and most recently was acquitted on yet another series of trumped-up charges. He continued to go to work every day in an armored car, performing vitally important work every day. No one forced Dr. Tiller to open his clinic every day and to continue performing this procedure. But he did, and by all accounts with the utmost compassion and respect for his patients, all of whom were going through an extremely difficult and dark time.
Contrary to what the anti-choice movement insists, there is no such thing as partial-birth abortion. This is an invention meant to conjure mental images of a nearly full-term live infant who is half-delivered and then murdered by a heartless doctor with the eager consent of an equally heartless mother. Such a procedure does not exist and it strikes me as unlikely that it ever will. However, there is a procedure called late-term abortion, which women most commonly obtain because something has gone horribly wrong in a pregnancy they would have otherwise carried to term. There are a few other reasons as well, all of them equally valid and most of them unknown to any except those who have bothered to learn. Dr. Tiller provided this procedure and supported his patients in their grief.
It seems likely that the murderer was an extreme anti-choice activist and like other murderers who targeted abortion providers, carry the sort of savior complex that pervades the entire movement. Troy Newman, the despicable leader of Operation Rescue in Wichita, dogged Dr. Tiller and his employees for years; camping outside their homes, rifling through their garbage to find personal information, following them around the community and generally making their lives hell. In the face of Dr. Tiller's death, he condemned the acts as "cowardly", but also hints that Dr. Tiller deserved to face some kind of justice. I expect he's not really sorry that this happened. I wonder how he would feel if someone refused to allow him to lead a peaceful and anonymous life.
This is appalling hypocrisy of the highest degree and it sickens me. A movement which claims to stand for life eventually murdered a man who bravely saved so many. The anti-choice movement is really about selfishness, ignorance, misogyny, bigotry and death.
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