TERRE HAUTE — The day after Dr. George Tiller was shot to death in his Wichita, Kan., Lutheran church, the home page of Operation Rescue’s Web site was busy, as usual.
Prominent in the available text was a statement by O.R. president Troy Newman, condemning the shooting as antithetical to the organization’s “pro-life ethic.” Another statement disavowed any words that might be attributed to the de-associated founder of Operation Rescue, Randall Terry.
Long on the outs with O.R., which is also based in Wichita, Terry has said for publication what many on the far-right fringe of the anti-abortion movement are saying in private: Tiller was a mass killer of babies who “reaped what he sowed.”
Surrounding the Operation Rescue disclaimers were various links to O.R. “news” stories and videos. One graphic featured a cracked white background with bright red rivulets and the words, “Their Blood Cries Out.” Another proclaimed, “The Latest Botched Abortion At Tiller’s Late-Term Abortion Mill.” Another said, “Undercover Investigation Stings Tiller! Watch the HOT Video and read the Report!” The word “hot” was in red print.
In a lineup of previously featured stories was “Tiller Abortion Worker Honored At White House By Obama.”
The article had been posted on Friday morning, two days before Tiller was gunned down. It featured a grainy group photo of several people, including Tiller, former Kansas Gov. Kathleen Sebelius — now secretary of the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services — and an 83-year-old woman named Betty Pulliam, who was identified as a volunteer at Tiller’s Women’s Health Care Services in Wichita.
The story indicated that the photo was taken at a party at the Kansas governor’s mansion when Sebelius stilled occupied the post. Red circles had been drawn around the heads of Tiller, Sebelius and Pulliam.
Pulliam had been honored at the White House on Memorial Day, not because of her clinic volunteerism, but because she was a Gold Star Mother — her son had died fighting in the Vietnam War. The Operation Rescue article described her as a person who “now works to take the lives of other women’s sons and daughters at George Tiller [sic] late-term abortion mill … This is yet another connection between Obama and late-term abortionist George Tiller.”
The O.R. piece quoted a Wichita Eagle story in which Betty Pulliam said no one wants to belong to the Gold Star Mothers because “you have to lose a child” to be a member.
“How ironic that Pulliam could make such a statement when she has dedicated a large portion of her life to insuring that other women lose their children to abortion,” Newman said, in the O.R. story. “It is hypocrisy at best, and perhaps stems from some sick need to make sure that other women suffer as she has.”
Several readers posted supportive responses to the Operation Rescue story about Pulliam. One predicted:
“That photo including late-term abortionist Tiller, and his pro-abort cheerleaders, will be one of the photos included in future history books; the history books of tomorrow will teach our great-grandchildren about the abortion holocaust the same way today’s history books reveal the identity and dirty deeds of the Nazis.”
Another post said of Pulliam: “This woman is a pure worker for Satan. She loses a son in the military then aids other women in killing THEIR children. How sick can she be? She’ll have a lot of explaining to do later on. God help her.”
Monday night on his Fox News show, Bill O’Reilly also condemned the shooting of Tiller, but said he had no reason to retract any of his many verbal attacks on the doctor he often called “Tiller, the baby killer” because “every single thing we said about Tiller was true, and my analysis was based on those facts.”
O’Reilly said “pro-abortion zealots and Fox haters” were trying to pin blame for Tiller’s slaying on him and that the far-left was “exploiting” the shooting because “those vicious individuals want to stifle any criticism of people like Tiller.”
In his second reference to an estimated number of abortions Tiller may have performed in his 35-year practice, O’Reilly called them “the 60,000 fetuses who will never become American citizens.” He also spoke of how “the people of Kansas sat there for 35 years and allowed this mill to take place.”
In a compelling essay on huffingtonpost.com, Frank Schaeffer is one of the few people weighing in on Tiller’s killing to own a part of it.
A former evangelical activist who produced an influential anti-abortion documentary series in the 1970s, Schaeffer has written a memoir of his political-religious days, “Crazy for God: How I Grew Up as One of the Elect, Helped Found the Religious Right, and Lived to Take All (or Almost All) of It Back.”
Still an opponent of Roe v. Wade — it “went too far, too fast and was too sweeping” — Schaeffer nonetheless details in his HuffPost essay the roles he and his father, Francis Schaeffer, played in making abortion a religious and political magnet for “people like Jerry Falwell, Ronald Reagan and countless Republican leaders …”
His father’s book, “A Christian Manifesto,” drew parallels between Nazi Germany and legalized abortion in the United States, Schaeffer writes, “and said that whatever tactics would have been morally justified in removing Hitler would be justified in trying to stop abortion.”
In his essay, Schaeffer points to the “norm” of angry speech “in American religion from both the right and the left.” Those angry words, he warns, “when taken seriously — lead directly to violence by the unhinged and/or the truly committed.”
Of Sunday’s shooting in Wichita, Schaeffer says: “Like many writers of moral/political/religious theories, my father and I would have been shocked that someone took us at our word, walked into a Lutheran Church and pulled the trigger on an abortionist. But even if the murderer never read Dad’s or my words we helped create the climate that made this murder likely to happen.”
Stephanie Salter can be reached at (812) 231-4229 or stephanie.salter@tribstar.com.
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