Murder Is Murder

According to the Living Church News Service, the Dean-elect of the Episcopal Divinity School, Katherine Ragsdale, promoted the recently slain abortionist, Dr. George Tiller, as a “martyr” and a “saint” during a recent vigil at St. Paul’s Cathedral in Boston. I shudder to think that Dr. Tiller might be the new model for sainthood in the Episcopal Church of the United States of America.

Life is bestowed upon all of Creation by God and procreated through the natural order of His own design. Life is sacred gift from its beginning to its end; yet today it is viewed by many as a cheap bauble rather than the exquisite jewel that it is meant to be.

Tiller was a high profile champion of the right of a woman to choose to terminate the life of the child that grows within her. Please note that I choose my words carefully here. Conception sets in motion a chain of events that, if uninterrupted by natural or unnatural means, will necessarily result in the formation and birth of a unique, living child of God.

Describing the results of this miracle as “an in viable tissue mass” may assuage the consciences of some; decrying the paternalistic system that subjugates women to an inferior status because of the burden placed upon them by the necessity to sacrifice themselves and their desires to this alien object growing within them might make it easier for others; however, the fact remains that Dr. Tiller, and many others like him, was responsible for the deaths of innumerable lives during the practice of his “profession”.

Should he have been brutally gunned down in the back of a church on a Sunday morning: No! Should he have been attacked as retribution for his actions or his beliefs: No! The murder of Dr. Tiller cannot, nor should it be, condoned or explained away. Murder is murder; whether the victim is a helpless child in the womb, or the abortionist who performs the procedure.

While the act of violence upon the person of Dr. Tiller should hardly be treated as anything other than the life stealing thing that it was, we must also never forget the violence that has been inflicted upon the unborn at the hands of the abortionist. He should hardly be heralded as a “saint” as some in the Episcopal Church would have us believe in the wake of his death. If he is to be remembered at all, let him be remembered as a man who made his choices and, like all of us, will have to stand before God and answer for them.