CHRISTIAN FUNDAMENTALIST TERRORISM: MURDER IN CHURCH

There was a sudden jolt of the Breaking News fanfare, a flurry of cable babble and the morning papers screaming their headlines about Dr. George Tiller's shooting. And then it was over. The event faded from view  so rapidly  that it occurred to me that we've become accustomed to frenzied anti-abortionists shooting doctors. We no longer recoil from these killings. After each one we pause, but ever so briefly. It's like driving up on a horrific accident. We get a dose of anxiety and  a  glimpse of the carnage as we slow to look. Seconds later we're back to normal speed and a quarter mile down the road. Show's over.

Has the murder of abortion doctors become just another bump on the road in American life?  Where has it taken us? Where has it led the crazed Fundamentalist Christians?

I'm a hopeless news junkie. Before I began blogging, my weeknights were spent flopped down in my recliner, watching one news show after another. During commercials I'd surf through two or three other news programs to keep my fix going. Sensing the commercials were over, I'd click back to the first show. After that, I'd watch  news I had seen earlier again  when the late evening reruns came on. When they were over, I'd be back to working my remote, hungrily searching for late-breaking news. News from anywhere, even the Weather Channel.

Dr. Tiller's murder came and went like a hard summer rain storm. The news cycle felt like it lasted less than a day. I knew it hadn't, but it felt like it.

This latest  of  assassinations by Christian extremists sickened me. Even the newshound in me could not be lured into tuning back in to the doctor's killing.   I avoided the continuing coverage, blocked it from seeping into my brain where I knew I would dwell on it for days, as with other tragic events.

I still see the alleged murderer, Scott Roeder, in the cheap orange jump suit he wore as he made his first court appearance via closed circuit TV. He  didn't look nervous, shaken or the slightest  bit repentant. He  looked nothing like I expected a man who, just hours earlier, shot another man in the head to look.

Roeder was the perfect choice for the Christian zealots who needed someone to do their dirty work. As reported by James Ridgeway in "A Brief History of the Radical Right,"  www.motherjones.com, (June 9, 2009), during the 1980's Roeder was nurturing his hate in an anti-government, white separatist group known as the Montana Freemen. His Freemen experiences launched him into a weird, unorthodox life style that should have earned him a bed in a state mental hospital.

In 1996 he was cruising through Kansas when sheriff's deputies stopped and arrested him in Topeka for driving his car with an unauthorized license tag. The homemade tag read "Sovereign and Immune from State Law." Strange enough. But a search of Roeder's vehicle turned up bomb making materials in the trunk. Stranger yet. Strangest of all, neither his  bizarre homemade license tag nor the explosives in his car caused any legal trouble for Roeder beyond  a mere traffic fine.

Roeder and the Freemen delight in their being regarded as "Christian Patriots", a deliberate contradiction given their known history of violence and the fact  that their ranks include former Ku Klux Klan members, Neo-Nazis and  skinheads.They call themselves "white sovereigns" and believe Afro-Americans, Jews and other minorities are inferior and not entitled to the same rights they have. They preach that God gave this land called America to white Anglo Saxons only and made them it's "true sovereigns." 

Armed militants claiming 1.2 million members, the Freemen are believed to have been part of another anti-government movement of the 1980's known as the "Posse Comitatus" or "Posse."

The Posse held a bewildering view of the state of affairs in America. Unknown to the general citizenry, they said, the country was under marshal law. Evidence of this could be seen by the American flags on display in courtrooms throughout the country. These flags, with their gold fringe and bald eagle atop each pole, are put in use   by the powers that be, according to the Posse,  only when marshal law has been declared. Their members "recognized" the situation and were there to rescue us from the "illegally constituted" government in Washinton.   

The Posse's influence explains the license tag found on Roeder's car in Topeka, Kansas. Like the Posse, the Freemen is a white supremacist  militia that seeks a culturally pure America and, like the anti-abortionist movement, believes violence is a necessary and acceptable means of protecting the "sanctity of  human life." It is this shared philosophy that made Roeder the assassin of choice for the anti-abortionist group (widely believed to be Operation Rescue) behind the Tiller murder.

What hate groups like Operation Rescue and  the fundamentalist Christian terrorists do not recognize is that their collaboration with the likes of a Scott Roeder, the Freemen and other hate mongerers obliterates all their claims of  being followers of Christ. Encouraging, enabling or abetting killers, bestowing approval  and praise upon them, puts the likes of such "Christians" in league with murderers.

They fail to see that no matter how strongly their religious beliefs convince them, they do not walk on higher moral ground than the George Tillers of the world. God does not grant anyone the authority to kill others. Muddled Christian thinking that condones killing in the name of God is stupendously sinful, unforgivable and stupid.

Roeder had trained and conditioned himself to be primed for action when the time came to put a bullet in someone's head. When he got the call to get rid of Dr. Tiller, any humanity he had was vaporized and dispersed  through his long association with hate groups. He became  a remorseless killer who, I'm sure, imagines himself in the shoes of a heroic commando sent on a suicide mission. Though his life is virtually over, Scott Roeder is no doubt content. After all, he has succeeded in his assignment.

Those who cheer and applaud Roeder's work must do so quietly. They are required to pretend to be  shocked and saddened by the shooting. The say that they "respectfully" avoided driving by the scene at the Reformation Lutheran Church where Dr. Tiller was working as an usher and his wife singing in the choir when he was shot. They sent sympathy cards to the Tiller family. They prayed for them.

These secret militants  believe they are still good, kind Christian people. Afterall, they did nothing wrong. They don't have George Tiller's blood on their hands. But they do. Unlike Lady MacBeth, they just don't see it.