Local, state and federal authorities were complicit in civil rights violations in the 50's and 60's, and only when the public outcry became loud enough did things begin to change.
Morris Dees of the Southern Poverty Law Center successfully sued the KKK for their compliance in the death of Michael Donald. He also successfully sued several other neo-Nazi groups and won large monetary judgments resulting in their bankruptcy.
In lieu of Dr. Tiller's assassination, I feel it would be appropriate for some entity to sue Bill O'Reilly and Fox News, as well as Randall Terry and Operation Rescue. I think you would agree that both individuals and their organizations are responsible for spewing forth HATE, and I feel a good case could be made in court that they contributed to Dr. Tiller’s death, in the same way the United Klans of America, White Aryan Resistance, and other neo-Nazi groups contributed to hate crimes against minorities, and were thus successfully sued in court.
Can we start a movement to get these people sued? You hit them where it hurts. The pocketbook.

This is hardly surprising.

Furthermore, those who do support self determination for women to their lives should wake up and realise that these people are dead serious.

The idiotic meme that is common among some progressives, that the right doesn't really want to stop abortions, and is only posturing, and that issues such as choice or GLBT rights are only a distraction, needs to be relentlessly quashed.

Just tap your heels together and say, "Let me make it to Greyhound; let me make it to Greyhound!"

You disgust me. You think women just blithely wake up one morning and say, "Gee, I just don't feel like carrying this baby to term". Most late-term abortions are due to severe problems, either with the woman's health, or the baby's. I've heard heart-breaking stories about tragically deformed babies missing important organs that will die shortly after birth anyway. Would you want to carry a fetus to term knowing that? Other reasons are because the pregnant woman (or teen, or child) has been unable to obtain a legal abortion earlier when it would be better for everyone. Don't think that we who are pro-choice "love" abortion; we don't. Tell me why pro-life people don't seem to care about single mothers who are struggling to make ends meet and can't find affordable day care so they can work? Why do you only care about the unborn? Why are you against birth control? Making birth control cheap and available would cut down the number of needed abortions, yet you don't support that.

Walk in a desperate woman's shoes before you lecture about right and wrong.

I understand that you're far MORE confused than you realize.

Go to http://www.democracynow.org/ and watch the program featuring a profile of Dr. Tiller and commentary from doctors who worked with him.

If you can stand to watch it, you'll notice that both the late Dr. Tiller and his surviving colleagues are serious, thoughtful, concerned, caring professionals. Their understanding of the reproductive process, and their concerns for their patients, are not only consistent with the Hippocratic Oath, but reflect a humane and mature, compassionate understanding of both the beginning of life and the horrific difficulties involved in complicated high-risk pregnancies.

Such sober public discussion is rare, and on a different order than the the anti-abortionists' seething cauldron of superstition filled with puerile, primitive, irrational, self-righteous, raging hysterical bumper-sticker and comic-book ideas and concepts about life and medical science.

With all due respect, if there's a paradox to be acknowledged, it's between your ears.

· Yr Obd't Servant

To charles June 3rd, 2009 12:41 pm:

There is no paradox.

However, a legally practicing physician was murdered, and that was a criminal act.

You may consider abortion objectionable, but you have no right to tell other people what to do with their bodies, as long as their behavior is within the law, even if that behavior offends your moral sense.

Any thinking fetus cries out to be aborted rather than be birthed into a world in which she'll be raped and disfigured in Sudan, starved in Zimbabwe, exploited by Chiquita in Guatemala, or become a "pro-lifer" in the U.S.

My mom was so proud of the abortion she had in the 30's. She'd taken control of her own life. I was conceived later, and despite having a long and lucky life, I'd have preferred to be aborted, to tell you the truth. Ask any thinking human if he'd live his life again. Try it.

But why do you feel you can make a decision affecting me and my family better than I can? Why do you think you know better? It's none of your business. It's fine for you to make the decision for you, but you shouldn't be able to make it for me.

After many years of personal struggle, I left all churches behind because the position that rape victims of any age can't abort a child whose conception was accomplished by an act of violence against them means that God authorizes rape in order to get babies into the world. Likewise with fetal health defects that endanger mother & child: automatically the right to life of the woman bearing the child are wholly abolished. "Sorry -- baby's to be born, too bad if you, your health, your life, happen to be in the way." In fact, it's a form of moral relativism -- there are many millions of 'unjustified' (in your eyes) abortions, so those who have what any fair-minded person would consider wholly justifiable reasons are mere collateral damage.

As for the churches that "care deeply" about single women -- I'm sorry, I've seen how these work, these are only part of the general proselytization efforts of churches. "We helped you, so believe -- and contribute -- to us." The ambiguity is used to keep hold of people who recognize the malice of authoritarian churches, to permit them to keep telling themselves "I'm not really a radical right-winger -- I have social concern!"

And as far as being 'anti-war' and 'anti-abortion', there is no religious group or person who spends anything like the amount of time & energy protesting or trying to end war that they spend in stigmatizing and attacking doctors & spreading deceptions about abortion.

One of the turning points for me was the challenge issued at the end of "Religulous", where Bill Maher addresses believers who acknowledge the evil uses to which faith is put: "Aren't you like mafia wives?"

Charles, I mean no disrespect but why don't you mind your damn business!

"Of course we must have compassion for others, but we shouldn't push brutal late-term abortions on them as if it's the only option."

And if they CHOOSE that option? What if they, adult women, make that CHOICE?

It is interesting that all the anti choice people like you, NEVER say anything about the responsibilities of the MALE FATHER. It takes 2 people to make a baby.

What is missing from this equation of late-term 'partial-birth' abortion is, of course, the pregnant woman, as well as the medical circumstance that would necessitate a late-term procedure, whether they involved a late discovery of a dangerous condition or the inability -- often caused by anti-choice groups -- of the woman to have had the abortion earlier.

This from Debra Sweet:

"Having been nose to nose with anti-abortion leaders in front of clinics, and sometimes between them and doctors, for decades, I know them as the active base of a deeply dangerous, Christian theocratic, and fascist movement. They believe, as Randall Terry screamed in my face in 1987, that women must be kept subservient to men. Their god is a vengeful god, they remind us, and we deserve death for not obeying him. They've got the scripture, memorized from both the Old Testament and the New, and the worldview to enforce that male supremacy in their homes and in their movement. They believe that this country's laws should be based on their interpretation of their God's law, so you, too, would have no choice in the matter. And they want to kill us; the women who aren't subservient, and the doctors who foster our agency."