The following is adapted from my forthcoming book, Words on Fire: The Power of Incendiary Language and How to Confront It, out in June and available for pre-order now.
It was an ordinary Sunday at the Reformation Lutheran Church in Wichita, Kansas. It was the last Sunday in May 2009. The 10:00 a.m. service had just begun. Just inside the church foyer a sixty-seven-year-old usher was handing out leaflets to latecomers about the day’s events at the church. A visitor approached, held a .22 caliber pistol to the side of the usher’s head, and shot him at point-blank range. The usher died instantly.
The shooter pointed his weapon at two others who tried to come to the usher’s aid, and then ran from the church and escaped in his car. He was later arrested.
The usher was Dr. George Tiller, the only provider of abortions in the Wichita area, and one of only three physicians in the country to perform late-term termination of pregnancy, a procedure that is legal.
Dr. Tiller was aware that he was in danger. He was wearing body armor, as he had been since the FBI first advised him to do so eleven years earlier. Dr. Tiller had been attacked before. In 1993, while in his car, he had been shot five times by an anti-abortion activist and had survived. The activist, Shelley Shannon, was later convicted of attempted murder. At her trial, Shannon said that there was nothing wrong with trying to kill Dr. Tiller, because of the work he did. She was sentenced to eleven years in prison. Dr. Tiller then started driving an armored SUV.
In 1986 Dr. Tiller’s clinic had been firebombed. As it was being rebuilt he put up a sign reading, “Hell no, we won’t go!”
But that Sunday in 2009, Dr. Tiller was assassinated. The killer was Scott Roeder, fifty-one years old, who lived in a Kansas City suburb more than 150 miles from the church. During his trial Roeder told the judge that he was protecting children so he was justified in killing Dr. Tiller. The judge disagreed, noting that abortion, including late-term abortion, is legal in Kansas. He also said, “There is no immediate danger in the back of a church.” Roeder said that he had been contemplating killing Dr. Tiller for at least sixteen years.
Roeder was convicted of first-degree murder and other charges and sentenced to life in prison without chance of parole for fifty years.
The assassination of Dr. Tiller was not a surprise. He had been the subject of a vigorous campaign to demonize him. Anti-abortion groups such as Operation Rescue had targeted his clinic for years, including blocking access to the clinic and acts of sabotage against it. After the killing, Operation Rescue founder Randall Terry, who had led many of the protests, issued a statement via ChristianNewsWire:
“George Tiller was a mass-murderer. We grieve for him that he did not have time to properly prepare his soul to face God. I am more concerned that the Obama Administration will use Tiller’s killing to intimidate pro-lifers into surrendering our most effective rhetoric and actions. Abortion is still murder. And we still must call abortion by its proper name; murder. Those men and women who slaughter the unborn are murderers according to the Law of God. We must continue to expose them in our communities and peacefully protest them at their offices and homes, and yes, even their churches.”
That kind of language, that abortion is murder and that Dr. Tiller was a mass murderer, was part of a campaign by several anti-abortion groups to close abortion clinics in the United States. It was part of what Terry called his movement’s “most effective rhetoric and actions.”
One group had distributed posters with a picture of Dr. Tiller and the words WANTED: Auschwichita Abortionist, combining the place names for the Nazi death camp and the city where Dr. Tiller lived. Similar “wanted” posters had preceded the murders of other abortion doctors: Dr. George Gunn and Dr. George Patterson in 1993, and Dr. John Britton in 1994. The posters claimed that the doctors killed babies, and listed their work and home addresses, pictures of their faces, and their phone numbers. After Dr. Tiller’s murder one doctor in North Carolina, who had been similarly portrayed, told CBS News,
“I am always looking over my shoulder. I know they know my car. They know my face. They’ve been to my house. They’ve put these posters in my neighborhood. So yeah, I look over my shoulder.…These posters are a call for my murder.”
In Dr. Tiller’s case it wasn’t just anti-abortion activists who used this kind of language. Fox News late-night host Bill O’Reilly had made Dr. Tiller the subject of his commentary for years. O’Reilly called the doctor “Tiller the baby killer.” An analysis by PolitiFact found that O’Reilly had mentioned Dr. Tiller by name forty-two times. On twenty-four of those occasions, he used the phrase “baby killer.” On one show O’Reilly said,
“In the state of Kansas, there is a doctor, George Tiller, who will execute babies for $5,000 if the mother is depressed.”
No one, including O’Reilly, explicitly called for Dr. Tiller’s murder, but O’Reilly’s and the anti-abortion groups’ language and images had the effect of mobilizing people to commit such acts of violence against him and other abortion providers.
Words on Fire: The Power of Incendiary Language and How to Confront It, from which this column is adapted, is due in June and available for pre-order now.
