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Robert P. George, J.D., D.Phil., McCormick Professor of Jurisprudence at Princeton University, is one of America's foremost scholars in the fields of constitutional law, ethics, and political philosophy.
Dr. George has won numerous awards for his academic and civic work, including the Presidential Citizens Medal. He has served on the President's Council on Bioethics and as a presidential appointee to the United States Commission on Civil Rights. He is a former Judicial Fellow at the Supreme Court of the United States, where he received the Justice Tom C. Clark Award.
| Deafening Silence: On Tiller and Little Rock |
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| Written by Steven Lindsay |
| Thursday, 02 July 2009 10:26 |
 Not long ago, America witnessed two tragic and senseless murders. On Sunday, May 31, Dr. George Tiller, one of the few late-term abortionists in the nation, was killed by Scott Roeder, an anti-abortion militant, while serving as an usher at his local church in Wichita, Kansas. On Monday, June 1, 23-year-old Private William “Andy” Long was shot to death outside of a Little Rock Army-Navy recruiting office by Abdulhakim Mujahid Muhammad, a Muslim convert who had been raised in Memphis, Tennessee. The parallel between these two incidents is both stark and striking. But the responses (or lack thereof) from the media and current administration have been completely incomparable. For those in the public life to decry the pro-life movement for having some hand in the death of Dr. Tiller, while simultaneously pursing lips against even the mentioning of Private Long’s death, is a glaring double-standard, and one that will only erode the moral sensibility of Americans who are exposed to those praising an abortionist and ignoring a fallen soldier. Only hours after the bullet first cracked the air in Wichita, the press had begun to turn the murder of Dr. Tiller into a nationwide media frenzy. Much of that attention was targeted at conservatives and particularly the flourishing pro-life movement. With headlines on liberal news sites reading “When Will Right Wing Violence Be Terrorism,” “Tiller Was Often Demonized on O’Reilly’s Cable Show,” and even “The Deadly Logic of the Anti-Choice Movement,” it is no surprise that the mass media had questioned the culpability of pro-life advocates in the murder of Dr. Tiller. This was the response, despite the fact that prominent pro-life politicians, such as Sam Brownback and Sarah Palin, and pro-life organizations, such as Kansans for Life and Americans United for Life, condemned the killing of Dr. Tiller and called for the end of such violence, while advocating the value and worth of all human life. This is the pro-life message that Scott Roeder disregarded when he entered the Reformation Lutheran Church and viciously murdered Dr. George Tiller. This is the pro-life message that was ignored by media in the wake of Dr. Tiller’s murder, and one that the pro-life movement had argued long before Scott Roeder’s evil deed, and will continue to advocate long after. The very next day, while the media continued to report of the death of Dr. Tiller, Abdulhakim Mujahid Muhammad, formerly Carlos Bledsoe, shot and killed Private William Long, and injured 18-year-old Quinton Ezeagwula. Muhammad later told authorities that he was angry at the United States military for previous actions in both Afghanistan and Iraq, and admitted that he wanted to kill as many members of the US military as he could. Muhammad had converted to Muslim during his teenage years, and recently spent time in Yemen, where he has been believed to have studied jihad with an Islamic scholar. Following this troubling event, the news media only tacitly mentioned the event and there were almost no voices deploring the murder and providing the support for Private Long’s grieving family. In the aftermath of Dr. Tiller’s death, President Obama had officially commented on Sunday evening that he was “shocked and outraged by the murder of Dr. George Tiller as he attended church services this morning. However profound our differences as Americans over difficult issues such as abortion, they cannot be resolved by heinous acts of violence.” No statement concerning Private Long ever came on Monday evening, or Tuesday morning, but rather Wednesday. The shocking and disturbing murder of an American soldier who had never seen a battlefield was not acknowledged by the White House or Justice Department until days after the murder. But, by the liberal media’s own standards of accountability, President Obama should have released more than a mere acknowledgement of condolences for Private Long’s death. If such claims against the pro-life movement were to be taken seriously, then President Obama and other liberals in public life should have contemplated an apology for the death of Private William Long. It was not long ago when liberals, in order to capitalize on the growing unpopularity of the war in Iraq, were persistently employing rhetoric aimed at defaming the reputation of American soldiers and antagonizing our enemies abroad. Senator Dick Durbin compared the military to the Nazis and Pol Pot, while John Murtha accused a group of U.S. Marines of being “cold-blooded” murderers. Senator John Kerry claimed that American soldiers were going into Iraqi homes “in the dead of night” in order to terrorize the women and children, while his fellow Massachusetts senator Ted Kennedy had proclaimed that the United States was “the most hated nation in the world.” And finally, even President Obama himself (a senator at the time) asserted that the American military was “just air raiding villages and killing civilians.” If liberals can openly claim that particular conservatives’ characterization of Dr. Tiller was an underlying factor behind his murder, then how could they categorically deny that statements such as these may not have contributed to the death of Private Long? Do these claims by American politicians, and even the would-be President of the United States, not feed the anger of radical Muslims? Americans may now take two disappointing lessons from these tragedies. First, we have now witnessed the death of moral equivalence. While the media is quick to point fingers at pro-life pundits for the death of Dr. Tiller, where were the accusations of liberal anti-military rhetoric fueling the hatred for American soldiers and ultimately contributing to the death of Private Long? Second, we have seen that the Obama administration cares enough the President’s pro-abortion constituency to issue a statement mourning the death of George Tiller, but cares little in honoring a soldier who died while serving his nation. Rather, I would have wished to see the American public learn a more profound lesson, and one articulated best by Robert F. Kennedy, himself a victim of the “mindless menace of violence.” Kennedy said, “Whenever any American's life is taken by another American unnecessarily - whether it is done in the name of the law or in the defiance of the law, by one man or a gang, in cold blood or in passion, in an attack of violence or in response to violence - whenever we tear at the fabric of the life which another man has painfully and clumsily woven for himself and his children, the whole nation is degraded.” Following the murders of Dr. Tiller and Private Long our nation was degraded on two occasions, and the media and Obama administration ought to have readily acknowledged both. Steven Lindsay is from West Milford, New Jersey. He is currently the Assistant Director of Communications for the American Principles Project. |
| Last Updated on Friday, 31 July 2009 14:45 |
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Topics Statements Deafening Silence: On Tiller and Little Rock
Topics Statements Deafening Silence: On Tiller and Little Rock