Justice for Tiller

I'm confident, alas, that that phrase, justice for Tiller, is what some groups and individuals believe happened.

Justice, of course, is the last thing that happened. What happened was first degree murder. Cold blooded, evil. The planned killing of someone who faced an ongoing ethical challenge and refused to embrace a simplistic answer, of someone who did not demonize those who disagreed with him.

Murder.

In a church.

During a worship service.

Those who fed and fueled this murder did so, fanning the flames of hate and violence. Radio Rwanda didn't kill Tutsis--but they urged it, encouraged it, and approved of it. It's as much their fault as it was those wielding machetes.

And it's clear that those like O'Reilly and Limbaugh and Operation Rescue and the rest are as culpable in this murder as Radio Rwanda was of genocide.

They've talked about Tiller and provided information about Tiller and demonized him in the most outrageous ways, and to pretend that they didn't think that this could be--would be--the result is nothing but an attempt to delude the rest of us (and themselves).

If there's any justice for Tiller, it will be that people like Randall Terry and Bill O'Reilly have lives where they need someone like Tiller, and don't have him.

As for Tiller's murderer, I hope he gets what McVeigh should have gotten--life in a gray concrete cell; decades of looking in a mirror with the conviction of murderer stamped on them by society--and then to be forgotten.