We're All Diminished: the murder of James Pouillon

Bill asks where all the bloggers--and the UUA--are regarding the murder of James Pouillon.

Well, murder is wrong. The murder of Pouillon is a reprehensible act. The fact that I disagree with his views about abortion doesn't change the reprehensibility of his murder.

But the blogosphere on the left didn't just ignore this. It got addressed at DailyKos, where the murder was decried, and decried again when the facts trickled out that it wasn't a politically-unrelated killing. Front-paged, too. I suspect that the news of the killing didn't spread as widely--Pouillon was a relative unknown, while Tiller had a far higher profile and people had been targeting him for a long time. The analogy breaks down, the cases are only loosely similar. I've seen nothing (which may only mean that I've not seen it) suggesting that this killer was associated with pro-choice groups or attended a church or participated in some other group that demonized Pouillon and talked about how good it would be if he were to be dead.

That still doesn't bear on the murder of Pouillon--only on the larger politics and newsworthiness of the case.

Harlan James Drake, Pouillon's murderer, seems to have targeted people he held grudges against--the other person he killed, Mike Fuoss, ran a gravel pit. The police caught up with Drake as he was--the police believe--he was on his way to kill a third individual he had some grudge against.

It's a damned shame. James Pouillon was, from all reports I can find now, steadfast in his beliefs, and equally a gentle, non-violent man.

I think that the case hasn't been addressed much because it's lower profile and murkier; Pouillon was--it appears--killed because the images he protested with offended Drake. That's not an excuse--murdering people because they show pictures that offend isn't tolerable, nor acceptable, explicable, or reasonable. But it's not clear that Drake was on some sort of crusade against anti-abortion protesters. And it's usually an error to leap off into a posting when the facts aren't available or clear. That's the sort of thing people did when McVeigh bombed the Federal Building in Oklahoma City--started insisting that this must have been an attack by anti-American Muslims....

None of which makes Pouillon's murder any less regrettable.

Just that presumptive politicizing of murders is... highly inflammatory, and socially unwise.

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.