Late-term abortionist Leroy Carhart is making an awfully big squawk about 1) the extreme danger to life and health posed by pro-life "fundamentalist terrorists" and 2) his friendship with George Tiller which has led him to Wichita to finish Tiller's schedule. He made these comments in a KMTV news story last night in which I was also featured.
However, both of Carhart's points have grievous flaws. First of all, Carhart's outrage against violence is remarkably undermined by the fact that he kills boys and girls for a living! Talk about violence against the innocent!
Several days of every week, Leroy Carhart takes the weapons of a curette and a powerful suction machine and tears preborn children from the safety of their mother's wombs.
He does so for huge profits, by the way.
Which is what dramatically undercuts his second point; namely, Carhart's presence at George Tiller's Wichita abortion clinic isn't because of friendship, ideology or altruism. He's making money committing abortions there as he has been doing for years -- an awful lot of money.
Carhart has shown himself over the years to be quite a blowhard, an egotist with a patent disregard for truth as well as for the sanctity of life. And though many of the "news reports" try to give him a positive, sympathetic slant, they all fail. After all, Carhart's grisly trade is too extreme, too clearly evil for any of his moral protestations to be taken seriously.
Now, none of this is to detract from the severity of evil perpetrated by George Tiller's assassin. As I explained to the reporter last night (a bit of which was put on the program), Tiller's murder is horrible and pro-life activists around the country have expressed revulsion at it. They've done so for three reasons: it is very counterproductive to the pro life movement; it detracts from the thousands of beautiful, gracious, loving actions performed every day by peaceful pro-lifers; and because the murder was, in itself, an evil act that has no moral warrant whatever.
But that certainly doesn't mean that we must swallow the hay that abortionists and abortion promoters are trying to pitch. Remember, these are people who kill children and who have tried to distract America from the injustice, danger and sheer horror of that practice through lies, cover-ups and a mangling of language.
That they try and exploit the assassination of an abortionist to divert attention away from the nearly 4,000 surgical murders those abortionists commit every day in the United States should be no surprise.
(A fuller treatment of my reactions to the Tiller murder can be found in these previous Vital Signs posts: "Statement on the Murder of George Tiller" and "Responding to Violence.")
