Within the past week, a group of neighborhood toughs in Philadelphia decided to make a community project out of finding the guy who allegedly raped an 11 year old girl. They had a police composite drawing to go by and they went about their job with a will. They found someone who looked like the drawing and they beat the living tar out of him…and THEN called the police. Supposedly they felt that he’d get away if they did not. The fact that the man in question was ‘a person of interest’ to Philadelphia police already has nothing to do with the fact that people organized and meted out their own brand of justice, superseding the criminal justice system and then, oh yeah by the way..handed him over to police.

An op-ed published today and written by a Philadelphia lawyer, Christine Flowers, describes her feelings as ambivalent on the one hand, and blood thirsty on the other.

“And yet there’s a part of me that wanted to pump my fist in the air and scream "Yes!" when I heard what the Kensington residents did to Jose Carrasquillo, the man who allegedly raped an 11-year-old girl on her way to school this week.
Call the neighborhood residents savages. But beyond the issue of guilt and innocence, and whether the wrong person was victimized (if you don’t count an innocent child), there’s something else at play here. And that’s the fact that a neighborhood came together on a June afternoon and became their daughter’s keeper.” Christine Flowers Op-Ed

Now, let’s do a little comparing to the situation last week in Kansas City. A man, known to police and the FBI as being a passionate anti-abortion follower and member of Operation Rescue, who had been reported for damaging clinic property on numerous occasions, decided that the Kansas State Supreme Court’s ruling this spring on Dr. Tiller’s performing late term abortions was not what he wanted. Many people who are on the bleeding edge of this movement view killing abortionists as ‘justifiable homicide’ – they describe doctors who perform these procedures as ‘mass murderers’, so in their minds, terminating the doctor is ‘justified’.

What is the difference between the two events?

As much as I abhor what happened in Philadelphia (and it can’t be called anything more than mob violence really), this group had been shown a picture of the man they hunted down, had been instructed that the man was a ‘person of interest’ and wanted by police, and they felt they were doing a job. They were, in a way, operating within the bounds of the criminal justice system in that they were acting as an extension of the police. They had been, in a very real sense, deputized. The beating up could be classified as ‘vigilante-ism’ in that they were meting out some of their own rough justice as a ‘just in case’.

What happened in Kansas City is not vigilante-ism. It was not a case of Scott Roeder’s ‘taking the laws into his own hands’ – anti-abortionists despise the laws that are on the books. One of the reasons they resort to murder is that they realize that through all of their various political and legislative efforts, they have basically failed at outlawing abortion. So they have taken up the amazingly effective device of murdering doctors, terrorizing their families and staffs, and frankly scaring the living daylights out of other doctors so that at the present time, in great swaths of the United States, access to health procedures such as abortion are basically nonexistent. Today, the Tiller family announced that the clinic would be closed permanently.

No one can tell me that it had nothing to do with the fact that the family probably feels that people like Roeder would not hesitate to come after them as an example to other doctors, if the clinic were still kept open, even with other doctors or staff performing the procedures. Even if they had nothing to do with it, they would be forever have bullseyes on their heads for fanatics such as Roeder to aim at to terrorize other doctors and their families into not providing women with health care.
Once people overcome any squeamishness to shooting other human beings and killing them, murder becomes almost routine to them.

No matter how we view the issue; no matter how we feel personally; no matter how we view what happened in Kansas City to Dr. Tiller, the fact remains that this was premeditated murder.

Murder is outside the law. Murder is a criminal act. It is not an act of bravery or heroism or higher purpose. It is murder.

And until the Justice Department starts to use all the laws and staff at its disposal to get at the heart of this, these murders will continue to happen, more and more doctors will stop providing women with the health care they need, and the terrorists will continue to win their war against women.

Because do not make any mistake about it. Their war IS against women, against women having any say in what happens to them, against women having any rights to their own bodies, against women as people and people with a sexual nature. Their interest is to control women and punish women.

Their interest is also to control families and what happens in them – because make no mistake – when a group can terminate a woman’s right to control the size of her family, then they can also dictate (and they did so by murdering Dr. Tillman) to parents that families MUST bring into the world, into their families, fetuses with congenital defects, and genetic defects, and diseases, and terrible crippling syndromes, and massive other problems. People like Randall Terry believe that they have this power over women..over families that they can force them into a situation where they will not have the choice over whether they feel ready to care for a child born with these levels of problems.

And they do not care about the families that they do this to – they do not offer to help. They do not offer to adopt children with or without problems. They do not care about families. They do not care about women. They only care about the fact that they want control.

And we think we have anything to say about what happens to women in other countries? Not while this sort of thing is happening here. Remember: You don’t have a right if you can’t exercise it – and you can’t exercise it if you don’t have access.

Randall Terry and his followers like Scott Roeder are making sure, slowly but surely, that very few women in the United States (and certainly the vast majority of women who need this level of care so very much) will be able to have access to it.