Bonhoeffer and Tiller's killer - are there parallels?

Charlie's asking the question of our time:

After years spent openly opposing Adolf Hitler and encouraging Germans to turn against his regime, Dietrich Bonhoeffer — a Christian minister, theologian, pacifist and German citizen — made a deliberate turn from civil disobedience to secret participation in a cabal whose aim was to assassinate the Fuhrer. Bonhoeffer laid aside his Christian pacifism when he woke up to the fact that Hitler was engaging in genocide. This outraged Bonhoeffer, who held the deep religious conviction that the Jews were a people precious to God and deserving of protection, whatever the personal cost.

As a pacifist, Bonhoeffer had quietly refused to join the military. With his newfound commitment to Hitler's murder he changed direction and joined the German Abwehr, the wartime intelligence agency headed by Admiral Wilheim Canaris. Canaris was secretly opposed to Hitler and was using Abwehr to launch a variety of plots against the Reich, including assassination attempts. Bonhoeffer never participated directly in such plots — they had to be carried out by the military, because officers were the only ones who could get close enough to the Fuhrer to kill him. Nevertheless, Bonhoeffer aided and encouraged these plots from his post inside the Abwehr. Pretending to be a loyal servant of Hitler's Reich, Bonhoeffer was in fact a double agent working towards Hitler's forcible overthrow.

The July 20 Plot on Hitler's life is retold in Tom Cruise's recent film Valkyrie, the plot's code name. It came very close to succeeding but nevertheless failed, enraging Hitler and setting off a ruthless hunt for the conspirators.

Bonhoeffer never claimed that God was "on his side" in this effort. On the contrary, he wrote that his decision to work for Hitler's assassination would make him guilty of breaking God's law. His conviction was that he had to follow the dictates of his conscience, even though he felt certain that he would be judged guilty by God should he cause Hitler's death. His only moral hope, he believed, was that he might find grace to cover his sin through his faith in Christ.

His position seems at first glance to be a tortured ethical contradiction. What drove Bonhoeffer to discard his pacifism in this instance was the realization that in a world broken by sin and suffused by evil, certain horrors simply could not be tolerated, and could only be stopped through violence.

Bonhoeffer saw himself obeying the call of Christ to lay down his life for others. He in effect sacrificed his own moral convictions in the hope of saving Jews from the death camps.

The question I would pose is this: Is it legitimate to suggest that there is a moral equivalency between Dietrich Bonhoeffer's violent opposition to Adolf Hitler and the recent cold-blooded assassination of doctor George Tiller, the unapologetic abortionist? I believe there is.

A thoughtful musing, one that feeds my own internal struggles on this.

Read the rest. 

Charlie puts meat on the bones of an issue that tests the sincerity of the pro-life movement.

I go back to yesterday's post and in particular WIlliam Saletan's piece:

Several years ago, I went to a conference of abortionists. Some of the late-term providers were there. A row of tables displayed forceps for sale. They started small and got bigger and bigger. Walking along the row, you could ask yourself: Would I use these forceps? How about those? Where would I stop?

The people who do late-term abortions are the ones who don't flinch. They're like the veterans you sometimes see in war documentaries, quietly recounting what they faced and did. You think you're pro-choice. You think marching or phone-banking makes you an activist. You know nothing. There's you, and then there are the people who work in the clinics. And then there are the people who use the forceps. And then there are the people who use the forceps nobody else will use. At the end of the line, there's George Tiller.

Now he's gone. Who will pick up his forceps?

George Tiller used forceps and other instruments to pluck, literally pluck, the unborn from the wombs of mothers in their third trimester.  60,000 times as some outlets are reporting.  60,000.

In your mind, line those unborn babies up in neat little rows of one hundred babies per row.  600 rows later, your task would be complete.  How long would that tasking take? 

Once completed, would you continue to think that Tiller's death was heinous?

Honestly... would you?

I don't understand the mindset, the logic, the mental manipulations necessary to consider it so.

Comments

[renee]

Roeder had been at the clinic the night before he shot the doctor, to put glue in the locks of the doors as he had done many times before. A worker saw him and scolded and chased him away while he repeatedly called her a baby-killer. Reportedly online, he had been trying to get other pro-lifers to go with him to speak with the church leadership in addition to protesting outside the church doors.

His family had abandoned him in his cause to stop abortion, his friends had abandoned him in his cause to stop abortion, his government had abandoned him in his cause to stop abortion, the church had abandoned him in his cause to stop abortion. His efforts didn't stop the abortions that he could see.

Perhaps over the course of another twenty years of his efforts and people like him, the hearts of his family, his friends, his government, the church would be changed and the abortions would stop. Perhaps, but he saw those 60,000 babies in his heart and another 60,000 babies yet to come and his fight against the powers and principalities was countered with his own flesh and blood attack. More than likely because he didn't see his efforts making enough of a difference.

Dr. Tiller had planned to be a dermatologist, his father was a doctor and had a practice that offered abortions. About the time that Dr. Tiller was going to hang his dermatologist shingle, his father and mother and sister and brother-in-law died in a plane crash. Dr. Tiller was given custody of his sister's child and went back home to close up his father's office. While there, reportedly, he heard about a woman who died attempting to abort her child. This death moved him to stay and continue his father's work rather than close it up.

Those that support Tiller's work bring up examples of women in late pregnancy where the mother is facing certain death and the baby is not going to make it, birth or not where only solution is to allow both to die or take the baby to save the mother. According to them, once past a certain stage, no doctor is able to take the baby except for one of the three doctors in the nation who would preform late term abortions.

I'm pretty sure there are other choices for someone in this position. I had a friend in this position, where the baby was terminal and there was nothing that could be done to save her. Whatever was wrong with the baby was making mom's body shut down, so that if the baby wasn't born soon, mom would die, too. The doctor induced mom early and her child died shortly after birth, not because she was born early, but because of her defects. The doctor didn't refuse the mom because of the late stage of pregnancy and force her to go to a doctor like Tiller for an abortion to save her life. Tiller claimed that women in my friends position had no choice but to find a doctor like him or face death. However, there had been several investigations with evidence that he would abort late term pregnancies for most any reason.

Two generations of killing babies, 60,000+ later, one ended in a plane crash, and the other by the hand of a man set on stopping the killing. Those babies if given a voice might call the death of those two men, justice but society boldly calls these two men's death, tragedy and murder and shakes in fear of calling the death of those babies murder, instead we call it pro- choice.

I think, if the majority of our population feels abortion is murder, we hold some reponsibility in the murder of Tiller, in that we haven't done enough to stop the murder of babies. We should have stood with Roeder, stood with him in masses, loudly demanding that the law be changed, in the churches, in the clinics, and in the courts.

So many standing in the gap relentlessly, not flinching, between those babies and death that we could not be ignored, and the law would be changed or they would have to jail such a significant number of the population that everything else would grind to a halt. Instead we withdrew from him, and abandoned him. With the support those babies lives demand, Roeder wouldn't have felt it necessary to end the matter himself, by himself, on our behalf and the behalf of the children yet to visit Dr. Tiller's clinic.

[chuck aka xtnyoda]

Speaking of the "unflinching" from the article... the following video at the end carries just the audio of an instructor teaching the partial birth abortion "procedure." There are no pictures of aborted babies, some actual medical drawings to illustrate (unnerving enough)... but what is absolutely dumb founding...

...keep in mind the "Dr." is actually conducting an abortion for a group of students... you will hear the "suction" machine extract the brain... then the most shocking thing I can imagine... you hear the audience break out in applause.

That is a big step past simple "unflinching."

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RyKc6nPw6C4

[renee]

"...Once completed, would you continue to think that Tiller's death was heinous?

Honestly... would you?"

Pro-life groups are saying they are "shocked and horrified" over Dr. Tiller's death. Isn't it dishonest feigning naivity to be "shocked" that someone who legally murdered 60,000 babies using a horrific method of birthing a live baby partially, cutting their spinal cord, sucking their brains out, crushing their skulls and removing the broken little bodies just might, possibly, become a target by at least one man out of millions of people who believe that what this doctor does is murder and should be illegal?

Honestly, I would be more shocked and horrified if he lived to an old age and killed 60,000 more babies and taught or inspired someone else's son to follow in his steps as he followed in his own father's steps.

The lefty blogs and responses to articles on Dr. Tiller's deaths are calling pro-lifers terrorists, cult groups, saying that we have have done more harm to society than the people in Gitmo, and that's where we all should be. They are calling for Operation Rescue to be listed as a terrorist group and prosecuted as accessory to murder.

So, those that see the horror of millions of babies murdered are the terrorists and those that advocate the murder of millions of babies are the good and decent people in our society. That is shocking and horrific.