A freakish barnyard of a botched, modernist building assigned to the unlucky Thirteenth Street of Wichita, Kansas, the Reformation Lutheran Church was a prime candidate for some “theology and geometry” – as Ignatius J. Reilly would say – for fortune never favored the strange angles it took. To the mass of Christians howling outside the church every Sunday, it seemed indecent of the parishioners to glory not only in the blood of Christ but in the blood money of the Tiller family—whose weekly tithe, cut from the millions they made off their murder mill, was not exactly a penny in the coffer. Atheists also polluted the atmosphere, less to point out Christian hypocrisy than to remind Tiller, in the company of his friends, that an unwanted nine-month-old should be put up for adoption rather than poisoned, defecated, and incinerated. On the worst Sundays, the protesters entered the church and crashed the party from the pews and the lectern. The Lutherans had them jailed, of course, but to no lasting effect and with no sense of historical irony. They even made Tiller an usher and never considered, so dark was their confusion, whether the abortions baptized at his clinic now kneel, join hands, and sing the hymn “O Tiller the Baby-Killer” in the nurseries of Limbo. “A Christian knows that everyone’s a sinner,” they demurred, so they could neither stone, nor censure, nor even judge him—not that anyone at all should judge a man who, in helping antsy mothers dump their wards often just hours before birth, helps out humanity.
Yet on the morning of 31 May 2009, a fair-weathered Sunday that, unlike the weekend before, tossed light rather than rain off the church’s steeple, the “little problem” of the parish resolved itself as swiftly, and humanely, as the sixty-thousand “little problems” of Wichita’s only vacationers. As Tiller exchanged terse hellos with the only company he could keep without the help of an oven, Scott Roeder emerged from his car and ascended the stairs of what seemed a temple of justice. He retracted and released the snapping slide of his handgun, knotted his fingers around the door handle, and knew that he, like Tiller, was good to go. “Crazy Scott” rhymes with “lazy shot,” however, and Roeder’s bullet failed to pierce the sternum in the style of Tiller’s own executions. It merely burst Tiller’s eye on the way to his brain, where it laid waste to the most legally sound mind in the history of serial killers.
The most beguiling mass-murderer since Adolph Hitler, George Tiller raised an army of fanatics even after he’d undergone the same full-term abortion as his targets. Small rallies erupted immediately in all major cities across the nation, citing his motto “Trust Women” as evidence that he worked with women in distress and was willing, for five-thousand dollars apiece, to give them whatever they wanted. Such cults have now succeeded in making Tiller a martyr, because some women, though not most, claim it’s humanly obvious that an infant in an amniotic sac deserves less dignity than a skin tag—for if a seven-, eight-, or nine-month-old dwells a quarter-inch away from the rest of the world, these few think they have the right to stab him in the chest, dump him in a toilet, and burn him on a bed of charcoal. Immune to matters of brute fact, they view abortion as a categorical right, seeing no difference between the young spore sopping up folic acid and the elder midget sucking on his thumb. They have left the earth in their spaceships and settled in a black hole, where not even the light of the stars can guide them through their night.
Ridding them of both their monster and their raison d’être, the lead entrenched in Tiller’s skull aroused an equally unreasonable and equally expected reaction from the people who knew him for what he was. The pawns of the pro-life movement immediately condemned the quelling of Tiller’s crematorium, washing their hands of it, like Pontius Pilate, in a cloying attempt to appease the mobs of homicidal ideologues. At the time of Roeder’s trial, which began this Monday and which will convict him of murder within the next three weeks, their confused reaction hasn’t wavered. Neither has the message it sends, which involves them in the same evil as their wild-eyed foes. For if it is just to kill a human being in defense of another, and if it is not just to kill a human being in defense of thousands of fully developed infants, then human life is a relative rather than an absolute value; and to advance this position is, for example, to gather Jews, Catholics, gypsies, homosexuals, and invalids in a place that reeks of Zyklon B.
Bane of the baby-butchering millionaire, scourge of the serial-killer who showed that the law is an onion-eyed jester, Scott Roeder will have single-handledly clipped America’s number of late-term abortions by a third. He exhibited neither a moral nor a mental inadequacy in performing an unparalleled act of civil justice. If he exhibited any inadequacy at all, it was that he couldn’t expunge Tiller’s brain sixty-thousand times over.
