The Pentecost Sunday murder of Dr. George Tiller by a man who
shot him to death in the foyer of Reformation Lutheran Church in
Wichita, Kansas, sparked a lot of commentary. Tiller was in a
controversial line of work, and known for “pushing the envelope”
even there.
I do not write to speak ill of the dead. My argument here is with
the living.
More specifically, I have a quarrel with Rev. Katherine Ragsdale
and those others who imply that anyone killed on church property
automatically becomes a martyr. It presumes too much to hint that
the crime scene tape used by police officers has sanctifying
power, yet this muddle-headed version of “murder in the
cathedral” seems to be the prevailing view in places where the
memory of people like Thomas Becket and Oscar Romero faded long
ago. You’d think the president of the Episcopal Divinity School
would know better than to suggest such a thing, but Ragsdale had
already
called abortion a “blessing,” so perhaps foolish consistency
really is the hobgoblin of little minds.
Sadly, Ragsdale shares her peculiar definition of martyrdom with
other progressive religious leaders. A rabbi named Arthur Waskow
echoed her in
telling a reporter that Tiller was “a religious martyr in the
fullest classical sense, killed for acting in accord with his
religious commitments.”
That is a stunning assertion. People who think the
Constitution tolerates abortion usually follow the late Justice
Harry Blackmun in locating that tolerance among the so-called
“penumbras
and emanations” of a right to privacy implied by the 14th
Amendment. As a result, even sympathetic readings of case law
leave abortion two steps removed from the actual text of the
Constitution. Rabbi Waskow’s assertion eliminates one of those
steps. By describing Tiller’s career in terms of “religious
commitment,” the rabbi zips past the usual 14th Amendment “due
process” jurisprudence to place abortion (Waskow calls it
“healing with compassion”) under the protection of the First
Amendment’s “free exercise of religion” clause.
If Waskow had made his statement in a comic strip, you would have
seen the thought bubble over his head: Why defend the career of a
man like Tiller by appealing to an Amendment that only lawyers
care about, when enterprising re-definition can find sanction for
abortion at the heart of the first and best-known Amendment in
the Bill of Rights? The bonus from a progressive point of view is
that if abortion can be called a religious commitment, then
rhetoric like “if men could get pregnant, abortion would be a
sacrament,” is no longer necessary. In the unlikely event that
non-theologians compare the involved terms, any difference
between “religious commitment” and “sacrament” will seem trivial
at best.
Some pundits used Tiller’s murder to revisit the risks of
child-bearing and scorn opposition to abortion as “reproductive
ignorance.” One writer with whom I am friendly
described the killing as a consequence of willingness to take
a stand against a powerful “patriarchal” mind-set. “Because the
shooter and all those who believe as he does are incapable of
acknowledging that women have the same moral authority and
autonomy as men do, Dr. Tiller had to die,” she wrote, thus
confusing abortion with empowerment and ignoring mountains of
evidence about what Christians actually think.
Speaking more accurately about Christian ethics, Phil
Lawler and others noted that the wrongness of taking human
life is not taught by wrongfully taking human life. Sudden death
robbed Dr. Tiller of the chance to repent and reform. The blame
for that rests with his killer, whose judgment has been condemned
by every pro-life group.
Attempts to add this murder to the rap sheet of anti-feminine
forces do not match the facts as we know them. Moreover, the
alternative to patriarchy is matriarchy, and — human nature
being what it is — that social arrangement also has dirty hands.
In a column for Canada’s National Post,
George Jonas put it this way: “Living in an epoch that is
selfish as well as matriarchal, our lifeboats are no longer
marked ‘women and children first,’ only ‘women first.’ We invent
euphemisms, such as ‘choice’ for killing, and sophomoric
dilemmas, such as pretending not to know when life begins, to
ensure that nothing hinders Virginia’s quest for Santa Claus.”
Jonas probably yells more than he should, but his argument
answers anyone who would drape abortion providers in the mantle
of heroism, or paint the gunman who shot Tiller as an agent of
some vast conspiracy against
women.
How then do we end the standoff that cheapens words by yanking
them from their historic moorings to use them as shields in
jousts with ideological opponents? Perhaps the rabbi, the
divinity school president, and their fellow travelers could visit
the Shrine
of the North American Martyrs in Auriesville, NY. While there,
they might get an inkling of real martyrdom by walking
the ground where Jesuit missionary René Goupil and
his companions were tortured and killed by Iroquois warriors in
1642. Goupil was felled by a hatchet blow for tracing the sign of
the cross on a child’s forehead.
Another possible remedy for the confused involves re-reading
Joseph Cardinal Ratzinger’s classic Introduction to
Christianity. Not for nothing did Ratzinger go on to become
pope. Without mentioning abortion as such, he explained why it is
gravely wrong by tracing the idea of human dignity back to its
historic and theological roots. “Greek thought always regarded
the many individual creatures, including the many individual
human beings, only as individuals, arising out of the splitting
up of the idea in matter. The reproductions are thus always
secondary; the real thing is the one and universal,” he wrote. In
other words, it did not matter whether you were an ex-fetus in
Athens or an ex-fetus in Sparta: when push came to shove, you
were interchangeable with every other ex-fetus. But then came the
radical change in outlook inspired by Jesus.
One reads the following summary feeling certain that Katherine
Ragsdale slept through a few classes that Joseph Ratzinger did
not: “The Christian sees in man, not an individual, but a
person; and it seems to me that this passage from
individual to person contains the whole span of the transition
from antiquity to Christianity, from Platonism to faith,”
Ratzinger wrote. “This definite being is not at all something
secondary, giving us a fragmentary glimpse of the universal,
which is the real. As the minimum it is a maximum; as the unique
and unrepeatable, it is something supreme and real.”
Neither those paradoxes nor the implications of what God says in
Jeremiah 1:5 lend themselves to sound bites, but they are worth
pondering.
Against such wisdom, Ragsdale and Waskow bring only the sentiment
they share with their progressive peers. The collective
experience of every group from the Baker Street Irregulars to the
Riders of Rohan and the Teamsters seems not to have taught them
about the limits of
acclamation, which is a pity. Had they paid attention, they
might have learned that treating murder as a chance to whack at a
piñata stuffed with praises is a risky business that demands more
than sympathy for what the deceased did to earn a living.
Christianity holds that all human life is precious, and
because God became man in Jesus, holy. But to jump from that to
the conclusion that anyone who dies in church has lead a life of
heroic virtue is to tumble down a rabbit hole into a wonderland
where the meanings of words like “martyr” and “saint” fade faster
than the body of Lewis Carroll’s Cheshire Cat.
