[Image via lewsviews]

Carhart, a longtime colleague of Tiller's who also performed abortions at Tiller's clinic, currently works in Nebraska but said he would start providing late-term abortions in Kansas. He declined to discuss the details of his plan, but he did say of late-term abortions, "if I have to train the staff and if I have to do them, then that's certainly an option."

Meanwhile, Operation Rescue's plan to buy Tiller's Wichita Clinic, which Tiller's lawyer Dan Monnat dismissed as a stunt, may be much more than that. Josh Harkinson of Mother Jones explains that the anti-choice organization previously bought a Wichita clinic — now its national headquarters — through a front group. That means, "if Tiller's family puts the building on the market, they might have to sell to someone they know or closely investigate the buyer to keep the building out of [Operation Rescue's] hands."

As Tiller's supporters wrestle with these concerns, others discuss who should bear the blame for Tiller's death, and what that blame should look like. Some are calling Scott Roeder a terrorist, and asking that he be charged with domestic terrorism. Joe Conason of Truthdig writes,

Although an overwhelming majority of abortion opponents bear no responsibility for the doctor's murder and should feel free to exercise their constitutional freedoms to the fullest extent, there is a violent fringe on the far right that has earned the designation of terrorist. And the federal government is responsible for ensuring our safety from those menacing forces.

According to feminist blogger Lindsay Beyerstein on the Huffington Post, however, Roeder is unlikely to face terrorism charges. She says,

That designation would unleash vast federal powers to investigate large swathes of the radical anti-choice movement and hold accountable anyone who gives them the slightest aid and comfort. The feds are simply not prepared for the political fallout that would ensue if, say, Operation Rescue were officially designated as a terrorist organization.

Although Gene Lyons in Salon calls Roeder "a classic Midwestern lone demento," he also cites some of the forces that egged him on. According to Lyons, Bill O'Reilly compared Tiller to Hitler, Stalin, and Osama bin Laden. He also said,

If I could get my hands on Tiller. Well, you know. Can't be vigilantes. Can't do that. It's just a figure of speech. But despicable? Oh, my God. Oh, it doesn't get worse.

This kind of rhetoric didn't kill Tiller, but it certainly made it easier for someone like Roeder to actually become a vigilante, and to feel that powerful people in the antiabortion movement were at least tacitly on his side.

Dr. William Harrison, himself called "Dr. Satan" by antiabortion protesters, has a moving tribute to Dr. Tiller in the Arkansas Times. At its conclusion, he writes,

A common pious remark among many on the Religious Right whose activities incited the murder of Dr. George Tiller is, 'He sowed the wind and now he has reaped the whirlwind.'

Federal, state and local governments, in allowing the religious terrorists - as dangerous as those who kill in the name of Islam - to continue their attacks on Dr. George Tiller, his staff and his patients and their families for the past 22 years are the ones who have 'sown the wind.' Now, unless there is government action on all levels, many more of us will 'reap the whirlwind.'

Let's hope the government action Harrison calls for actually happens, so that no other doctors have to face Tiller's fate.

Neb. Doc Plans To Offer 3rd-Term Abortions In Kan. [AP, via Yahoo News]
Why Is Tiller's Alleged Killer Doing Press Conferences? [Salon]
Will George Tiller's Murder Be Charged As Terrorism? [Utne Reader]
The Story Behind Operation Rescue's Plans to Buy Tiller's Clinic [Mother Jones]
‘Dr. Satan, Come Out!' [Arkansas Times]
Domestic Terrorism By Any Standard [Truthdig]
Weekly Pulse: Will the Feds Dare Call it Terrorism? [Huffington Post]

The clip below includes footage of Dr. Tiller, rendered chilling by his recent death. According to a story that went up late yesterday on the AP, Tiller became a lightning rod for Kansas anti-abortion forces not only because he performed late-term abortions but because, unlike many abortion providers, he was publicly visible and highly outspoken. This much is clear from the clip: Tiller says, "if a stake has to be driven through the heart of the anti-abortion movement, I want to have my hand on the hammer."

Unfortunately, plenty of people felt this way about Tiller. He was in many ways the center of the Kansas abortion debate, which has been, in turn, the center of Kansas politics in general. In the book What's the Matter With Kansas?, Thomas Frank said the presence of Tiller's clinic made anti-abortion activists dub Kansas "the abortion capital of the nation." The issue is a highly polarizing one, dividing far-right, often evangelical Christians from more moderate Republicans and from Democrats. Political science professor Burdett Loomis says,

When you get down to the heart of the split among Kansas Republicans, it always comes back to abortion. It may pop out in gun laws, homeschooling, evolution - but it starts and stops with abortion.

Frank tells stories of several Kansans who have switched political parties solely because of their views on abortion. One is a friend's father, a teacher and former McGovern Democrat. Frank writes:

These days he votes the farthest-right Republicans he can find on the ballot. The particular issue that brought him over was abortion. A devout Catholic, my friend's dad was persuaded in the early nineties that the sanctity of the fetus outweighed all of his other concerns, and from there he gradually accepted the whole pantheon of conservative devil-figures: the elite media and the American Civil Liberties Union, contemptuous of our values; the la-di-da feminists; the idea that Christians are vilely persecuted — right here in the U.S. of A. It doesn't even bother him, really, when his new hero Bill O'Reilly blasts the teachers' union as a group that "does not love America."

Taken together, the documentary and the book make yet another case that the assassination of Dr. Tiller was not "an isolated act,"
but a particularly tragic skirmish in a long, broad war. A woman's right to choose is at risk in Kansas, as are the lives of those who uphold it. For anyone who has gotten complacent about abortion rights, What's the Matter With Kansas? is a disturbing reminder that many people in this country desire — passionately, crazily, and sometimes badly enough to kill — to take those rights away.

What's The Matter With Kansas? [Official Film Site]
New Documentary Spotlights Tiller [Broadsheet]
What's The Matter With Kansas?: How Conservatives Won The Heart of America [Amazon]
Kansas Is Deadly Battleground In Abortion Debate [AP, via Yahoo News]

Most of the women who have shared their experiences online — even anonymously — are married, and sought late-term abortions because of fetal abnormalities. Though their decisions were heart-wrenching — these were planned, wanted pregnancies — their stories may be more socially acceptable because they don't fit the pro-life profile of thoughtless sluts seeking "abortion on demand." But Tiller treated unmarried women and girls too, with no less compassion. One woman, who terminated her pregnancy because of a rare fetal blood abnormality, remembers Tiller's commitment to all his patients:

My husband and I found Dr. George Tiller to be a caring, sensitive, and compassionate man who truly believed he was helping those of us who were desperate and had nowhere else to go. While we were at his clinic, he was very concerned about an 11-year-old child raped by her stepfather. And, when we were tormented by Operation Rescue protesters outside his clinic, he put on a bullet proof vest and personally drove us out of there while we hid in his van.

And a husband recalls:

I remember being puzzled about a T-shirt he was wearing, which said "Happy Birthday Jennifer from team Tiller!" or something similar. Turns out it comemmorated the birthday of a fifteen year old girl who was raped, became pregnant, and came to Tiller for an abortion. As luck would have it, she was in the clinic the same week as her birthday. So the clinic threw her a party.

A Heartbreaking Choice, a website for parents who terminate planned pregnancies due to fetal abnormalities, has a section called "Kansas Stories," dedicated to Tiller's Women's Health Services Clinic, one of only three in the nation that will perform abortions after 21 weeks. The stories don't mention Tiller by name, but they paint the clinic as a safe haven for women with few options, beset on all sides by critics. One woman writes,

I was 27 weeks by this point. I was terrified. The moment I met the doctor, all of that ended. He was a wonderful and loving man. I came in on Monday and gave birth to our baby girl on Friday. We were able to hold her after, and say our goodbyes. That doctor will always be in my heart.

Another says:

The reality is that abortion in the late second and third trimesters is extremely rare. The reality is that finding a doctor to do this procedure in the late second or third trimester is almost impossible. For me, the reality was that at the most painful time of my life I had to travel out of state, stay in a hotel room and face hostile protesters in order to carry out this most personal of choices. [...]

My only advice is don't let "them" define this for you. It is still your choice, your child and your life. I started to react as if the protesters were talking to me personally and indeed felt like everything they said was directed at me. In truth, they never see the real people behind the rhetoric.

A third adds:

The following morning the protestors were there again but this time with a twist. They had a huge group of kids with them. These middle- to high school-age kids were out there on the street corner hollering at us. These children didn't have the slightest understanding of what we were going through but they were taught they had the right to judge us.

A Kansas pro-lifer, writing to Andrew Sullivan, lays part of the blame for Tiller's death at the feet of such protesters:

This had been going on for years now. When these people said that Tiller's practices must be "brought to an end" or whatever, I truly believe that the vast, vast, vast majority of them (including the OR president, whom I've talked to about this before) do not have homicide on their minds. However, it doesn't matter. Operation Rescue or Bill O'Reilly do not qualify every statement about Tiller with a parenthetical stating "oh, by the way, killing him is not the way to stop him" for obvious reasons. But even if they did, they can't stop someone from thinking that more drastic measures are "necessary."

Pro-life advocates have the right to protest in front of abortion clinics, just as advocates for choice have the right to criticize them for making a difficult time all the more painful for women. But rhetoric that targets abortion providers themselves, rather than abortion as an issue, always runs the risk of inciting extremism and violence. After Tiller's death, Operation Rescue president Troy Newman said,

Operation Rescue has worked for years through peaceful, legal means, and through the proper channels to see him brought to justice. We denounce vigilantism and the cowardly act that took place this morning.

His denunciation is commendable, but why the focus on "bringing Tiller to justice?" Why can't the debate over abortion concentrate on laws and courts, rather than on individuals who perform a service that is legal and considered by many to be morally acceptable? William Saletan at Slate says, "If unborn children are morally equal to born children, then Tiller's assassin has just succeeded where the legal system failed: He has stopped a mass murderer from killing again." He says that the fact that pro-life groups have denounced Tiller's murderer shows they don't truly equate unborn children with born children, or abortion with murder. But there's another argument here, one that says if you truly disagree with abortion, you should seek to remove the laws that allow it, not the people who operate according to those laws. If the death of George Tiller shows us anything, it's that if there must be a battle over abortion, that battle should be fought at the polls and in the courtrooms, not in doctor's offices — and the weapons should be words, not bullets.

Kansas Stories [A Heartbreaking Choice]
Patients Remember Dr. Tiller [Feministe]
It's So Personal: A Tiller Patient [Daily Dish]
Another Memory Of Visiting Dr. Tiller [Double X]
A Pro-Lifer From Kansas [The Daily Dish]
Kan. Abortion Doc Killed In Church; Suspect Held [AP, via Yahoo News]
Tiller's Killer [Slate]

Lawrence, Kansas. (AP Photo/Charlie Riedel)


Lawrence, Kansas. (AP Photo/Charlie Riedel)


Wichita, Kansas. (AP Photo/Orlin Wagner)


Lawrence, Kansas. (AP Photo/Charlie Riedel)


Wichita, Kansas, Sunday. (AP Photo/Orlin Wagner)


Lawrence, Kansas, Sunday. (AP Photo/Charlie Riedel)


Wichita, Kansas. (Photo by Kelly Glasscock/Getty Images)


Wichita, Kansas. (Photo by Kelly Glasscock/Getty Images)


Lawrence, Kansas. (AP Photo/Charlie Riedel)


Wichita, Kansas. (Photo by Kelly Glasscock/Getty Images)


Lawrence, Kansas. (AP Photo/Charlie Riedel)


Wichita, Kansas. (AP Photo/Orlin Wagner)


Wichita, Kansas. (Photo by Kelly Glasscock/Getty Images)


Earlier: George Tiller, Late-Term Abortion Provider, Shot & Killed At Church

Richard Hasen, a professor specializing in election law at Loyola Law School in Los Angeles, says in the Chicago Tribune that ''Election law has become political strategy." Hasen's not wrong, except about the timing — election law has been an electoral strategy since McCain's hero Barry Goldwater ran for President in 1964. Back then, it was called "ballot security" instead of "voter caging," but the principles were the same: target low income and minority voters whose housing situations might not be as stable as your average suburban white Republican voter with mailers marked "Do Not Forward." When they are returned to sender, get the person thrown off the voter rolls since they don't live where they say they live and, abrakazam!, you've got one less vote for the other party. It was so bad and so racist that the Republican party was forced to sign consent decrees agreeing not to do it anymore in 1982 and again in 1986. This, of course, did not stop the Republican party from doing it (at least) in 2004 in Ohio and Florida.

Not that caging was the only electoral problem in 2000, either — former Secretary of State Katherine Harris initiated a "felon purge" that illegally purged at least 2,000 former felons who had their rights restored from the voter rolls as well as thousands of other Floridians with "similar" names. Unsurprisingly, most of these people who were prevented from voting were African-American (and, in many cases, Democrats). Bush won Florida by less than 1,000 votes. But even what limited bad press the Republican party got from that hasn't stopped them in their quest to make sure that as many potential Democratic voters are purged from the rolls in time for Election Day — or should we start calling it coronation day?.

In 2007, the head of the Republican Party in Kansas was so emboldened by the fact that most people don't give a shit if voters (and particularly minority voters) are illegally disenfranchised that he actually sent out a letter bragging about the party's efforts to throw legal voters off the rolls. He's still the chair, by the way.

The Chairman of the Republican Party in Macomb County, Michigan told reporters for the Michigan Messenger last month that they planned to challenge voters on election day based on lists of foreclosed homes in the county, in an effort to get voters thrown out of polling places. Of course in Michigan, as in the rest of the country, minority homeowners were far more likely to have been offered subprime mortgages and are thus far more likely to be caught up in the foreclosure crisis in Michigan. Unlike registration-caging which, when done by race, is illegal under the consent decree, it's apparently perfectly legal to challenge someone's right to vote at their polling place.

The Republican National Committee sent out "registration confirmation" mailers to thousands of registered Democratic voters in Florida this summer (you know, when the snow birds weren't there) with "do not forward" noticed attached in order to cage voters there as well. Their spokeswoman told a reporter that it "wasn't worth writing about," because, of course, they'd prefer that you not know that they're undertaking massive efforts to eliminate potential Democratic voters from non-provisional balloting on November 4th.

In Ohio, they've gone even further, filing lawsuits against the Secretary of State to keep anyone from voting in-person absentee that registered close to the deadline — as the woman pictured did. Can't you tell she shouldn't be allowed to vote? Can't you just see it in her face? Ohio law allowed people to vote in-person absentee before the registration deadline and the Secretary of State ruled that ballots not counted until election day weren't votes until Election Day. And — horrors — people that might not have the means to get back to the polls a month after they registered did so. Homeless people! Women at domestic violence shelters! The Ohio told the New York Post that they "smelled a rat" in that, because, you know, increasing voter turnout (which is embarrassingly low in this country) through making it easier for legal but disadvantaged voters to vote is totally shady. This is what they do: when they can't win on the issues, they'll win by hook or by crook or by making sure that your civil rights are violated and you can't do anything about it. Oh, and yes, Republicans are caging votes in Ohio again, too, in case they couldn't disenfranchise enough people by the registration deadline.

But they've got other tactics that they're hoping you can't tie to them. In 2002, the Republican-controlled Congress passed and President Bush signed into law the completely unironically named Help America Vote Act. That's the legislation that ushered in the days of electronic voting machines, by the way. But it also ushered in the days of database-checking and automatic verification that will kick out voter registrations if a typo some data-entry person making $6 stuck in or left out a letter somehow. They're checking your voter registration against your driver's license (took me an extra trip to the DMV to get mine right, by the way) and against the Social Security database which is so error-ridden even Republican-leaning groups like the Chamber of Commerce don't want to have to use it to see if you're eligible to work in this country. Oh, and they don't even have to tell you if you've been purged — you might just show up on Election Day and be told in a crowded room that they think you're a felon or an illegal immigrant or have registered in more than one place. That's not humiliating or intimidating or anything, or designed to get you to give up and go home. And that, of course, is if some GOP operative "observing" the election doesn't decide to challenge your right to vote at all based on some shadily-obtained caged list.

And don't let them pretend that this isn't part and parcel of how they expect to win. They know they're not going to win votes based on their policies at this point — hence with talking about Bill Ayers the "terrorist" BFF of Obama, hence with running nothing but negative ads, hence with not calling out their supporters on yelling "Kill him!" or "Off with his head" at rallies. But if they can't win with that, they'll win with this and hope that, as has always been the case, disenfranchised voters will head home and not scream, shout or try voting again. Because, after all, there's another election they want to win by hook or by crook next year, and a win's a win as George Bush proved in 2000.

States’ Actions to Block Voters Appear Illegal [NY Times]
Voter Reigstration Lawsuits Could Shape Nov. 4 Election [Chicago Tribune]
Voter Caging [Project Vote]
Voter Caging [Wikipedia]
Voter Supression [ePluribus Media]
Botched Name Purge Denied Some the Right to Vote [Washington Post]
Kansas GOP Chair Sends Email Boasting of Voter Caging [Crooks & Liars]
Kansas Republican Party Officials [Kansas GOP]
Lose Your House, Lose Your Vote [Michigan Messenger]
New NCRC Study Shows Racial Disparities In High-Cost Lending Remain Entrenched [National Community Reinvestment Coalition]
Democrats, Florida Elections Officials Criticize GOP Mailing [St. Petersburg Times]
Ohio Republicans Use Lawsuit To Fight for State's Crucial Votes [Wall Street Journal]
GOP Smells Rat in Ohio [NY Post]
Nearly 600,000 Subject to Possible Caging in Ohio [Miller-McCune]
Immigration [U.S. Chamber of Commerce]
Red Flag On Purging Voter Rolls [CBS News]

"She was not glued. She was not tied. She was just physically stuck by her body. It is hard to imagine. ... I still have a hard time imagining it myself," said Ness County Sheriff Bryan Whipple to the AP. Us too! Anyway, needless to say, don't try this at home. Her legs atrophed! And...um...it doesn't seem like it was particularly intellectually stimulating in there either.

Woman Stays On Boyfriend's Toilet For Two Years [MSNBC]