[This post originally appeared at Lean Left, a general-issues blog KTK also contributes to. The founders of Lean Left graciously allowed me to re-post it here to bring all my health-related posts into one place. Original posting: 4/8/2005]

Eric Rudolph, suspect in a string of abortion clinic bombings, the 1996 Atlanta Olympics bombing, a bombing of a gay bar in Atlanta, and other crimes, has reportedly pled guilty to 4 bombings in which he killed two people and wounded over 100 others. He will receive 4 life sentences, escaping the death penalty.

In addition to the Olympic bombing, Rudolph also has been charged with setting off a blast in 1998 at an Alabama abortion clinic that killed an off-duty police officer and critically injured a nurse. . . .

He is charged in two other 1997 bombings in Atlanta – one at a lesbian bar and one at a building that housed an abortion clinic.

One woman was killed and more than 100 people were injured in the Olympic bombing, which tore through Olympic Centennial Park during the Summer Games.

He hid in the mountains around North Carolina for over 5 years, receiving help and food from locals who knew he was there and sheltered him from the authorities. There were several pro-Rudolph demonstrations by fellow members of the culture of life during his fugitive years.

The FBI perfunctorily searched the woods for him soon after he disappeared, but otherwise did nothing. (This is the same FBI that arrested the man who spotted the bomb at the Olympics and moved the crowds away, saving an untold number of lives - whom the FBI railroaded and ruined simply because he was convenient and untelegenic. Their “theory” - the FBI is very proud of its “profiling” - is that the person who discovers the bomb is the bomber - so why bother with evidence?) There have been seven people killed at abortion clinics in the US in the past 20 years, along with at least 17 other attempted murders, hundreds of bombings and arsons, and literally thousands of acts of assault, harassment and threats, let alone tens of thousands of picketings and clinic “blockades.” To this day not one person has ever been arrested for the murders of clinic workers by law enforcement officials actually investigating their crimes (two were arrested on the scene of the crime, one while driving a stolen car, and one by the French government after he had been receiving support from the US for years without an extradition request being filed; Rudolph was stopped and identified while scrounging for food). Increased enforcement efforts after passage of the “Federal Access to Clinic Entrances” act under Clinton, and the use of anthrax as a terror weapon after 9/11 (forcing the federal government to take anthrax-hoax threats at abortion clinics seriously) did have a damping effect on the violence, but it is still notable that the FBI has never made any progress on these cases on its own efforts; they have also identified only two of the hundreds of people involved in the anti-choice violence conspiracy or their many supporters.

At least one of the most disgusting of them is now dealt with - and we are spared the ghoulish sight of supporters standing vigil at his execution and proclaiming him a “martyr.” He’s just a murderer, a terrorist, and a jailbird. He’s also a homophobic bigot - a fact that bears careful notice. His anti-gay obsessions were just as real and just as deadly as his anti-woman/anti-sex obsessions, and sprang from the same source: extremist right-wing Christianity. Rudolph is an example beyond all others of the hatefulness, the bigotry, and the insanely violent hostility toward “the other” that drives the angry fringe of the religious right. Whatever high-flown rhetoric about “defending life” he may have used in his taunting communiques after his murders, he is in fact merely a seething bigot, too ready to kill gays, women, women’s doctors, and anyone who emblematizes for him a way of life he disapproves of. The anti-choice movement is no more about “life” than is the anti-gay movement, the anti-tax movement, the “Christian Identity” movement, or the KKK, all of which to some degree overlap it. (We may pause here to note that the Department of Homeland Security has now officially removed the “Army of God” - a group explicitly advocating the murder of abortion services providers, publishers of a terror-tactics manual to that effect, and to which Rudolph and at least two other abortion-clinic murderers and attempted murderers belonged - from its list of terrorist organizations, while listing numerous environmental and left-wing groups.)

Murderous hatred of abortion providers and the women who seek to control their own sexual lives is simply one manifestation of the hatred of all non-conservative, non-Christian, non-patriarchal, non-medievalists that erupts in so many ugly and violent ways from the religious right. Rudolph manifested that hatred in unmistakable form, finding time to kill one person each at a gay bar and an abortion clinic, while bombing an even-handed assortment of three clinics and at least two “gay” sites. (In his bizarre worldview - a perfectly common Christian worldview, but no less bizarre for that - the Olympics bombing qualified as an anti-gay action, because gay people would go to the Olympics.) His fight is not for life, not for fetuses, not for “the vulnerable”; it is against anyone who threatens him by not being like him, and threatens his superiority, and his authority over them, by not acknowledging it. (You see, then, the desperation over gays and independent women - the ultimate threats to male hetero domination.)

In this he is just one part of the wide-ranging and violent bigotry that characterizes the “Christian dominion” movement. And through him it is more obvious than ever that the fight for abortion rights is a fight for freedom tout court - that women’s right to control their sexuality is the same right as that of gays to live their lives freely, the same as that of non-Christians to claim equal protection under the law, of ethnic minorities to be free of intimidation and discrimination, of teachers to teach and students to learn free of religious indoctrination and deliberately falsified knowledge, and of all of us to assert our freedom to live by our own values in all areas of our lives. Rudolph was a terrorist - a bigot and a terrorist - and we all who were not like him, or who merely sympathized with those not like him, were his targets.