The AP reports that Scott Roeder, the terrorist who killed Dr. George Tiller, publicly and in cold blood, last May, has openly confessed to the crime and justified it with the usual religious-radical gibberish about “unborn children”. In the article, he explicitly equates fetuses with independently-living persons and claims that killing to prevent abortion is justified if at least one forced pregnancy results; he encourages others to perform similar terroristic murders, and states he intends to base his legal defense on an argument for a religious-political justification for murder. None of this is new, except possibly that he has stated all this on record now.  It confirms what we knew about him, anyway.

The real question is whether those who are so agitated about real or imagined terrorism of other kinds (especially by Muslims), and who have been so complacently accepting of anti-woman terrorism in the US for decades, will condemn or even acknowledge an open statement of Christian religious-terrorist ideology in the case of yet another anti-choice fanatic.

Just this week we’ve seen a terrible mass murder committed by a Muslim military officer who was apparently distraught over the war in Afghanistan and his possible deployment. Literally before the bodies were cool, various right-wingers jumped in to denounce “Muslim terrorism” and to cite vague links between the suspect and Al Qaeda (he visited a mosque which was also visited by someone who knew someone who was connected with Al Qaeda); however, it is not clear that the apparent perpetrator’s motives were intended for a political end at all – as opposed to merely an outburst of personal anxiety – and there is little to suggest that it was terrorism in any reasonable sense. The murders of doctors by anti-choicers, beyond any question, are defined by the features of terrorism found in most of the commonly-used definitions: they are acts of violence committed against civilians for the purpose of inciting fear in other, third-party individuals, to promote a particular political end. We heard nothing of this at the time of Dr. Tiller’s death (nor of any of the previous murders and other acts of violence); will we hear it acknowledged now that the terrorist has so openly proclaimed his murderous religious ideology?

Anti-choice terrorism is intended to prevent women from exercising a legal and moral right involving their bodily health and autonomy, by terrorizing those women and their healthcare providers – it is violence intended not merely against its chosen (often random) targets, but to terrorize and thus paralyze a larger group, to further the religious and political ideology of the perpetrators and their vast army of supporters and admirers within the religious right. Yet it has never been acknowledged as such, and the large subculture on the right wing who have made a profession of terrorism scare-mongering have never acknowledged the persistent anti-choice terrorism ongoing in the US. (Nor has the FBI: fake anthrax attacks had been staged on almost 700 abortion clinics in the US in the days before 9/11 – not one of them resulted in an arrest, or any obvious urgency about the issue, and they were not treated as domestic terrorism. One person was charged with terrorism for fake anthrax attacks on clinics in the wake of 9/11 and the Congress anthrax mail attacks – the first and only such charge in the entire history of anti-choice terrorism. None of the anti-choice murderers, including Roeder, have been charged as terrorists.)

Now we have an admitted terrorist openly advocating further political killings to promote his religious obsessions. If Roeder were a Muslim and his targets were not women and their healthcare providers, the shrieking loons of the right would be off their heads screaming about his crime, his religious beliefs, his unrepentant stance, his advocacy and rationalization of violence, and his links to other extremists with similar religious and political beliefs. Will we see even the slightest acknowledgment of Christian anti-choice religious terrorism and its dangers in this blatant case?