Yes. There it was on Daily Kos on Tuesday (albeit republished from the blog RH Reality Check), plainly headlined "Dr. Tiller's Crucifixion and Resurrection," a brazen rant on how Tiller was assassinated by the State because he was too "destabilizing to the oppressive status quo." The author simply uses the pseudonym "Trusting Women." Even as you read it, you can't believe it:
I am drinking my morning coffee. Shortly, I will head to morning service at the Unitarian Church. I wonder what Dr. Tiller's Sunday morning was like, that Sunday one year ago when he was gunned down in his church.
A couple months ago, I had honor of addressing a group of abortion providers. The topic was "Resurrecting Our Moral Center." I do not think it was coincidental that less than a year after Tiller's murder, we were talking about resurrection. God, how much we miss him.
In that talk, I said that I did not think that the abortion providing community's moral center needed to be resurrected. It had never died. I knew it had not died because if it had, the providers who have continued to serve women, the providers who have increased their gestational limits to take the patients St. George would have served, would not have done and continued to do what they do: provide women abortions and, in particular, provide later-term abortions.
After I gave that talk, I was discussing this idea of resurrection with a leading feminist theologian with whom I have been blessed to study. I told her how sad I was that this community of people so clearly grounded in a profound ethic of love and compassion felt that their "moral center" had died, so sad that they could not articulate what I see so vividly: a beaming moral and spiritual core that radiates through the community's service to women.
And then she said to me "but there WAS a crucifixion. Because crucifixion is about the State executing an individual who is too powerful, too destabilizing to the oppressive status quo. If there was a crucifixion, then the community does need a resurrection. The community needs to remember that all that Dr. Tiller was, all he did, DID NOT die in his assassination."
For many of us, particularly those involved in medicine and science, religious (particularly Christian) terms like resurrection, crucifixion, and God make us queasy and for good reason, reasons I will not rehash here. But the fact of the matter was they did not make Tiller queasy. George Tiller had faith....
Tiller was able to do what many of us liberals have not: harness profound spiritual and religious power, providing abortions later than almost all of his colleagues. I find it difficult to believe that his deep grounding in a spiritual/religious tradition was unconnected to the radically compassionate nature of his work....
George Tiller was murdered in his church, in his (liberal) religious community. He called his work a reproductive ministry. And while terrorists tragically ended his life, they did not end the work to which he (and all those working at Women's Health Care Services) dedicated their life. Tiller finds good company among the ancient prophets who spoke truth to power, who kept on keeping-on with the faith that one day justice shall "roll on like a river, righteousness like a never-failing stream." [Amos 5:24]
"Trusting Women" doesn't seem to ponder that perhaps Tiller was not doing God's work. He or she is "queasy" over religion because they see the protesters pray outside clinics, pray as part of the "oppressive status quo." But still, he or she cannot resist the temptation to place Tiller at the "resurrected" moral center offering abortion as if it were a precious sacrament of God's justice.
