Interesting how, midst doing final edits on the next edition of Inspection, I find that I’m sharing thoughts with people far more famous than I will ever be; and the new is confirming that I’m on the right track. My next Inspection is about how we frame our arguments as a society. I have found several columns suddenly popped up on this topic after the murder of Dr. Tiller, though I started my next column almost a month ago: long before the homicide was committed. From one of these columns I found a link to a former member of some of the more radical Pro-Life Christian groups who addresses the topic honestly… a sadly rare occasion these day.
First an excerpt, then a link. But before that I would simply like to say, “Thank you, Frank Schaeffer.”
We who sowed hate share blame in killing of abortion doctor
By Frank Schaeffer
June 2, 2009My late father and I share part of the blame for the murder of Dr. George Tiller, the abortion doctor gunned down on Sunday.
Until I got out of the religious right (in the mid-1980s) and repented of my former hate-filled rhetoric, I was both a leader of the so-called pro-life movement and a part of a Republican Party hate machine masquerading as the moral conscience of America.
In the late 1970s, my father, evangelical pro-life leader Francis Schaeffer, along with Dr. C. Everett Koop (who soon become surgeon general in the Reagan administration) went on the road with me, taking the documentary anti-abortion film series I produced and directed to the evangelical public. The series and companion book eventually brought millions of heretofore nonpolitical evangelical Americans into the anti-abortion crusade.
In the early ’80s, my father followed up with a book that sold over a million copies and which, in certain passages, advocated force if all other methods for rolling back the abortion ruling of Roe v. Wade failed. He compared America and its legalized abortion to Hitler’s Germany and said that whatever tactics would have been morally justified in removing Hitler would be justified in trying to stop abortion. I said the same thing in a best-selling book I wrote.
Except that Franky lied about his father. His father never advocated violence as answer. He used the word force as in regards to civil peaceful disobedience.
And more, sincerety is not his intentions on abortion debate. This is just the latest excuse for him to take swipes at his father for raising him evangelical Protestant, which he has been doing to his parents for decades since he became Eastern Orthodox. It has zero to do with the stances on abortion. It has everything to do with his own need to mock and berate his parents, even when his mom was alive and driven to tears at his insults at her looks, etc. His apology may come off sincere to those who wish to paint lump pro-lifers as extremists (ignoring this is first murder of abortion doctors in more than a decade, and this happens every four years overall combined in all of fifty states), but anyone familar with his work and how he is towards others, smallest to biggest among folks, know better than that.
I strongly suggest liberals who wish to use him as model of repenting from hate speech do a background check on this man. He takes the cake on hate speech, now and then, at everyone he disagrees with, regardless of the issues he is involved in. He is nothing like his dad, who does not sunk to his low level.
The guy says things about his parents for decades not even any liberal would advocate anyone say about anyone’s parents:
http://www.christianitytoday.com/bc/2008/marapr/1.32.html?start=3
Ironically the link you provided offers a overview; a characterization, a framing of his parants and a movement not all that different from those who “convert” the other way I have read, and been told of. So apparently this is not a tendency limited to “liberals,” as you seem to suggest.
Whenever you find yourself dissallusioned with how you were raised and things that happened; especially in your own family, this can happen. But… if you wish to think it’s all a “liberal” thing I will accept your right to be deceived by your own skew. But you would be wrong.