The murder of George Tiller has brought some vile people creeping out from under the woodwork…especially the kinds of nasty minds that like to dress up in clerical collars. Looking for a good emetic? Look no further than this sermon by a Presbyterian minister for a great example of deploring a murder while praising the murderer’s motives.

A notorious murderer met what is certain to become a notorious end. By the goodness of God the witness of the Church was not entirely silenced in Dr. Tiller’s life. He had been excommunicated by his previous congregation, a church of the Missouri Synod Lutheran denomination. And so the judgment of God had been declared; not every watchman was silent, not every shepherd proved a hireling.

But the point was reached where a man despaired of change through government and took matters into his own hand. I do not view the actions of Dr. Tiller’s killer as defensible, but not for many of the easy and often self-serving reasons advanced with alarm and indignation even by many Christians in recent days.

• Violence is not always wrong. Killing is not always forbidden. Opposition to abortion does not obligate us to oppose all forms of killing. In saying this I make a biblically defensible statement. God has given the power of the sword to the state so that it may judge and execute judgment. This is true internationally and locally. Condemnation of the vile sin of abortion, the murder of an infant, an innocent, in its mother’s womb is not the same as the death penalty, properly applied.

• Nor do I believe that Dr. Tiller’s killer necessarily acted inappropriately as self-appointed judge, jury and executioner. Like the couple who boldly went into the tent before the congregation at Peor and were immediately killed by Phinehas, Dr. Tiller’s bold practice of the indefensible, his brazen boasting of his practice rendered judge and jury superfluous. He was self-accused and self-convicted.

But what Dr. Tiller’s killer did which Phinehas did not do was to kill against the will of the nation’s civil authority. It was an act of rebellion posing as an act of justice. The killer was an assassin who lacked the courage to attack the root of abortion, our national leaders, and so attacked the branch. His was not an act of saving babies or of executing justice. Other men will continue Dr. Tiller’s practice. A bucket of water taken from the sea will not create a hole in the ocean. Others will fill where Dr. Tiller left off. Abortion will proceed because, and this is vital to say, abortion is blessed by the law of the land. The logic of Dr. Tiller’s killer is the logic of John Brown, of Absalom, of Ehud.

Get that? It’s OK for anti-choicers to kill, and it is appropriate for them to execute abortion doctors, we just need to wait until the civil authorities declare it’s time to line them up against the wall. And Tiller’s murderer’s mistake was being insufficiently brave enough to attack the nation’s leaders.

I read the whole thing. Now I need to take a shower.

Cheyenne Cherry has a very pretty name. It’s too bad that the person isn’t quite so pretty a human being.

She and an unidentified juvenile allegedly broke into Valerie Hernandez’s Tinton Ave. apartment on May 6 and trashed the place.
Then in a shocking act of animal abuse, they tossed the woman’s kitten, Tiger Lily, into the stove and cranked up the temperature, ASPCA assistant director Joe Pentangelo said.

Cherry told authorities that she and her accomplice “thought we would play a joke on Valerie and mess up her apartment.”
The duo bolted from the apartment with DVDs and packages of noodles, Pentangelo said.

“She didn’t want to hear the cat crying and scratching at the oven door,” Pentangelo said.
Firefighters found the female cat’s remains smoldering in the oven after neighbors complained of smoke coming from Hernandez’s apartment.

I simply do not understand that kind of behavior at all. Why would anyone commit such a random act of unmitigated cruelty? A kitten is a small thing in the world…but it seems to me that how we treat the small and helpless is a measure of how we see ourselves.

Don’t follow this link if you are at all sensitive. Gingi Edmonds has weighed in on the killing of George Tiller. She compares him to Lee Harvey Oswald, Ted Bundy, and Jeffrey Dahmer, and concludes with some really twisted logic.

Tiller was killed by a pro-choice act.  Pro-lifers need make no apologies. 

I hope the police have an eye on this evil monster…if she doesn’t have a gun in her hand herself, she’s busily inciting others to go kill in the name of her fetal gods.

Dr George Tiller, a Kansas doctor who has long provided abortion services (including late-term abortions) was gunned down this morning. He has been the target of anti-choice fanatics for years: his clinic has been vandalized, he was shot and wounded by one of these monsters years ago, and there has been ongoing legal harassment to shut him down.

One of these self-righteous and hypocritical creatures apparently shot him to death…as he was attending church services, ironically enough.

The culprit has not been caught, but probably will be soon. I’m sure whoever it is is very proud of him or herself.

(via ema; also note that you can get breaking updates via twitter)

But I thought religion helped people live a moral life! We’re going to have to really struggle to find an ethical rationale for this pastor’s monstrous behavior.

A Baltimore pastor who worked with developmentally disabled people was charged Friday with befriending a blind and disabled man in his care, then paying a hit man $50,000 in church funds for an execution so he could collect life insurance money.

Police say Kevin Jerome Pushia, 32, who worked for four months as an operations manager for the Arc of Baltimore before abruptly quitting in January, confessed to plotting to kill Lemuel Wallace.

Pushia told police he persuaded Wallace and “numerous” other mentally challenged individuals to list him as a beneficiary on insurance policies.

A terse notation in Pushia’s planning calendar for Feb. 5, the day after Wallace was found dead in a Leakin Park bathroom stall from multiple gunshot wounds to the head and back, reads: “L.W. project completed,” police said.

Errm, Pushia must have wanted the money so he could perform good works, and he was helping Lemuel Wallace to be happier in heaven with Jesus?

Maybe it would be easier to admit that religion is ineffective at imposing any kind of socially useful moral code, but is a handy disguise for the amoral among us.

Oh, wait — I got the headline backwards. The real story is that a mentally disturbed, fanatical Christian/creationist and misogynist, went nuts, killed a young woman on a community college campus, and then killed himself. It’s a tragedy, but not at all exceptional, I’m afraid — the man was delusional and depressed, apparently frustrated that women weren’t obedient to him, and he decided to erupt into hateful violence.

The disturbing twist this time, though, is that the killer was a youtuber — and a big fan of VenomFangX, the infamously vapid creationist. You can see some of his pre-suicidal rants preserved for posterity, and they will make you wonder why he wasn’t getting psychiatric help. And yes, the lunatic does literally accuse atheists of being non-human and evil, but that doesn’t seem to have been the trigger for his break from reality…that seems to have stemmed more from his proprietary feelings towards women.

Muzzammil Hassan had a great idea: he established a television station to run programming that would counter stereotypes about Muslims. That sounds like a fine plan…but then his wife asked for a divorce, and his response was to murder and decapitate her, which rather confirms a particularly nasty stereotype.

Unless, perhaps, it’s not a stereotype, but simply a fact that Islam is a patriarchal religion of misogyny.