Happy Goddamn Day: Scott Roeder To Go Directly To Jail For Murder

Murdering fuck Scott Roeder, who killed Kansas abortion provider Dr. George Tiller last year, has been convicted of murder after just 40 minutes of jury deliberation. Not voluntary manslaughter or any of this picayune bullshit his attorney’s were trying to get him charged on – straight up murder, for which Roeder faces a life sentence, meaning that his one and only stop on the express train to hell should be a nice long layover in prison. Couldn’t happen to a nicer guy.

Congratulations to the jury on the case, who apparently did not see gunning down a man inside a church before the eyes of his wife and family as the tricky moral grey area the defense attempted to portray it as. And while it’s great to see Roeder do the time he deserves for his horrific crime, the real importance of the verdict may be the message it sends to anti-abortion extremists. That message: it’s still murder to kill someone even if you really, really don’t like what they’re doing. That’s why we have laws against it, and not against abortion, which is what class? NOT THE SAME THING AT ALL!

 

In Which The Bomb May Be Ticking

John Cole over at Balloon Juice isn’t the only one to ask it, but the question of what to do about a problem like Scott Roeder persists.

So here’s the facts:

Soctt Roeder is a domestic terrorist by any definition of the word. He’s a religious zealot who committed a politically motivated murder.

He’s been in contact with at least one other convicted domestic terrorist, Cheryl Suellenger, who spent two years in a California prison for conspiring to bomb an abortion clinic in 1988. Of late, Suellenger has been employed as a senior policy advisor for Operation Rescue, the strident anti-abortion organization that has pronounced lukewarm denunciations of Roeder’s vigilantism while thoroughly approving of the fact that Tiller is dead.

Finally, Roeder claims to have knowledge of existing plans to commit further murders, but that’s all he’ll say.

Is Roeder just blowing smoke? Maybe. Maybe he just thought AP would get bored of his complaints about his jail cell and wanted to keep his iron in the media fire.

But put it this way: Scott Roeder is an anti-abortion fundamentalist and a domestic terrorist. He claims to have knowledge of future terrorist activity and has been in recent contact with a convicted anti-abortion terrorist in the employ of a US based radical anti-abortion organization to whose web site he frequently posted.

Now read that sentence again, but replace the phrase ‘anti-abortion’ with ‘Islamic.’ Is there any way that the organization would not be under every investigative spotlight that there is?

It’s time for a thorough federal investigation of Operation Rescue on the grounds that it may be providing material support to domestic terrorists, and I mean right now. Not next week, not after the next doctor has been murdered or the next clinic bombed.

Right damned now.