Roanoke Times
Copyright (c) 1995, Landmark Communications, Inc.
DATE: WEDNESDAY, March 9, 1994 TAG: 9403100026
SECTION: EDITORIAL PAGE: A6 EDITION: METRO
SOURCE:
DATELINE: LENGTH: Medium
It was, Griffin said, an act of conviction. It was, said the jury, an act of murder.
It was a murder partially incited, moreover, by a fevered campaign to overturn abortion rights as the law of the land, a campaign that has moved some true believers to commit criminal harassment, bombings and other property destruction in escalating acts of intimidation and violence. Acts that culminated in Griffin taking out a gun and pulling the trigger three times to kill a man who had been demonized.
Gunn was not a demon. He was a physician, providing a legal medical service to women.
Abortion opponents have every right to try to win hearts and minds of their fellow citizens, to try to persuade them that the guarantee of safe, legal abortions made by Supreme Court decisions should be overturned or restricted. They even have the right, under a noble tradition, to perform nonviolent acts of civil disobedience - assuming they are prepared to accept the legal consequences.
They have no right to murder, or to intimidate by less severe but illegal acts, those who disagree with them.
Is Griffin a man of conscience who, in committing murder, was trying to stop a greater wrong, to slow down a holocaust? In his own mind, probably.
In his own mind, and in much of the anti-abortionists' rhetoric, Gunn was a baby-killer. In Griffin's mind, it may have seemed reasonable to kill a serial baby-killer to avenge and protest the massacre of millions of infants.
But a society's justifications are not the same as an individual's. In a sane, orderly society, governed by laws fashioned by elected representatives of the people - and interpreted by judges appointed by those representatives - the society as a whole sets the bounds of what is acceptable, what is right and what is wrong.
Are those laws sometimes wrong? Anyone who believes in racial equality knows that they are. In a free society, if people believe a law unjust, they are able to protest and to try to bring enough others around to their view to get the law changed - through moral suasion.
But where is the moral high ground in an act such as Griffin committed? Where is the affirmation of life?
In his world view, the abortionist is only a contract killer. Do the women who hired the doctor also deserve to die for ending their pregnancies? The immorality of Griffin's view, carried to its conclusion, becomes evident.
And Griffin is a pawn in a larger movement. Radical anti-abortionist leaders may share his convictions, but they will not share his murder conviction. They will not share the 25 years, minimum, he will be spending in prison.
Despite their protests of innocence, they have seen where their zealotry leads. They should turn away from a campaign of ugly intimidation, or accept responsibility for the consequences.
by CNB