It’s not clear where the worst abuses are taking place—New York State, Connecticut or San Francisco. In all three cases, some government officials have sought to bully the Church. Their goal is to silence Church leaders, and in every case they have been met with stiff opposition. The Catholic League has been integrally involved in all three battlegrounds.

On several occasions over the past several months, New York Assemblywoman Margaret Markey has come very close to succeeding in her effort to create a one-year window where those claiming they were abused by someone in a private institution [the target population is Roman Catholic priests] can sue regardless of how long ago the incident occurred. Under pressure by the Catholic community, she extended her bill to cover public institutions, and made other amendments as well.

Markey, feeling the pinch, lashed out at Brooklyn Bishop Nicholas DiMarzio for his opposition to her scheme. She even went so far as to put him on warning: keep it up and you may jeopardize the Church’s tax-exempt status. Bill Donohue snapped back, saying that “she should get off her high horse and stop with her ugly threats against Bishop DiMarzio.” The Catholic League let every single member of the New York State legislature know of its position.

Something similar happened in Connecticut. A few months ago, two lawmakers threatened to take over the administrative affairs of the Catholic Church in the state. Again, Catholics were mobilized and struck back. Because Bridgeport Bishop William Lori took the lead, he was then accused by some in the Office of State Ethics of violating the state’s lobbying laws. Again, the Catholic League hit back hard, contacting all the lawmakers about the initial “fascist stunt” and the subsequent attempt to bully the bishop. On July 1, after feeling the pinch from Catholics, and additional pressure from the state’s attorney general, the Ethics Office decided to drop the matter altogether.

A few years ago, the Thomas More Law Center, representing the Catholic League, sued San Francisco when its Board of Supervisors issued an inflammatory resolution condemning the Catholic Church for “meddling” in its affairs. The offense? The Vatican opposes gay adoptions! While the 9th Circuit Court of Appeals said the government did not violate the First Amendment, the case is still alive and may yet go before the U.S. Supreme Court.

In all three cases, these latest developments show how some state officials will not give up in trying to intimidate Catholic Church officials. And in two of the three instances, our side has come out on top so far.

A news report in late June showed that when the infamous Roe v. Wade decision was granted by the U.S. Supreme Court in 1973, President Richard M. Nixon worried that abortion would promote “permissiveness.” But he also thought that abortion would be justified in cases of interracial pregnancies. “When you have a black and a white,” he said, “abortion is necessary.”

No one in the pro-abortion camp has any principled reason to object to Nixon’s selective justification for abortion. Indeed, pro-abortion advocates cannot logically claim that abortion is morally neutral and then object to abortions for reasons they find objectionable.

Who are they to decide what is a good reason or a bad reason? Who are they to decide that a woman’s right to choose must accord with liberal rationales for abortion? Ultimately, if extracting a baby from a mother’s womb is the moral equivalent of a tooth extraction, then all abortions are morally equal.

Remember a while back when liberal gays learned that a “gay gene” may exist? They were scared to death that prospective parents might elect to abort such kids. Now we have the sight of those who condemn Nixon on this issue.

Ironically, the man who sits in the White House is just the kind of guy Nixon thought our society would be better off without. That the current occupant is also a pro-abortion extremist makes the story all the more bizarre, if not sickening.

The first book that I wrote, The Politics of the American Civil Liberties Union, was published in 1985. The groundwork for that book had already been done: my NYU dissertation was on “Organizational Change Within the ACLU.” To write the book, I not only revised my dissertation, I added much new material and concentrated more on the ACLU’s political agenda.

That book helped to get me to The Heritage Foundation a few years later, and it was there that I wrote a book on contemporary social problems, The New Freedom: Individualism and Collectivism in the Social Lives of Americans. I returned to La Roche College in Pittsburgh where I wrote Twilight of Liberty: The Legacy of the ACLU. All of my books were published by Transaction Press, and were it not for Transaction’s founder, Irving Louis Horowitz, my career would not have been the same.

Since becoming president of the Catholic League in 1993, I have written hundreds of articles and several chapters in books. I have also granted an endless number of TV, radio, magazine and newspaper interviews. Despite many offers to write a book, I always turned them down, citing my crazy work demands. But then a few years back I was interviewed by Deal Hudson about a book he was doing on the political implications of Catholics and evangelicals working together. My responses to his questions flowed out of me so easily that I reconsidered my reasons for not writing a book.

The book I began to write was an exploration of the social and cultural reasons why religious conservatives were coming together. When it was done, it was a huge, uncoordinated mess, the product of someone too preoccupied with other matters (e.g, running the Catholic League). Not only that, I fell back on my professorial mode, writing a book that may have had an appeal to academics, but not to the reading public. In other words, my agent and prospective publisher were not all that impressed.

What did they want that would make them happy? They wanted the Bill Donohue they saw on TV: provocative and unyielding. They wanted something hot. I got the message. In no time at all, I changed the entire focus of the book (it would no longer be about Catholics and evangelicals), and made substantial additions and deletions. I told Loretta Barrett, my agent, that the new book was so hot that she had better be wearing gloves when turning the pages.

The result is Secular Sabotage: How Liberals Are Destroying Religion and Culture in America. I chose the title, and Harry Helm, my editor at Hachette, offered the subtitle. It will be available on September 2, the Wednesday before Labor Day; an “open access” version, a large print edition, electronic book and an audio version will be available, as well as a hardbound copy. In the next edition of Catalyst, information about obtaining discounted copies will be published.

The thesis of the book is quite simple: the radicals of old, namely the Marxists, wanted to tear down society and replace it with something new; today’s radicals just want to tear it down—they are nihilists, out to annihilate our social and cultural heritage. This should sound familiar to Catholic League members.

The book covers such topics as multiculturalism, sexuality, the arts, Hollywood, constitutional law and politics. Peppered with Catholic League anecdotes throughout, it shows how secular saboteurs have targeted Christianity in general, and Catholicism in particular, for devastation. There is also a chapter on how Catholic dissidents have sought to destroy Catholicism, and another on how Protestant dissidents have sought to sunder their religion. Quite frankly, I spare no one.

Like most of you, I’ve had it. I’ve had it with mean-spirited secular activists out to turn our society and culture inside out and upside down. They will stop at nothing to smash our traditions, norms and values, making mince meat out of our Judeo-Christian heritage. Like termites, they eat away at the cultural edifice of our society. Some, perversely, are working to sabotage their own religion. They must be stopped because there is too much at stake.

Never in my lifetime have I seen our society more under attack than it is today. And I don’t mean from abroad, although that threat is all too real. I mean from within. A frontal assault on everything we hold dear has been underway for decades, reaching a crescendo in the first part of the 21st century. This includes mutiny within Catholicism and Protestantism, the result of which has been an array of scandals. From the classroom to the arts, from legal activists to Hollywood, our way of life is being altered right before our eyes. Indeed, it is being disfigured.

Too many Americans have become complacent, sitting back as if they were impotent spectators. The good news is that most of them know in their heart of hearts that something has gone awry. It is my hope that Secular Sabotage will open their eyes and light a fire under their behinds.

Father Gordon J. MacRae

This article is expanded from a commentary by the same author entitled “Crime and Punishment” published in the November 2008 issue of First Things.

Psychologist Daniel Kahneman won the Nobel Prize in Economics in 2002 for his work on a phenomenon in psychology and marketing called “availability bias.” Kahneman demonstrated the human tendency to give a proposition validity just by how easily it comes to mind. An uncorroborated statement can be widely seen as true merely because the media has repeated it.

Also in 2002, the Catholic clergy sex abuse scandal swept out of Boston to dominate news headlines across the country. Many commentators writing on the scandal have, knowingly or not, employed availability bias to justify draconian revisions in law and policy. The revelations of priestly scandal have evolved a number of examples of availability bias—snippets of ostensible fact repeated so often in the news media that they assume the visage of unassailable truth.

Among these is a claim that civil statutes of limitations for victims of sexual abuse to sue for monetary compensation must be extended or discarded. The claim that “victims of sexual abuse require years or decades to recognize they were abused and report it” is classic availability bias. This mantra has bolstered the interests of self-serving contingency lawyers and various agenda-driven groups using the scandal for their own ends, but the premise lacks both context and proof.

The prison system in which I have spent the last 14 years houses nearly 3,000 prisoners. Estimates of those convicted of sexual offenses range from 25 to 40 percent. This translates into a population of up to 1,200 sexual offenders in this one prison with thousands more in the state’s parole system or otherwise monitored by the state as registered sex offenders.

 Three among these thousands of convicted men are Catholic priests, one accused a few months after claimed offenses in the early 1990s while the other two faced charges from decades ago.

The thousands of other men convicted of sexual abuse are accused parents, grandparents, step-parents, foster parents, uncles, teachers, ministers, scout leaders, and so on, and for them the typical time lapse between abuse and the victim reporting it was measured in weeks or months, not years—and certainly not decades. There is simply no evidence to support the claim that victims of sexual abuse require decades to come forward. With but rare exceptions, only Catholic priests face the daunting and sometimes hopeless task of defending themselves against sex abuse claims that are many years or decades old.

So what sets the accusers of priests apart from other claimants? The John Jay study commissioned by the U.S. Bishops revealed that the highest percentage of accusers of Catholic priests came forward not in the 1960s to 1980s when the abuse was claimed to have occurred, but between 2002 and 2004 when Catholic dioceses entered, or were forced into, mediated or “blanket” settlements.

The quality of due process for priests accused during mediated settlements is highly suspect. A New Hampshire contingency lawyer recently brought forward his fifth round of mediated settlement demands. During his first round of mediated settlements in 2002—in which 28 priests of the Diocese of Manchester were accused in claims alleging abuse between the 1950s and 1980s—the news media announced a $5.5 million settlement. The claimants’ lawyer, seemingly inviting his next round of plaintiffs, described the settlement process with the Manchester diocese: “During settlement negotiations, diocesan officials did not press for details such as dates and allegations for every claim. I’ve never seen anything like it.” (NH Union Leader, Nov. 27, 2002). “Some victims made claims in the last month, and because of the timing of negotiations, gained closure in just a matter of days.” (Nashua Telegraph, Nov. 27, 2002).

That lawyer’s contingency fee for the first of what would evolve into five rounds of mediated settlements was estimated to be in excess of $1.8 million. At the time this first mediated settlement was reached in 2002, New Hampshire newspapers reported that at the attorney’s and claimants’ request, the diocese agreed not to disclose their names, the details of abuse, or the amounts of individual settlements.

In contrast, the names of the accused priests—many of whom were deceased—were publicized by the Diocese in a press release. Despite the contingency lawyer’s widely reported amazement that $5.5 million was handed over with no details or corroboration elicited by the diocese, the claims were labeled “credible” by virtue of being settled. Priests who declared the claims against them to be bogus—and who, in two cases, insisted that they never even met these newest accusers—were excluded from the settlement process and never informed that a settlement had taken place. The priests’ names were then submitted to the Vatican as the subjects of credible allegations of abuse. The possible penal actions—for which there is no opportunity for defense or appeal—include possible administrative dismissal from the priesthood, but without any of the usual vestiges of justice such as a discovery process, a presumption of innocence, or even a trial.

The U.S. bishops have rightly campaigned against so-called “window legislation” proposed in a number of states to extend or remove civil statutes of limitations, and then retroactively apply the extension so that Catholic Church entities can be sued while public institutions—e.g. public schools—remain exempt. Such legislated “windows” would allow lawsuits to proceed long after the statutes allowing them have expired. The mantra chanted in support of such legislation is that victims cannot report abuse for many years or decades. The premise is baseless, and the proposed legislation has but one target, the Catholic Church.

Catholic dioceses and institutions are entirely justified in opposing such duplicitous laws. At the same time, however, many in the Church have demanded of our bishops—and, sadly, with some success—that they lobby the Holy See for dispensation from “prescription”—the statute of limitations in canon law—so that accused priests can be removed from ministry, and even dismissed without trial from the clerical state—decades after the Church’s own statute of limitations has expired. As Archbishop Charles Chaput has wisely cautioned, “Statutes of Limitations exist in legal systems to promote justice, not hinder it.” (First Things, May 2006).

The mediated settlement process has continued year by year since the explosions of 2002. To date, the U.S. Church has lost $2.6 billion in abuse claims, but are the ongoing claims just? In the 1990s, the Haworth Maltreatment and Trauma Press published a trade journal for personal injury lawyers entitled Sexual Abuse Litigation: A Practical Recourse for Attorneys, Clinicians and Advocates. The book is a manual for obtaining profit from sexual abuse claims. One chapter, for example, is entitled “The Needle in the Haystack: Uncovering Insurance Coverage in Sexual Abuse Litigation.” Each chapter concludes with a list of “practice tips” describing in detail the most effective ways to find and sue deeper pockets than those of the alleged molesters themselves.

The “practice tips” address ways to claim negligent supervision of clergy (especially Catholic priests), to present claims in ways that will circumvent existing civil statutes of limitations, and in using the power of the state to bolster civil claims with simultaneous criminal prosecution. The book also includes a number of ways to bring claims while avoiding quagmires such as controversial “repressed and recovered memory” by claiming newly discovered injuries instead of newly discovered memories. In a chapter that seems to be a harbinger of what was to come for the Catholic Church, the book describes ways to manipulate media coverage to pressure institutions into mediated settlements without an in-depth discovery process or even filing a claim in a court of law. Sound familiar?

The “mass mediation” precedent for settlement of claims against Catholic priests was first established in 1992 when the insurers for the Diocese of Fall River, Massachusetts, sought to end some 80 lawsuits involving Fr. James Porter in claims alleged to have occurred up to three decades previously. At the time, insurers tried to deny coverage of the decades-old claims that were beginning to emerge around the country. The insurers took the position that bishops and dioceses had prior knowledge of the history of most of the priests accused in the 1990s. Despite obtaining the files, the insurers ended up providing coverage because the written records simply did not support the insurers’ own availability bias, i.e., that the bishops knew of the abuse and covered it up. The majority of the claims, the insurers found, surfaced for the first time as money was being demanded, and not when the abuse was alleged to have occurred.

The relationship between insurance coverage and claims against priests is certainly clear in the historical record of this issue over the last 20 years. Insurers of Catholic dioceses ceased to provide coverage for claims alleged to have occurred after 1990 or so, but could not deny the coverage retroactively into the 1960s, 1970s and 1980s.  It is an interesting note that the lowest percentage of claims against priests were alleged to have occurred subsequent to 1990 when insurance coverage came to an official halt. As the Howarth book cited above makes clear, “insurance” is spelled s-e-t-t-l-e-m-e-n-t. Only a few commentators have cited the inherent danger mediated settlements have posed to priests, and can pose to the Catholic Church in the wake of “window legislation.”

Yet another example of availability bias is the widely held belief that no one would claim to have been sexually abused just for money—not even for lots of money, and not even when few questions are asked. Remembering the shocking false claims for compensation after the 9/11 attacks, I put the proposition to my fellow prisoners. Would any of them consider falsely accusing a priest for money? It got a good laugh—and then a reminder that I am surrounded by men who have taken lives for far less money than what was gained by those who took my reputation and freedom.

Fr. Gordon MacRae is in prison for claims alleged to have occurred in 1983, and for which he maintains his innocence.

After months of controversy, New York Assemblywoman Margaret Markey’s sex abuse bill that would suspend the statute of limitations was stifled and will not pass unless a special session is called and the bill is put to a vote.

It was no surprise that Brooklyn Bishop Nicholas DiMarzio—whose diocese covers Markey’s district—vigorously opposed the legislation because it would open a door to endless claims against the Church and leave public institutions untouched. The legislation that DiMarzio favored was that of Assemblyman Vito Lopez which treated public and private institutions the same. What was surprising was Markey’s language used in retaliation.

Markey accused Bishop DiMarzio of being “on the borderline of jeopardizing his not-for-profit status.” She also warned, “If I were the bishop, I would walk very cautiously.”

Not only did Markey show no respect for the First Amendment provisions guaranteeing freedom of speech and freedom of religion, her attempt to silence the bishop showed her contempt for the standards of decency.

After we hit Markey for her statements about DiMarzio, a story ran in the New York Times reporting that Markey had decided to amend her bill allowing public schools to be sued as well.

We pointed out that Markey was nothing, if not dishonest. All along she insisted that her bill applied equally to both private and public institutions. But if that were the case, why amend it?

This bill was still problematic. While it treated both public and private institutions equally, it still suspended the statute of limitations for one year, thus permitting anyone to file a claim regardless of when the alleged abuse occurred.

We announced that if Markey’s bill prevailed, we would spend hundreds of thousands of dollars in a massive public relations campaign to alert those who had been sexually abused by a public school employee that they had a year to sue the schools, provided they met the provisions in the bill.

Our reason for reaching out only to those victimized in a public school was because up until now lawyers and professional victims’ abuse advocates have waged a relentless campaign to exclusively stick it to Catholic institutions, while nothing was done to help those victimized by an employee of a public school.

A few days after she amended the bill, Markey chopped it up again, stating that anyone who wished to file a suit during the suspension of the statute of limitations could do so providing that he is not over the age of 53.

Finally on June 23 it appeared that this bill was dead in the water.

On that same day, the AP reported that 700 public school teachers in New York City were being paid full salaries to sit around and do nothing while cases against them were being investigated. The accusations included sex abuse. Also, in that morning’s New York Daily News, a story ran about a teacher’s aide who was reassigned to a desk job after being busted for molesting a first grader; she was thought to be his third victim.

Although the bill has stalled, we will never yield on our pledge. If Markey’s bill ever passes, we will do whatever it takes to alert those victimized by public school employees of their right to sue.

In March, two lawmakers from Connecticut sought a state takeover of the governing structure of the Church. This gambit, which we properly labeled a “fascist stunt,” lost. The reason it lost was because of the courageous reaction of Catholics, led by their bishops and organizations like the Catholic League. Among the steps taken to thwart this unconstitutional breach of religious liberty was a rally at the state Capitol.

In retaliation, some state officials sought to penalize the  Diocese of Bridgeport, led by Bishop William Lori. They accused the diocese of breaking the state’s lobbying laws. Lori filed suit seeking an injunction to stop punitive measures from being implemented.

What was at stake is practically every liberty enshrined in the First Amendment: freedom of speech, freedom of assembly, religious liberty and the provision guaranteeing separation of church and state. First the tyrants sought to take control of the Church, and then their lackeys attempted to muzzle the free speech of Catholics. Had this been reversed—had the bishops sought to take command of the legislative functions of the state and then proceeded to get a gag order placed on lawmakers—those who were silent would have been enraged.

It was only in May that there was a rally in Hartford demanding universal health care. According to the Hartford Courant, approximately 140 “clergy and religious folks marched to the state Capitol to ask to talk. They wore clerical collars, suit coats and hijabs, and all chanted and carried signs that said, ‘Muslims for Health Care,’ and ‘Health Care for All.’” But of course this rally occasioned no threats by state officials.

We urged our members to contact the person behind this anti-Catholic effort, Carol Carson, the executive director of the Office of State Ethics, and ask that she call off the investigation. On June 30, we were joined by Connecticut Attorney General Richard Blumenthal, who also called on the ethics officials to end the investigation. The following day, the office withdrew its probe.

When President Obama chose Judge Sonia Sotomayor to be the next justice on the U.S. Supreme Court we wondered if there would be an outcry due to her Catholic faith. Barely a peep was made.

When John Roberts was nominated to serve on the U.S. Supreme Court, left-wingers accused President Bush of “Playing the Catholic card.” When Bush selected Samuel Alito, these same critics sounded the alarms over the prospect of a “majority” of the Supreme Court justices being Catholic. One would think that the selection of yet another Catholic to sit on the high court would drive these folks right over the edge. But for some reason, Sotomayor’s Catholic credentials didn’t seem to matter. Is that because she is viewed as reliably liberal?

When Justice Roberts was nominated to be on the high court, Senator Dick Durbin told CNN that he considered it fair game to probe Roberts about his Catholicism. After Sotomayor’s selection, Durbin released a glowing statement never once mentioning her religion. When Senators Arlen Specter and Dianne Feinstein questioned Roberts, they both asked him whether he agreed with President John F. Kennedy about the separation of church and state. Neither of them mentioned Sotomayor’s religion in their respective statements on her selection.

When Roberts was nominated, Dahlia Lithwick, legal analyst for Slate, said, “I wouldn’t underestimate the influence of his religion”; when Alito was nominated, Lithwick said that “People are very, very much talking about the fact that Alito would be the fifth Catholic on the Supreme Court if confirmed.” Following Sotomayor’s nomination, Lithwick posted a lengthy piece that never mentioned the judge’s religion.

When Roberts was nominated, NPR’s Nina Totenberg said that Roberts’ wife was a “high officer of a pro-life organization. He’s got adopted children. I mean, he’s a conservative Catholic.” At the news of Sotomayor’s selection, she simply mentioned that the judge attended Catholic schools without ever raising an issue.

Journalist Adele Stan said that “Rome must be smiling,” when Roberts was nominated. In her positive assessment of Sotomayor, Stan never mentioned her religion.

Let’s face it: left-wingers would gladly accept nine Catholic Supreme Court justices if they were reliably liberal before they would ever accept a diverse court that was reliably conservative. Ancestry, anatomy and religious affiliation have always been oversold: what trumps them all is ideology.

What’s going on? Are liberal Catholics Catholic? Obviously not, at least according to liberals. After all, if Sotomayor was known as a practicing Catholic, those who fretted over Roberts and Alito would have been in crisis mode; instead they were calm and collected.

In his press conference discussing Sotomayor’s nomination, White House press secretary Robert Gibbs put any fears the liberals may have had to rest. He said of the jurist, “I believe she was raised Catholic.” If this is true, then the telling verb “raised” would explain why liberals are so fond of Sotomayor—she’s the type of Catholic that they can trust. Let’s just hope they’re wrong.

The following comments were made in 2005 following President Bush’s nomination of John Roberts to the U. S. Supreme Court. The anti-Catholic bias that was apparent towards Roberts was non-existent towards Sonia Sotomayor.

NPR, Lynn Neary: “And he is a Roman Catholic, and that might affect the way he views an issue like abortion, for instance.” To which American University law professor Stephen Wermiel said, “It could make a difference. It could also make a difference in church-state separation issues.”

CNN, “Inside Politics,” Ed Henry: “Roberts is a Roman Catholic and a political conservative. This week on our ‘Faces of Faith’ segment we’re going to examine how his faith might influence his profession.”

Tribune Media Services, Bill Press: “It is absolutely essential to explore Roberts’ religious beliefs as part of the confirmation process…. And those who suggest otherwise should not be taken seriously.”

Slate, Christopher Hitchens: “Why should this question [about Roberts’ faith and the way he might rule] be asked only of Catholics? Well, that’s easy. The Roman Catholic Church claims the right to legislate on morals for all its members and to excommunicate them if they don’t conform.”

NPR, Francis Kissling: “If this pope will intervene in the ways he has already in Europe, it certainly raises the questions for us in the immediate sense of whether he thinks he can tell Roberts how to vote when he gets on the Supreme Court.”

NBC, “Meet the Press,” Mario Cuomo: Regarding questions that Cuomo wanted the senators to ask Roberts: “Are you going to impose a religious test on the Constitution? Are you going to say that because the pope says this or the Church says that, you will do it no matter what?”

When abortionist Dr. George Tiller was killed in late May, the Catholic League unequivocally condemned the shooting. Bill Donohue told CBS Evening News, “We have to get the message out that life means we have to respect all life, including somebody as bad as Dr. Tiller was.” Unfortunately, his death occasioned a highly political response from his allies.

From what we know of the suspect, Scott Roeder, he is an ex-convict that fits the profile of a deranged man. Yet there were those who wasted no time in pointing their collective fingers trying to pin the blame on others. Andrew Sullivan and the liberal blog, the Daily Kos, fingered Fox News’ Bill O’Reilly and featured a video which shows O’Reilly’s past denunciations of Tiller. Worse than this irresponsible accusation was the hypocrisy of the Daily Kos: above the O’Reilly video was an advertisement for an upcoming interview on C-Span2 with Bill Ayers, the urban terrorist who is a hero in some left-wing circles.

It took no time for MSNBC’s Keith Olbermann to throw his hat into the ring. On his first show following Tiller’s murder, Olbermann argued that Fox News was responsible for this action and pledged to “retire” O’Reilly from his show.

We noted that in all of O’Reilly’s denunciations of Tiller, he never once called for anyone to even post his address on the web, never mind call for his death. Yet he was blamed for the murder. If O’Reilly’s critics had any sense of decency or fairness, they would have condemned what Hustler icon Larry Flynt once said about the Fox News personality: In 2003 Flynt launched a National Prayer Day, calling for O’Reilly’s death.

Sullivan, Olbermann and the Daily Kos weren’t the only ones to collectivize the guilt. Kim Gandy, president of the National Organization for Women, referred to “those who are behind this murder,” suggesting that this is part of a pro-life cabal. Vicki Saporta, president of the National Abortion Federation, also blamed “individuals” for Tiller’s death. Similarly, Dr. Warren Hern, a late-term abortionist from Colorado, said that Tiller’s death was the result of a “fascist movement in this country.”

Accusations that the pro-life community shouldered some of the blame were not confined to the United States. Jill Filipovic, a writer for the British newspaper theGuardian, said that the killing of Tiller was “not an anomaly. It is part of a clearly-established pattern of harassment, intimidation and violence against abortion providers and pro-choice individuals. And mainstream pro-life groups shoulder much of the blame.” She went on to say that “mainstream pro-life groups and the people who run them do not care about life before or after birth.” She ended her piece by saying: “The responsibility for George Tiller’s death surely falls on the shoulders of the person who actually pulled the trigger. But when pro-life groups did everything but give him a gun, their hands are hardly clean.”

The worst of all maybe came from Bonnie Erbe of the Scripps Howard News Service. Erbe said that pro-life language referring to abortion as murder is inflammatory and “this type of language ought to be against the law. Anyone who issues statements containing such language ought to be prosecuted as an accessory to murder, as well as for partaking in domestic terrorism.”

So this is where we have come. The pro-abortion crowd can make sweeping generalizations calling the pro-life community accomplices to murder, but when we want to call a spade a spade and call abortion what it truly is—the murder of an innocent baby—they want to put us behind bars.

· Dr. George Tiller began performing abortions in 1973 after he found out that his deceased father, a family physician, had quietly performed illegal abortions.

· In 1984, his medical license was restricted by the Kansas State Board of Healing Arts when he was charged with driving under the influence. After treatment for drug and alcohol problems, the restrictions were removed in 1986.

· By 1985, he converted his father’s medical practice, which he had taken over at his death, into a clinic where abortion was the primary service.

· By the late 1980s, Tiller was performing late-term abortions on women from around the world.

· In 1992, Kansas passed its first restrictions on abortion followed by tighter regulations in 1998. A doctor was forbidden to abort a pregnancy after the 22nd week except to save the mother’s life or to prevent physical or mental harm to her. Two independent doctors had to concur that the abortion was medically necessary.

· Tiller formed a political action committee in 2002 to give donations to pro-abortion politicians in Kansas, such as Governor Kathleen Sebelius.

· In April 2007, Sebelius honored Tiller and his staff in the Governor’s Mansion for his contributions to her campaign.

· Earlier this year, Tiller was acquitted of 19 misdemeanor counts; the allegations were that he had performed late-term abortions without verification by an independent physician of their medical necessity.

· At the time of his death, the Kansas Board of Healing Arts was investigating whether Tiller performed late-term abortions in accord with the law requiring affirmation of their necessity by a second physician.

· According to Tiller, he performed 60,000 abortions.