I’m getting uncomfortably acclimatized to the violent rhetoric of pastors in America. It seems like every other day, some local preacher is defending the murder of Dr. Tiller, accusing the man of all kinds of terrible crimes, and raising his murderer to the status of martyr. It’s not the first time a deranged killer gets an endorsement from the self appointed messengers of god. You may recall Paul Hill (here is a crazy tribute site to him), who was convicted in 1994 of killing physicians John Britton and James Barrett. Hill encouraged others to follow in his example; when he was executed in 2003, he had no remorse and offered no apologies for taking the lives of these two men. Still today many in the religious right consider him a hero.

Now their new man of the hour is Scott Roeder, a man who was diagnosed as a possible schizophrenic (the diagnosis is contested, but all agree the man has serious mental illness) . According to his ex-wife, when he was facing financial trouble, a friend informed him paying taxes was not part of the Constitution, and it was then that he joined an antigovernmental militia and began reading the Bible with ‘zeal’. If that isn’t your stereotypical ‘gun nut’ gone wild, I don’t know what is.

If you have 20 minutes to kill and want to read what passionate and violent vitriol really sounds like, then check out this sermon by pastor David Gray, who had this to say of murder:

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…[Tiller’s] brazen boasting of his practice rendered judge and jury superfluous. He was self-accused and self-convicted.

The rest of this article is followed by your typical “Jesus is Lord, he is King, he commands everything” bullshit that goes on and on. I have to assume the reason they mention it so often is if you just claim something with fervor often enough, everyone will assume it’s true.

No, Jesus is not anyone’s Lord, and boldly declaring murdering innocent individuals is sanctified by God is the kind of hate speech most countries in the world have laws about. This is literally enticing others to continue the works of Hill and Roeder. So long as these pastors continue to entice their flocks to violence, tragedies like Tiller’s murder will be inevitable. Hey Christians, didn’t your God tell you killing is wrong? Didn’t he even make that a fucking Commandment or something? Try following it! It’s one of the few rules that makes any sense in that book of yours.