Will kill for life

Not far from the site of an extremely controversial battle, a mother hunkers in her home. She is afraid to leave. She fears for the safety of her two children and their father. The family has received threats that if they are caught out-side their doors, they will be killed.

The government promises her protection, but the mother knows that won’t be enough. There is a very strong possibility that people outside her doors will make good on their promise. Now she bunkers in her home fearing that the very people who have sworn to protect life will kill her.

Knight Ridder Tribune reports that the other woman in Michael Schiavo’s life, Jodi Centonze, fears for the safety of Michael Schiavo and their children. Centonze was told that she was “next.” Last week, we learned of a man who was arrested for taking out a bounty on Michael Schiavo’s head.

Throughout years of court battles, KRT reports that Centonze stayed in the background. She backed Michael Schiavo, visited his wife and even did her laundry.

Now people new on the scene want to kill her.

Those of us who don’t quite ‘get it’ watch with amazement as pro lifers bomb abortion hospitals and execute doctors at abortion clinics. I watch that situation enabled by a system that provides legal support for people who would carry out these missions.

In Iraq and around the world, we call people who would bomb and kill other individuals, terrorists. I’m trying to figure out why the same term wouldn’t apply here. Citizens who want to exercise their constitutional rights and the doctors whom they employ live in fear.

They know that a stranger can deliberately kill them at any time. They know that the killing would happen in support of an ideological cause and celebrated as a victory for “God.” And so they are terrorized.

When radical Islamists commit acts of terror, Americans demand that main-stream Islam supporters speak out, and conservatives bemoan the fact that mainstream Muslims don’t speak out forcefully enough.

Well it’s time for conservatives to start practicing what they preach. It’s about time someone starts speaking out against the extreme fringe right to lifers who think it is justified to take a life while campaigning to save one.

More importantly, it’s time that conservatives start speaking out against the extremists who would commit such atrocities in their name. That denunciation needs to be heard loud and clear from the top. We should clearly hear vows about hunting down pro-life terrorists and bringing them to justice.

If George Bush and his party have denounced these acts, I haven’t heard them. That, to me, is further evidence of his sincerity; I have heard everything else he’s wanted me to hear.

I heard him spout on and on about why Social Security is broken and needs to be fixed. I heard him declare that freedom is on the march in Iraq. I heard in celebrate the virtue of tax cuts.

But I’ve not heard one word against pro lifers who would kill innocent people. On that form of terrorism, he and other conservatives are uncomfortably silent.

I’m sure if pressed they would say, “of course we don’t support taking another human life,” but they have to be pressed. That’s the problem.

It’s time for Bush to go after the terrorists – “wherever they are.” It’s time for Bush to speak up in support of life. All life.

“To sin by silence when we should protest makes cowards of all men.”