(NY Times) [Eric] Rudolph, who pleaded guilty in April to the Birmingham bombing and three bombings in Atlanta, was sentenced to two life sentences without parole for the Birmingham bombing. The four bombings injured 150 people and killed 2, Alice Hawthorne at Olympic Centennial Park in Atlanta and Robert Sanderson, an off-duty police officer, in Birmingham.
Judge C. Lynwood Smith ordered him to pay $1.2 million restitution to the victims, though he acknowledged that Mr. Rudolph had no financial resources. In August, Mr. Rudolph will be sentenced to two more life terms in Atlanta for attacks on another abortion clinic and a gay club and at the 1996 Olympics.
And Judge Smith asks the obvious rhetorical question:
(The Journal News) “In the name of faith you hate,” said U.S. District Judge Lynwood Smith. “For the professed goal of saving human life you killed. Those are riddles I cannot resolve.”
How does a sociopath like Rudolph resolve those riddles? If you can possibly stomach the justifications of a terrorist…
(Repugnant Pro-Christian Terrorism Website) Written Statement From Eric Rudolph
Psalm 144:1 Blessed be the LORD my strength which teacheth my hands to war, and my fingers to fight:
After much thought and consideration, I entered into an agreement with the government. After potentially facing 4 trials in 4 separate jurisdictions on circumstantial evidence that would likely lead to a conviction in at least one of these jurisdictions, I have decided to deprive the government of its goal of sentencing me to death. [Unfortunately, Alice Hawthorne and Robert Sanderson got no such chance, asshole.]
Abortion is murder. And when the regime in Washington legalized, sanctioned and legitimized this practice, they forfeited their legitimacy and moral authority to govern. At various times in history men and women of good conscience have had to decide when the lawfully constituted authorities have overstepped their moral bounds and forfeited their right to rule. This took place in July of 1776 when our Forefathers decided that the British Crown had violated the essential rights of Englishmen, and therefore lost its authority to govern. And, in January of 1973 the government in Washington decided to descend into barbarism by sanctioning the ancient practice of infanticide, by that act consigned 50 million unborn children to their graves. There is no more legitimate reason to my knowledge, for renouncing allegiance to and if necessary using force to drag this monstrosity of a government down to the dust where it belongs. [Yes, of course. The cowardly bombing of young women at an abortion clinic is certainly morally equivalent to bravely fighting armed men to gain independence from Britain.]
Because I believe that abortion is murder, I also believe that force is justified in an attempt to stop it. Because this government is committed to maintaining the policy of abortion, and protecting it, the agents of this government are the agents of mass murder, whether knowingly or unknowingly. And whether these agents of the government are armed or otherwise they are legitimate targets in the war to end this holocaust, especially those agents who carry arms in defense of this regime and the enforcement of its laws. This is the reason and the only reason for the targeting of so-called law enforcement personnel. [Doesn’t really explain much about bombing a gay nightclub or the Atlanta Olympics, though, does it?]
Understandably the majority of Americans who have dehumanized these millions of children with the label of fetus are able to kill in good conscience and to recognize and support the government which sanctions this. But then there are those who call themselves “Pro-Life”, and who claim that abortion is murder; they also claim that those who would use force to prevent it are just as morally reprehensible as the abortionists. For these people I have nothing to say other than you are liars, hypocrites, and cowards. There is no more fundamental duty for a moral citizen than to protect the innocent from assault. …you must support the use of force as justified in attempting to prevent the murder that is abortion. [The “label” of fetus, eh? Heck, why should we bother with any scientifically-accurate terms for natal human development? Fetus = womb baby. Blastocyst = mini-womb baby. Zygote = super-duper mini-womb baby. Sperm / Egg = ultra-super-duper mini-womb baby boy / girl.]
You so-called “Pro-Life,” “good Christian people” who point your plastic fingers at me [Holy shit, is a Christian terrorist quoting Hendrix’s “If 6 Was 9”?] saying that I am a ‘murderer,” that “two wrongs don’t make a right,” that even though “abortion is murder, those who would use force to stop the murder are morally the same,” I say to you that your lies are transparent. … After all, the unborn are citizens, are they not? Is not that the basis of your argument for a “right to life” guaranteed in the Declaration of lndependence and embodied in the Bill of Rights?
I’m going to shock myself and maybe a few readers now.
I agree with him.
If you believe that abortion is murder and fetuses are “womb babies” being slaughtered by the millions in a “holocaust”, then eventually there is no logical route but the use of deadly force.
Think about it a second before you flame me. I’m not advocating that anti-abortion people take up terrorism. But they keep telling me abortion is the murder of a baby. Now, if I knew that there was someone in the apartment next door beating their child to death, I would call the cops. If the cops wouldn’t come, if the law said it was OK to beat your child to death, if the beatings were happening in every apartment in my complex, if it were going on unabated for 32 years, I wouldn’t be picketing and protesting and petitioning an unresponsive government and majority of citizens. Eventually, in order to save babies, I’d be morally forced to take direct action.
This very reason is why I believe that nearly all “pro-lifers” are really more interested in their own self-aggrandizement and consumed by martyr complexes. I believe protecting the life of an innocent person is worth killing and dying for and I assume “pro-lifers” do, too. So, if they are not killing and dying for “womb babies”, they are tacitly suggesting that fetuses deserve less protection than innocent people, thereby relegating the fetus to a status less than that of a person, which is the very position they’ve always accused us of holding.
Along with abortion, another assault upon the integrity of American society is the concerted effort to legitimize the practice of homosexuality. Homosexuality is an aberrant sexual behavior, and as such I have complete sympathy and understanding for those who are suffering from this condition. [And maybe just a little too much sublimated understanding for comfort, huh, Eric?] Practiced by consenting adults within the confines of their own private lives, homosexuality is not a threat to society. Those, consenting adults practicing this behavior in privacy should not be hassled by a society which respects the sanctity of private sexual life. [Nice bit of wiggle room there. The bedroom is private, but not the uterus?] But when the attempt is made to drag this practice out of the closet and into the public square in an “in your face” attempt to force society to accept and recognize this behavior as being just as legitimate and normal as the natural man/woman relationship, every effort should be made, including force if necessary, to halt this effort. [Ah, I was wondering where the fags fit in. Apparently, queers who don’t know their place by keeping their “aberrant sexual behavior” absolutely secret are morally equivalent to the people who are murdering the “womb babies”. If you support two men kissing in public, you might as well be slaughtering infants.]
For many years I thought long and hard on these issues and then in 1996 I decided to act. In the summer of 1996, the world converged upon Atlanta for the Olympic Games. Under the protection and auspices of the regime in Washington millions of people came to celebrate the ideals of global socialism. [Did I miss NBC’s coverage of the 1000-meter Redistribution of Wealth from the Despotic Bourgeois to the Honorable Proletariat Relay?] Multinational corporations spent billions of dollars, and Washington organized an army of security to protect these best of all games. …the purpose of the attack on July 27th was to confound, anger and embarrass the Washington government in the eyes of the world for its abominable sanctioning of abortion on demand. [Right… a bomb goes off and kills, say, a dozen German tourists, and the first thing Germany will say is, “Damn it, this never would have happened if the US Supreme Court would’ve correctly interpreted the Constitution in Roe v. Wade. Die ist eine sehr dumme Idee.]
The plan that I finally settled upon was to use five low-tech timed explosives to be placed one at a time on successive days throughout the Olympic schedule, each preceded by a forty to fifty minute warning given to 911. The location and time of detonation was to be given, and the intent was to thereby clear each of the areas, leaving only uniformed arms-carrying government personnel exposed to potential injury.
…and then he goes on to detail how he failed to plan worth a shit, missed the opening of the Olympics by a week, set up his first bomb in Olympic Park, called in his fifty-minute warning but was disconnected by 911 personnel, then he frantically tries other public phone booths attempting to call 911 and give them some notice of the forthcoming explosion. He fails, leading to the death of Alice Hawthorne.
The story continues as he takes to the woods, living off the land, formenting his plans and building his bombs for his next targets in Atlanta and Birmingham. He justifies his attacks against clinic workers and security guards and abortion-seeking mothers and their families. He lays out his moral underpinning, using much of the same language and explanation I hear from so many of the anti-abortion forces:
I really do not understand the psychological process that goes into the making of an abortion mill worker. To participate up close in the daily murder and dismemberment of children takes an extremely calloused soul. The very dregs of modernity raised on a culture of selfishness and death find their ways to the abortion mills. Some are there just for money being indifferent to the moral questions involved or the politics surrounding the issue of abortion. Many of these are mediocre mercenary doctors wanting to receive as much money as possible for performing a relatively simple procedure. Then there are the ideologue abortionists. They are the lowest common denominator of extreme egalitarianism, the off scouring of liberalism. These people hate life, and they see maternity as a disability, placed upon women by nature and used by men to keep women in subjection. They see themselves as liberators breaking the chains of patriarchal slavery. [You’re bombing innocent people and it’s us that hate life? And for your information, I see maternity as a privilege, honor, and duty that should not be undertaken lightly, and whether to take the path to motherhood is a choice that only the woman facing maternity gets to decide.]
Nothing is more demonstrative of the degenerate nature of American society than the portrayal of the abortionist Lyons as an heroic victim. Abortion is the vomitorium of modernity, and the abortionist is the attendant who helps the bloated partiers disgorge themselves so they can return to the rotten feast of materialism and self-indulgence. And here the celebrants lionize their wounded attendant. [Hmm, one tortured metaphor deserves another…]
Nothing is more demonstrative of the destructive nature of Fundamentalist Christianity than the portrayal of the terrorist Rudolph as a holy warrior. Fundamentalism is the cancer of religion, and the terrorist is the cigarette that poisons the otherwise healthy body of spirituality with a seductive addiction to martyrdom and self-righteousness. And here the rational demonize that sanctimonious cigarette.
Postscript: Rudolph talks about his past marijuana use:
Stone claims that I am a major marijuana grower selling as much as 50 pounds a year. Yes, this is why I was living in a trailer paying $275 a month for rent. Big time drug dealer, that’s me. The truth is that when I left Washington’s army in 1989 I did cultivate marijuana in the early 1990’s, but was never a big time grower and it did not constitute the major source of my income as he suggests. I hated every aspect of the marijuana trade, except for the great deal of time I spent in the woods where I grew it. Happily I left that lifestyle behind me years ago (1992-1993).
So, for a three-year span in the early 90’s, you were growing your own dope in the woods and, I’ll assume, smoking some of it and dealing the rest. Then you quit and three years later you’re planting terrorist bombs in Atlanta. There you have it folks, your link between marijuana and terrorism… if you stop smoking it, you’ll become a terrorist! (Hey, it’s as logically consistent as the “marijuana is a gateway drug to heroin” fallacy.)