Wichita Kansas: Media outlets are reporting that Dr. George Tiller has been murdered at his church in Wichita, Kan. He is one of the nation’s few doctors who performs late-term abortions in keeping with state and federal laws. (I will be researching the diagnosis and eitiology of those late-term medical abortions soon, insofar as HIPAA laws will allow, to see what circumstances led to these particular operations being undertaken. There are often severe conditions warranting such surgery that are rarely reported by media, such as massive injury and irrepairable trauma to the infant in utero, as in the case of auto accidents for instance.)

Anonymous police sources said the 67-year-old doctor was killed Sunday morning inside the Reformation Lutheran Church, that the gunman lay in wait, sprang out, and shot the Doctor to death.

Police spokesman Gordon Bassham would not confirm the victim’s identity pending notification of relatives but said a 67-year-old “high-profile individual in the community” was shot and killed.

Tiller’s clinic, home and church have repeatedly been the site of protests for about two decades, and he was shot in both arms by a protester in 1993.

Just as three peripheral notes for now:

Wichita is not far from Topeka… the home of Fred Phelps who with his family of self-ordained Baptists, shows up to veterans funerals and tragedy memorial services with signs saying God Hates You.

Wichita is also the home of perhaps the most fundementalist Catholic Dioscese in the nation, one whose Bishop has issued press release after press release for years now, about how he is punishing and shaming errant Catholics, and naming them by name.

While I was in South Bend, Indiana during the week of the 17th, covering Barack Obama’s speech at Notre Dame, but more so, the community’s response to 8 weeks of Randall Terry who has positioned himself as anti-abortionist hero, bringing hoards of his anti-abortion protesters in from out of state, and littering the community with mobile billboards of dead children, placing them near schools and other places where actual living children must pass … and finding in my research in prep for that article that Randall Terry (who converted to Catholicism two years ago, saying the Evangelical Protestants werent hard enough on the abortion issue) has more than once publicly called for the murder of persons who undergo abortions, assist with abortions, perform abortions, give money to/for abortion. There is much more to this story.

But in all, murder as a “justice” intervention? Those of you who read my work, know my heart on bringing children to life; you know my spirit on the matter. But, taking the life of a person who performs within the laws of the land, is Christian?