Shout out from the Strib!

Well, whaddyaknow -- it looks like this humble little blog has made the big time of sorts. The Star Tribune's latest "Blog House" opinion piece, entitled "When words are a loaded gun," features my post on the murder of George Tiller.

Unfortunately, the author, Tim O'Brien only snipped out a few carefully selected sentences and, shall we say, "massaged" the context to fit his premise. That premise, you ask? Well, here's how O'Brien starts the piece:

No one should have been shocked by the assassination of George Tiller on Sunday in Wichita, Kan. Tiller was one of the few remaining doctors who performed partial-birth abortions and had been the target of physical violence in the past.

But the 67-year-old doctor had also been the target of another kind of violence -- an unrelenting stream of verbal violence. He had been called "Tiller the Baby Killer" and had been compared to Nazis and Al-Qaida. And that was just by Bill O'Reilly.

The heightening of political rhetoric, whether it is about abortion or about former Vice President Dick Cheney or about President Obama, has many people worried that Tiller will not be the only casualty....

So, from this we are to conclude what, exactly? That Tiller's killer was motivated by Bill O'Reilly's hate speech? That we dare not criticize President Obama's policies, or he might be next?

When citing me, O'Brien cherry-picked:

No fan of Tiller or his profession, A Voice for the Unborn (5) tried to put the tragedy in the proper light:

George Tiller was not your ordinary abortion doctor. George Tiller was personally responsible for hundreds, if not thousands, of late-term abortions. ... [T]o add a bit of perspective, in the US since 1973, less than one abortion doctor has been murdered for his practice for every 10,000,000 babies aborted during that time.

Maybe I'm being overly sensitive here, but doesn't it seem as though O'Brien is implying I endorsed Tiller's murder?!

To be clear, I also noted in my post:

The shooting was unjustified and needs to be denounced emphatically, unequivocably, and often.

The shooter acted alone, not as an agent of any pro-Life organization.

The shooter was suspected to have been suffering from mental illness.

And, of course, Mr. O'Brien completely ignored my conclusion, which was:

For all but a few nuts, this doesn't need saying, but the solution to abortion is not to kill abortion doctors, but rather to put them out of business by removing the demand for abortions through compassion and education.

The Blog House piece does, however, support the prediciton I made in the same post:

This is a bad day not only for the Tiller family, but also for the pro-Life cause. The story now is the blood on Roeder's hands, not Tiller's. The story now will be "those crazy right-wingers," not the staggering number of innocent unborn lives lost.... There will still be those who say the Tiller shooting is evidence of extremism rampant within the pro-Life movement. There will be those who conclude that the increased scutiny of pro-Lifers by DHS is justified. They're wrong, of course, but they're the opinions that will be promoted by a biased media.

Oh, well. This was my first time being quoted out of context by (what used to be) a major newspaper. I guess I should feel honored?