According to the Dali Lama, fear is one of the human emotions that brings out the very worst in us. Fear enables us to create "others," dehumanizing another person based on any arbitrary characteristic: race, ethnicity, nationality, gender, sexual orientation, politics. None is justification. All are as flawed as being human without insight.
George Tiller was shot in church yesterday in Wichita, Kansas. Dr. Tiller was one of the few doctors in the United States who would perform late term abortions, not because he was a baby killer, but because in often tragic circumstances, women, to save their lives or their future reproductive capacity, have to terminate a pregnancy months, not weeks, into gestation.
He was shot in church while serving as an usher.
He had survived a prior shooting and a criminal prosecution for performing abortions. Dr. Tiller was a courageous man, and he never should have been forced into becoming a hero, or now a martyr.
Abortion is a medical procedure, although fewer doctors in training are learning how to perform one. Abortion is just one aspect of reproductive health, just one. And after eight years of inaccurate and incomplete federally funded information about sex, perhaps a more common procedure than it needs to be in the wake of abstinence only programs that don't work. Just last week Governor Mark Parkinson vetoed the funding cuts imposed by the legislature on Planned Parenthood.
Fear of women's ability to make babies, fear that one person's private life decisions might make your own more difficult, fear that society is decaying, fear of that enormous life force of sexuality. Fear makes us into monsters unless we stop to consider what makes us tick.
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