homicide

It has been a full month since my last post, and I apologize. Kinda. My post deployment break (yeah, I figured it was pretty obvious why I'm doing this anonymously, so I've decided to just hang that out there. I don't speak for the military, I'm just in it... for now) is over, and I'm going to try to get back into this. Luckily, Chris Matthews has provided me a segue.

Mathews has been really getting his figurative ass handed to him lately, and it's good to see. But I heard something today that independently irked me. OK, I didn't so much hear it as read the hearing impaired subtitles while listening to Rush (not the band) on my iPod and running on the gym treadmill. But I digress. The point is that I didn't catch the whole discussion, but it was about the abortion doctor killing that just happened in Kansas. Like I said, I didn't hear the whole discussion, but I did hear Mathews saying that his guest should not use the term "murder" of an unborn child because even if you believe that it is "killing" another person, murder is a "legal term".

Now, for the record, I'm walking a fine line here with regards to the murder of the doctor. I do not think it was right. I am not in favor of vigilante justice of abortion doctors, mostly because I believe that it hurts the pro-life cause more than it helps it. If we are to remain a nation of laws in spite of our current government, then as civilized people we must work within those laws until such time (if ever) that it becomes impossible to preserve freedom that way. So for the record, I'm against it.

But morally, I also "get it". I do believe that the doctor was a murderer. He specialized in, and advertized late-term abortions. So he was killing children older than those that might have been incubated and saved as premature births in a local hospital. No matter what you think of early abortions - and for me there is little difference - this is unarguably a baby human. It can cry, feel, eat, shiver, and suckle it's mother. Morally, what the killer did yesterday is stop another killer. Even though I wish, for a whole host of reasons, that he hadn't done it I can't be sad at the passing of a man who I morally rate as no better than Charles Manson or Ted Bundy.

That aside, let's get back to Chris Matthews and the subject of Murder as a legal term. To start, I disagree on the face of it. Murder has meant the unjustified killing of another person for about as long as it has been an English word. The fact that it has a legal meaning does not make the common use of it invalid. What that doctor did was murder babies. But I'm going to give Matthews the benefit of the doubt here, and accept his premise: Murder is far too technical of a legal term to apply to a man who kills womb-entrapped infants for a living. So we are going to be more technically accurate ourselves. If Chris Matthews doesn't like using "Murder" to describe these killings, then we shall henceforth use the word "Homicide" as it is more specifically descriptive. A child, unborn or not, is a homo-sapiens. Homicide is the killing of a member of homo-sapiens. Therfore, that abortion doctor, and ALL abortion doctors, commit homicide.