The Practicing Progressive

“Sticks and stones will break my bones but words can never harm me!”

Such sentiment may be a consolation to little children being bullied on the playground but by the time they become adults they will learn that it is patently untrue.

Words have great potential to do enormous harm as the recent murder of Dr. George Tiller, a Wichita physician and part-time Dillon resident, can so tragically attest. Tiller’s murderer, who chose to assassinate his victim on a Sunday morning in the foyer of Tiller’s Lutheran church, was apparently an avid reader of some of the most vitriolic and inflammatory anti-abortion blogs on the web including David Leach’s “Prayer and Action Newsletter”. One can fairly assume that the hate-filled rhetoric that spews out of these blogs made an impression on the assumedly unstable murderer. It is worth noting that Mr. Leach responded to the murder of Dr. Tiller with this revealing quote: “To call this a crime is too simplistic. There is Christian scripture that would support this."

There are many others among the anti-abortion advocates who must bear responsibility for this infamous act. The language they employ, the ire they induce and, perhaps most especially, the divine mandate they claim, have contributed to the hate-filled, indeed murderous, atmosphere that permeates this controversial issue. Reading the recent remarks of some very popular conservative commentators one can’t help but question whether they are at least indirectly responsible for egging on the perpetrators of such heinous crimes.

One of Evangelical Christianity’s most revered theologians, the late Francis Schaffer, in one of his best-selling books compared America and its legalized abortion to Hitler’s Germany and strongly suggested that it was morally justified to use the same methods against doctors who perform abortions as one would have used against Hitler. In other words, murder.

Words matter. When former President Bush employed the term “crusade” to describe the war on terror in his famous post 9/11 speech, he immediately engendered the disdain of millions of Muslims who have been schooled in the bloody battles Christianity once waged against Islam. The Muslim world was put on notice, they certainly believed, that the impending war was to be a war of religions rather than political ideologies. Such careless rhetoric, even if innocently stated, can have terrible consequences. A quiet conversation with almost any Middle-Eastern citizen will reveal just how powerful and hurtful that one word from President Bush was felt by many, if not most, Muslims.

In Christian churches all over the world, words read on Sunday morning invite hate and vengeance against non-Christians. In a myriad of scriptural passages, the Christian Bible berates Jews, even famously suggesting in one verse from Matthew that the murder of Jesus should forever be a curse upon all of Judaism. The fact that most Christians don’t overtly respond to such hateful language doesn’t excuse it from being used in Christian worship.

The recent condemnations of Supreme Court nominee Sonia Sotomayor is another blatant example of the damage that can be done by the careless employment of language. To hear her referred to as a racist by commentators who most often represent that segment of society that once stood idly by when African-Americans were attacked by dogs and beaten by police, reveals how irresponsible our utilization of language has become. Could such current name-calling incite an unbalanced true-believer into murderous action? It already has, many times.

“Sticks and stones…” Most children, of course, already know the lie inherent in that playground retort. Words do matter. All of us who are parents can certainly remember those profoundly sad days when our children returned home emotionally crushed by the hateful words of others. Brushing aside their pain with a bathos-filled bromide is to infer what we all know is simply false. Last Sunday’s murder was a tragic confirmation of this sad truth.