http://www.firstthings.com/article/1994/12/killing-abortionists-a-symposium
"HADLEY ARKES
This is one of those melancholy cases in which we would need the equivalent of a Leo Strauss emergency box: break the glass, pull the lever, and quickly summon to our side a writer schooled in the art of covert teaching or "writing between the lines." Even with the most delicate hand, we run the risk of fostering vast moral hazards—and creating perils for many innocent, earnest people—if we are willing to set into print a truthful discussion of this issue. For the answer should be jarringly plain if we simply take seriously the understanding that is anchored firmly among the opponents of abortion: namely, that the child in the womb cannot be anything other than a human life from its first moments; that a human life may not be taken except for the most compelling justification; and that the justification can never be proportioned, in its gravity, to the height, or the social weight, of the victim. If a person understood that innocent human lives were being destroyed in abortion clinics, without the need even to render a justification, what kinds of things, after all, might we expect him to do? Would the media, for instance, have been filled as they have in this case with reports of "religious zealots" if a band of Jews had killed guards and executioners on their way to work in Auschwitz? Would we have heard stories of the killing of innocent workers, who were merely carrying out orders, and pursuing a policy that was fully "lawful" under the laws of the Third Reich?
Of Mr. Hill's psychic balance, I cannot speak. What we can attribute to him however is this: He understood that the practitioner entering the clinic was willing to destroy innocent human lives, even for the most trivial reason—indeed, even without the need to give a reason. That enterprise had become his vocation, and that purpose was borne with him every time he entered the building. Mr. Hill did not engage in killing as his office work. He was moved to an awful, rare act, and he focused his lethal assault on a person who was about to engage directly, and deliberately, in the destruction of an innocent life. Unless we dismantle moral reasoning altogether, or remove the gradations that are critical to moral judgment, it should be evident that these two acts of killing cannot stand on the same moral plane.
But at this moment, the morality of the case is at odds with the law, and that must make a grievous difference. The members of the public who have now absorbed the premises of the law will not see even the rudiments of a justification in Mr. Hill's act. For them, the act cannot appear to be anything other than an act of lawless killing. Any endorsement of the act is bound to be misunderstood then as an endorsement—nay, even the tendering of a franchise—for lawless killing. Of course, the state of mind of the public looking on cannot supply the ground of our moral judgment. But writers and teachers, who help to shape the public discourse, cannot be indifferent to the ways in which they are likely to be misunderstood in the current cast of public opinion. From the lessonbook of Plato'sCrito we must remind ourselves that there are concerns of prudence at the highest level for paying a decent regard even to the unimproved "opinions" of the public; and there are weighty moral reasons for preserving the willingness to respect even bad laws.
Here, the badness runs deep, and the deeper strain has been set forth for us in these pages by Russell Hittinger: The Supreme Court has now established, in the case of abortion, nothing less than a private right to use violence, for any private reason, without the need, that is, to render any public reason. And now the rest of us are obliged to counsel the Paul Hills of the world that they may not make that same claim to the private use of violence, even when they are seeking not merely a private but a public end: the protection of innocent strangers. That the arrangement is not symmetrical is not to state the most damnable thing about it, or the degree to which it makes of us accomplices in a vicious project. For if we begin to express, even in part, what is morally dubious in this structure, we run the risk of sweeping away the inhibitions of prudence from many earnest people. We court the peril of propelling them to further acts of violence. Of course, the case of Paul Hill could be used, with a legal design, to pose a challenge to the very premises of Roe v. Wade. But even that act of high purpose, attended by a legal defense fund, could beget in turn other acts of affirmation and martyrdom. And so we bite our lips and hold back—and by my own account I may have already said more than one should say without the arts of indirection. But our political men and women deceive themselves if they think that this issue can be quietened simply by being displaced to the periphery of our politics. They have not grasped quite yet that this issue can corrupt even parts of our law that do not seem connected to the issue of abortion; and it can be counted on, reliably, to generate a poison for our civic life that will not be abating.
Hadley Arkes is the Edward Ney Professor of Jurisprudence and American Institutions at Amherst College. His most recent book is The Return of George Sutherland: Restoring a Jurisprudence of Natural Rights (Princeton University Press)."
http://www.firstthings.com/article/1994/12/killing-abortionists-a-symposium" If u declare with your mouth,
"Jesus is Lord," & believe in your heart
that God raised Him from the dead,
u will be saved."
Romans 10.9