Values That Leave a Family Fatherless

It is a case rife with irony and absurd circularity: A man who believes he is saving lives from murder commits murder and is condemned to die for his killings.

A man who claims to prize the family destroys his own.

And anti-abortion hypocrisy reaches a new low.

On Tuesday, Paul Hill, a 40-year-old former Presbyterian minister, was sentenced to die in Florida’s electric chair for the murders of Dr. John Britton and James Barrett at a Pensacola abortion clinic last summer. Hill, barred by the judge from claiming justifiable homicide, presented no defense.

Britton and Barrett, his volunteer escort, were ambushed by Hill, who hid behind a tree praying before shooting his victims with a 12-gauge pump-action shotgun as they pulled up to the Ladies Clinic in Barrett’s truck. Barrett’s wife, June, who rode in the back seat, was wounded in the attack.

Hill said that before he turned his weapon on Britton and the Barretts, he also prayed that he would not have to kill any police officers, whom he considers murder accomplices because they offer protection to abortion providers.

“But,” he said, “I was prepared to do so.”

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Hill’s conviction puts an effective end to the argument advanced by many anti-abortion activists that bombings, shootings and murder at abortion clinics are “isolated incidents” and not part of orchestrated efforts.

Hill was the head of a small group called Defensive Action and had, according to news reports, traveled the country in the past year telling fundamentalist church groups that the murder of abortion providers (and cops, too, by implication) was “justifiable homicide.”

“I honestly think that what I did was honorable and I’m unquestionably encouraging others who are called by God to do the same thing,” Hill said after the murders.

If one were to get ridiculous (and why not, since everyone else is?), one could blame Newt Gingrich for Paul Hill.

Don’t laugh.

Gingrich tried to pin blame for the psychopathic acts of confessed child killer Susan Smith on a liberal society, remember?

Well, what kind of values give rise to killers like Paul Hill? Could they be the ones we see now parading across the front pages in the form of vicious rhetoric from the far right? The intolerance toward women’s reproductive rights, for instance?

It’s a thought.

And here is another: Paul Hill is the father of three children--a 9-year-old son and two daughters, 6 and 4.

What of them? Now they are fatherless.

Maybe the family will have to go on welfare. Who knows? Maybe they are already on welfare. Maybe, as per the “Contract With America,” they will be kicked off welfare after two years. Maybe the kids will be put in orphanages.

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Last year, in an extremist pro-life magazine called Life Advocate, Hill penned what amounts to a long Bible-based defense of killing doctors who perform abortions.

At the end of the rambling essay, he wrote, “Suppose your own precious children were pleading for you to help them as a murderous man was about to destroy them? Would you do whatever was necessary to protect them?”

What is Paul Hill? A murderous man who has destroyed his own family.

Abortion-rights advocates reacted with muted cheer to the news that Hill had received the death penalty. They acknowledged that the sentence may do nothing to deter other fanatics from taking up arms, and that there is danger in the creation of a martyr to the anti-abortion cause.

This fear is not unfounded. As Hill was sentenced to death, a woman in the courtroom yelled out: “This man is innocent and his blood will be on your hands, the hands of the people of the State of Florida and on the jury.”

Whatever position you take on the death penalty, Paul Hill’s sentence is most assuredly not a case of martyrdom.

It is a case of vigilantism, of religious zealotry.

And of another fatherless family, possibly headed for the dole.