As Dan suggests, George Tiller’s killing is bound to prompt a barrage of overblown paranoia about the Religious Right. Here’s a classic piece of sanctimonious fear-peddling from Cristina Page.

For those who would like to think today’s murder in church of Dr. George Tiller, an abortion provider, is an isolated incident, here’s the horrifying news: You are wrong.

Be afraid! The crazy pro-lifers are coming to get you! What’s most unfair about Page’s response — and the responses of others — is the near-explicit contempt and mistrust towards the many pro-lifers who have denounced the killing. As Page writes,

Anti-abortion groups will put out carefully worded press statements condemning the murder of Dr. Tiller, as became routine for them during the Clinton years. But unless the rhetoric they choose from now on becomes careful too — they may be the enablers of murder and terror.

You’ve got to love the bit about “carefully worded press releases.” How snide.

In a similar vein, Jacob Sullum, trying perhaps too hard to be clever, asks “Why Is Killing Abortionists Wrong?”

If you honestly believe abortion is the murder of helpless children, it’s hard to see why using deadly force against those who carry it out is immoral, especially since the government refuses to act.

He may have a point about the loudmouths who call abortion “murder.” Indeed, most sane abortion opponents avoid using that word, as it suggests the abortionist is fully conscious that he or she is wrongly snuffing out a human life, which — let us hope — he or she is not.

Yet Sullum casts his critical net wider. He accuses “less-militant anti-abortion groups,” such as National Right to Life, of suffering from the same “contradiction” in their condemnations of Tiller’s killer.

Killing abortionists may be contrary to [their] goal for tactical reasons. But how is it possible to believe that fetuses are people with a right to life yet also believe that using deadly force to defend that right is wrong?

What a bad rhetorical question. Sullum seems to be saying, in effect, that if one is mad enough to believe that abortion is wrong, then why should one not be mad enough to believe that killing an abortionist is right?

If, however, we jump out of Sullum’s utilitarian circle for a moment and try to comprehend the idea — central to nearly all abortion opposition — that killing human beings is intrinsically wrong, then it becomes entirely possible to see why people can abhor the life-work of George Tiller while condemning his murder. Yet Sullum, from his willfully narrow teleological perspective, might not accept that.