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Paul Hill
The killer of the abortionist Dr. John Britten and his bodyguard Jim Barret was executed by lethal injection by the State of Florida last Wednesday. Mr. Hill went to his death with a smile on his face, certain of his “great reward” in heaven.
I feel deep anger at the man and his death dealing and the manner of his death. It’s taken me several days to sort out my feelings and what I might have to say about him here. At first, my thought was something along the lines of “They shoulda dusted off ‘Old Sparky’ and let Hill ride the lightning to home to the Lord.” But Hill didn’t deserve to die that way; in fact Paul Hill did not deserve to die.
No, Hill did not get what he deserved. Like Tim McVeigh, the Oklahoma City bomber, he got exactly what he wanted, to play the martyr in the last act of a self-scripted passion play. Paul Hill deserved to spend 23 hours per day in a windowless box the size of a large broom closet for another 30 or 40 years growing old, irrelevant, and forgotten, in the admittedly faint hope that he might develop some capacity for reflection, compassion, or remorse.
I oppose the death penalty for criminals like Paul Hill precisely because I believe such murderers should have the opportunity for decades of solitary reflection upon what they have done. It is their only chance for redemption.
In his own statements to the press and on the Army of God website, Hill was fond of comparing abortion to genocide and the Pro-Choice movement to Nazism. Like many of his ilk he appropriated the word “holocaust” in particular to put all of its powerful and horrible associations in harness to his rhetoric. The meaning of the word "holocaust," leaving aside the connotations it has acquired in the past half century, is "burnt sacrifice," more specifically an offering that is burnt whole and entirely consumed by the fire.
I think it likely, judging by his own words, that Mr. Hill would not have been uncomfortable thinking of himself as the unblemished lamb of god sacrificed on the brazen altar of a sinful nation. He certainly had a mind unblemished by doubt, and it seems to me a heart unblemished by pity or compassion for any but unborn human beings and those obedient to his Lord.
Paul Hill flung himself into the volcano of his "god of love" as a self sacrifice not to forstall but to provoke an eruption, and forced the state to collude in his unholy suicide. Hill committed a crime I name "soul arson,” a perversion of the human spirit and an atrocity against our common humanity. That it was his last crime and his own soul won't provide much consolation to his victims.
Now he is an angel of damnation burning behind the brows of other pious killers-for-Christ. Allah akbar.
God is great.
There is no God but God, and God
the compassionate, the merciful cannot be, so
the women have mercy
and teach it to their girl children
while the men are busy
counting their begats.
God from whom all blessings flow
cannot be, so
the mothers carry the daughters' water
to the place all waters flow,
and God himself
needed his mother and sisters
to get there.
God is love, and God
in his infinite mercy cannot be, so
the mothers love with a love
stronger than death,
dropping tears of blood
in their daughters' shadows.
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