Michael Bray

Author of A Time To Kill

Paul Hill, the Unabomber, and . . . Thoreau?

Posted on 31 March , 2017

22 May, 1996

Dear Op-ed editor:  Oral arguments for Paul Hill’s mandatory  appeal of his conviction and death sentence will be delivered in the federal court house in Tallahassee on 31 May. Hill acted in defense of the innocent and ought to be acquitted.

Paul Hill  terminated an unwanted abortionist and one accomplice on 29 July, 1994.   A majority of the people did not recognize Hill’s deed as an act of mercy.   In fact the court wouldn’t even allow  Hill to argue his defense: the legal doctrine of justifiable homicide.  Such a defense is predicated upon the popularly  denied fact that children in the womb are in fact children.  The prosecution and the whole abortion culture wanted to keep this trial a simple open-and-shut case about whether one man killed  two others.   To grant Paul Hill his defense would have been to extend a measure of legitimacy to or even vindication of  Hill’s deeds.   But the just and sovereign  state of Florida means to be certain that no innocent person gets the chair – terminal as that kind of punishment is.   So the mandatory direct appeal  of  Hill’s death sentence is in progress.  On  Friday (31 May) oral arguments will be presented in Tallahassee by Hill’s lawyers.

The present nationwide abortion policy is the product of a piece of judicial foul play known as Roe v. Wade.   It was conceived by that want-to-be progressive, semi-senile group of males on the bench of  the U.S. Supreme Court of ’73.   This oligarchy imposed its morality upon the rest of the nation contrary to the statutes of all fifty states!   But the arrogance of this decree is bested in unseemliness only  by the abject submission to it by the citizens of  these states.  Accordingly, not only do they sit by and allow the yellow-page-advertised, savage killing of innocent children to occur daily in their neighborhoods;   they also condemn, when they are not ignoring, those who are prosecuted for coming to the defense of abandoned children.

The ensuing moral confusion regularly displays itself in some curious deeds. Jacqueline Williams comes to mind.  A November, 1995 AP reports on a plot she hatched by which she killed a pregnant woman’s two ex-utero children and then lethally sliced her open and took out the live baby for herself.  (“Now which unwanted ones  were  we  allowed to terminate?”)   Another is that woman at the University of California hospital in San Francisco a few springs ago  who was delivered of her three-pound  boy two months after she was pronounced legally dead.  (“Now, where do we put this ‘organ’ we are about to harvest?  Not a cradle!”) Of course the “dilemma of ethics”  posed by the live product of an abortion has long been a  real brain teaser for thinking nurses (New York Times, 15 Feb., 1984).   (“What do I do with this breathing baby we just tried to terminate a moment ago?”)   Then come those thorny little legal irritants caused by vehicular homicides in which a wanted child in the womb is killed along with an ex-utero person or two.  A few years ago in Manassas, Virginia police charged a man with the manslaughter of two people: a girl inside Tasha Terry, 17, and Lavetta Brown, 31.  (“How can I charge this chap with manslaughtering what they terminate in the local reproductive health clinic?”)

Ah, but my favorite example of moral confusion is the story of Kawana Michele Ashley, 19, of Clearwater, Florida.  Right in the middle of the five-month gap between the deeds of Paul Hill and  John Salvi (terminator of abortionist accomplices in Massachusetts), Kawana shot herself in her own stomach, killing her child.  She was charged with third-degree murder and manslaughter.  Kawana had been “turned down at a St. Petersburg clinic because she did not have enough money”  according the AP report.  So she resorted to a desperate do-it-yourself-by-any-means-necessary abortion.   (Well, of course, the charges were dropped in order to avoid conflict with the current national abortion policy.)

The arrogance of the Court is not restricted to its judgments regarding the liberty to kill unwanted children;  the oligarchy which imposed the decriminalization of abortion upon  the republic has,  in like fashion, moved in the direction of  imposing legalized sodomy upon all the states.  We refer, of course, to the Court’s recent decree by which it thwarted the will of the people of Colorado, giving license to that which the people expressly wanted to keep outlawed. Romer v. Evans, says Thomas Jipping of the Free Congress Foundation, “vitiates self-government by substituting  the personal opinions of unelected judges for the people’s opinion expressed at the ballot box on an issue that violates no constitutional right.” How are citizens to be expected to respect and  submit to such a tyranny?  Why do they?

A morally confused people are easily ruled by tyrants.   They believe in nothing for certain – except for the liberty to indulge in their individual appetites.  And so they find themselves unable to withstand the demands by others for personal liberty.  The “choice”   to commit sodomy and abortion for the sake of personal pleasure or convenience is a “right.”  And when the highest object of devotion is no longer the triune God of  heaven and earth, His replacement becomes the creation.   Earth itself gains a new reverence. And the apotheosis of Earth yields new heroes: Her would-be protectors.  Among the elite, then, Ted Kaczynski, not Paul Hill, is more the hero.  He defends Earth from the onslaught of the villain, man.  Behold the New Age hero: the Unabomber.

He is way ahead of his time, and we unenlightened adherents to the old moral order cannot be expected to appreciate him.  The elitists only hint at the heroism of this defender of Earth.  Syndicated columnist John Leo provides various excerpts of guarded praise from the pundits for the new age hero. Boston Globe columnist Alex Beam, though dutifully acknowledging his horror at the killer’s tactics, says, “I envy him his disobedience” toward “American society,”  which “drove him to madness.”  (Yes, whatever fault we may find is not Kaczynski’s, but America’s.)

Another of the several fans of  the Unabomber  mentioned by Leo is Professor Robert Harrison of Stanford University, who compares him to Thoreau.   “The Unabomber wants to wake us up with a treatise, yet the late 20th century is fundamentally different that the mid-19th century.  In order to attract attention to a book, an idea, he had to get our attention with bombs.”

Well, yes, and I suppose Kaczynski would have loved to have typed his manifesto at Walden Pond.  Other than that I am not sure what  the connection is with Thoreau.  But, of course, I am just one of those simple members of  the “religious right” who believes that God made the world and all the creatures in it.   In fact that is the view of those of  the old moral order of America.  It was actually believed that the Creator made human beings in his “image” and that because of this imago, human beings were to be regarded with a profoundly greater respect than were all the other creatures  (wicked “speciesism” in the view  of  new order environmentalists like Animal Liberationist Peter Singer).

No,  Thoreau would not have been a fan of Kaczynski.  He liked his trees, but he held to the old moral order.  And when the rest of  the elite of his time, blinded by their tolerance of racist slavery and manstealing, condemned John Brown  – that  forceful defender of the oppressed in his time –  Thoreau stood alone praising him.  The Unabomber would have scorned both sides of the ensuing Civil War for stinking up the air with their gunpowder.

There are no Thoreaus today.

But there is a John Brown.   There is one who has stood up in defense of the innocent, oppressed children in the womb who suffer not the chains of bondage but the daily threat of death not just in certain southern  states but in every bloody state in this Union.

The Supreme Court of Florida has the opportunity to atone for the sins of its cousins on the U.S. Supreme Court.  Florida can uphold its own statutes which – to this day – outlaw abortion and provide for the use of  force by any citizen to defend the innocent.  Standing upon its own laws, the courts of Florida can recognize a true hero of  the old and true and good order.  The Florida Supreme Court can do the right thing and vindicate Paul Hill.

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