By Staff
Our View
In an era of many moral ambiguities, one of the issues, which seems to not go away is that of abortion.
Few people in our country have no opinion on the practice, one way or the other. While no one likes the idea of it, some opponents of abortion have been known to go too far.
One of those, Eric Rudolph, 38, of various locations throughout the Southeast, was sentenced Monday in Birmingham to two consecutive life sentences for two bombs he set off in an abortion clinic in Birmingham in 1998.
Rudolph also faces two more life sentences in Atlanta for his role in the Centennial Olympic Park bombing in 1996 and bombing an abortion clinic and gay nightclub in Atlanta in 1997.
Rudolph spent five years on the run through the Appalachian Mountains in North Carolina from 1998-2003 after being named to the FBI "10 Most-Wanted" List and having a $1,000,000 reward placed on information leading to his arrest.
He struck a plea agreement to avoid the death penalty from the three deaths and over 150 injuries his bombings caused.
In a statement made at his sentencing, Rudolph said that he felt that abortion is murder, and because of that "deadly force is needed to stop it".
In other statements made previously he has rationalized his bombing of Centennial Olympic Park as an attempt to embarrass the government, and to hurt the pockets of those who had invested a great deal of money in the Olympics, an event which he feels promotes socialism.
While most are opposed to abortion, Rudolph certainly took matters too far. Death cannot be combated with more death. While in his mind what he did was completely justified, and he will probably always think so, people need to realize that bombing and killing innocent people is not the answer (as many foreign terrorists have learned over the past four years).
While almost everyone has a strong opinion about something, it is usually better to find a non-violent way to go about fighting it.