Abortion rights opponent David Leach made news this week when he posted a video of himself on YouTube speaking with George Tiller murder Scott Roeder and threatening Kansas abortion providers.
Leach has a long record of promoting violence against clinic workers and has defended Roeder’s murder of Tiller.
As a GOP state senate nominee in 2010, Leach suggested that HIV/AIDS was divine punishment for homosexuality. He was eventually defeated by Democratic incumbent Matt McCoy, but his candidacy did win the support of one leading anti-choice activist: Personhood USA board member Chet Gallagher:
Gallagher served as the field coordinator for Mississippi’s failed personhood campaign, led the Nevada Pro-Life Coalition, which worked with Personhood USA to sponsor that state’s personhood initiative, and worked on Personhood USA’s campaigns to outlaw abortion in Montana and Colorado. He also works for Flip Benham’s Operation Save America.
The Des Moines Register reports today on Leach’s latest call to violence:
Leach posted the comments this month on YouTube. His posting includes a recorded phone conversation he had with another man, whom Leach identifies as abortion opponent Scott Roeder. Roeder is serving a life prison sentence for the 2009 shooting death of the Wichita clinic’s then-owner, Dr. George Tiller.
Leach has previously suggested that other men were justified in killing other abortion providers. He notes in the video that Tiller’s old clinic was recently reopened by a new abortion agency.
“If someone would shoot the new abortionists, like Scott shot George Tiller, … hardly anyone will appreciate it but the babies,” he says. “It will be a blessing to the babies. Everyone else will panic. Of all places to open up a killing office, to reopen the one office in the United States more notorious for decades than any other is an act of defiance against God and the last remaining reverence for human life.”
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In the YouTube video, the man Leach identifies as Roeder laughs as Leach talks about the prospect of someone shooting the new leaders of the Wichita clinic. Then the second man wonders aloud about the clinic director’s motives. “To walk in there and reopen a clinic, a murder mill where a man was stopped, it’s almost like putting a target on your back — saying, ‘Well, let’s see if you can shoot me,’ ” he says.
Then the man quotes a fellow activist, who predicted that the abortion industry would end if 100 abortionists were shot. “I think eight have been shot, so we’ve got 92 to go,” the man whom Leach identified as Roeder says. “Maybe (the Wichita clinic director) will be number nine. I don’t really know. I’m not sure about that. But she’s kind of painting a target on her.”
