No heroism in public act of murder

About some things, there should be no debate.

Scott Roeder killed an abortion doctor in ruthless cold blood and he's going to prison where he belongs, characterized as what he is, a murderer.

Timothy McVeigh was put to death in a Terre Haute, Ind., prison in 2001, identified as what he was, a heartless murderer of hundreds of innocent men, women and children.

And Joseph Stack, however gentle and unassuming he may have seemed to his acquaintances, was a selfish, thoughtless killer who turned his own personal tax grudge into a murderous act of terrorism when he plunged a stolen airplane into the stone edifice housing hundreds of employees of the Internal Revenue Service in Austin, Texas, last week.

We are drawn to these observations by an Associated Press story about some tax protesters who quickly elevated Stack to hero status. Perhaps we must acknowledge in our multidimensional, free society that almost any bit of nonsense will always find some group of fringe thinkers to support it. And we must surely attribute to the sorrow over losing her father a good deal of the faulty thinking that led Stack's daughter at first to declare her father a hero "because now maybe people will listen," a notion she later retracted when she came more to her senses. But neither of these factors accounts for the thousands of people AP cited who hastened to join a Facebook site praising his cause, and that sentiment must be condemned in the strongest terms.

Resentment of The Tax Man dates from well before Zacchaeus climbed his famous sycamore tree 2,000 years ago, but no resentment should be permitted to broil into the kind of hatred that contemplates harm or murder. Still, the Treasury Department told AP that more than a thousand people issued specific threats against IRS employees last year.

Such threats, it must be said, against people acting according to their duties as employees of the federal government can only be seen in a criminal context and can never be countenanced. This, of course, doesn't mean those employees ought to be elevated above any others; to be sure, they are public servants and rightly face high expectations for the way they go about their jobs.

But they likewise need to be recognized as fathers, mothers, grandparents, brothers, sisters and friends, going about their lives as we all do. They are, indeed, like Vernon Hunter, a father of six and veteran of two tours of duty in Vietnam whom Stack killed.

To somehow dehumanize them or the institution where they work sets us on a path that leads, as everyone in this country knows only too well, to horrific tragedy. So, whether officials will somehow "listen" more now to complaints about the tax system or whether Stack's action, as a Texas gubernatorial candidate said, reflects "hopelessness" many people feel about government, his decision to fly an airplane into an occupied building wins no redeeming value from that. It must be called what it is, murder, and cannot be accepted as anything less.