I've been following this Tiller story mainly on this website. However, I just visited drudgeretort.com (not drudgereport.com), and saw these two stories on top of each other: "Abortion Doctor Killed", and "Military Recruiter Killed".
A quick read of the latter immediately mentions the suspect in the killing of the military recruiter has a Muslim name, there appeared to be political and religious motives behind the slaying, and he could be facing 15 counts of terrorism.
The other article about Dr. Tiller's death mentions anti-abortion (rather than anti-choice), indicates it seems the suspect acted alone, and will most likely only be charged with murder and two counts of aggravated battery (for threatening to shoot two others in the church who attempted to apprehend him before he left the building). There is no mention that Tiller's murderer may have had political or religious motives for the killing. Interesting, since abortion and military recruiting are both political issues, but abortion strikes me as more of a religious issue than military recruiting (others might feel differently, but this is how I see it).
The two articles each come from separate websites (they're both local news organizations, and these incidents happened in different parts of the country), so some difference in the style of reporting might be explained by that. However, the raw facts of these cases are objective, and one black Muslim man breaking the law by murdering a US citizen is facing 15 counts of terrorism, while one white Christian man who broke the same law by murdering a US citizen is facing one count of murder.
The article about Dr. Tiller's death was much much longer than the other article, but there is only one mention of terrorism made in the entire article (towards the bottom, while the other article about the Muslim mentions it twice in the first paragraph), and it's part of a quote given by a colleague of Tiller's (Dr. Warren Hern, who we've also read about a bit during the life of this story):
"I think it's the inevitable consequence of more than 35 years of constant anti-abortion terrorism, harassment and violence," he said.
When Obama was elected last fall, Hern predicted that anti-abortion violence would increase, he said. Because Obama supports legalized abortion, Hern said, its foes "have lost ground.... They want the doctors dead, and they invite people to assassinate us. No wonder that this happens.
"I am next on the list."
That is the only mention of terrorism whatsoever in the article, and Dr. Hern's comments are not analyzed in the least anywhere.
This is not a Christianity-bashing diary. This is a diary where I saw a stark difference in reporting between two similar stories, and upon further reading found further contrasts in the way the suspects were being handled by law enforcement. This is my first diary, and I know this topic has been written endlessly about in the past few days, but I felt that this particular case was interesting (and upsetting) enough to analyze, albeit briefly.