Supporting Christopher Dorner Is Like Supporting Abortion Clinic Bombers

Perhaps it’s fitting when Occupy Wall Street is holding up Robin Hood as a hero that someone like Christopher Dorner, who went on a murder rampage after alleging that he was fired for blowing the whistle on police brutality, would also become a sort of hero to some (including, specifically, the occupiers).

But what often gets forgotten when it comes to people like Dorner, or the mythical figure of Robin Hood, is that they were “ends justify the means” sort of people.

“The urge to make myth, to try and redeem humans who commit immoral acts under the flag of moral causes, is understandable,” writes Ta-Nehisi Coates at The Atlantic. “It’s understandable in those who look at Jesse James and see not the straight white supremacist, but the scourge of greedy bankers and acquisitive industrialists against whom, it seemed, none could stand. And it’s more understandable among a people disproportionately brutalized by the police who look at Christopher Dorner, and see not a murderer but a plague on a police force that is, itself, above the law.”

But, as Coates points out, you still have to acknowledge that Jesse James and Robin Hood were killers and thieves. And Dorner was just a flat-out killer.

People who are supporting Dorner make me think of pro-life extremists who bomb abortion clinics. I’m very pro-life, but I don’t think murdering people and/or destroying property is a justifiable means to ending abortion.

I also don’t think that fighting terrorism justifies giving our President the power to order assassination-through-drone-strike on US citizens.

Just because a cause might be good and just doesn’t mean evil is justified in pursuit of it.