Republican presidential candidates Ted Cruz, Mike Huckabee and Bobby Jindal are slated to appear this weekend at a conference in Des Moines hosted by Kevin Swanson, an extremist pastor and radio host based in Colorado.
We’ve reported extensively on Swanson’s extremist views, including his defense of the death penalty for gay people and worry that the movie “Frozen” will turn kids gay, and have been going back through the archives of his “Generations Radio” program this week to learn about his views on other issues.
One illuminating episode of “Generations Radio” came in 2009, four days after Kansas abortion provider George Tiller was murdered in his church by anti-abortion extremist Scott Roeder. Calling “Tiller the Killer” a “mass murderer,” Swanson declared that the abortion provider had received his divine “upcommance” and insisted that the deaths of 14 people in a Montana plane crash earlier that year was divine retribution for one of their relative’s owning of abortion clinics.
“It was anarchy and this vigilantism is not a good thing at all,” Swanson said of Tiller’s murder. “But … so was the fact that you had a guy who was in his abortuary for the last 30 to 40 years killing 60,000 babies. That’s anarchy too!”
“If anybody’s keeping count …Let’s see, Tiller killed 60,000 babies, so that’s 60,000 dead babies and one dead abortionist,” he continued. “So, let’s just say, the abortionists are still ahead on this one.”
Swanson’s cohost, Dave Buehner, had a similar attitude. “Let’s just say Tiller was the mass murderer and he died and I’m not shedding a tear for him,” Buehner said. “And I might at times be tempted to cheer that he is no longer killing babies — okay, at all times I’m tempted to cheer.”
“It is interesting that if you live by the sword, you die by the sword,” Swanson continued. “Wasn’t that what Jesus said? And this is really, pretty much, what happens. People tend to get their upcommance, and that’s precisely what happened to Tiller the Killer.”
“I believe, I am convicted of the fact that there is a God in the heavens and He is sovereign over everything that happens, including the fact that George Tiller the Killer is dead,” Swanson said later in the program.
He cited the fact that Tiller’s father, also an abortion provider, had died along with his mother, sister and brother-in-law in a plane crash, and that a 2009 plane crash in Montana had killed 14 family members, including small children, of a man who owned several abortion clinics.
“By the way, a couple of months ago out in Montana there was a plane crash out there where 14 family members of the owner of one of the largest abortion clinic franchises in the country died in that particular plane crash,” Swanson said. “Now, George Tiller the Killer is dead too. Is there a God in the heavens? Is He involved in the affairs of men? That’s what the word of God says. So God’s providence is all over all of these things, we have to believe that God is in the heavens and He rules.”
Later in the program, Swanson turned his ire to the pastors of Tiller’s church, who he said were operating “a synagogue of Satan” because they had not excommunicated Tiller.
In fact, he and Buehner insisted, any church that fails to excommunicate abortion providers, women who have abortions, gay people, divorced people, people who commit adultery, or anyone who supports any of those people, is not a true church at all.
“Do not murder, do not commit adultery, and if a man lies with another man as he lies with another woman, then the two of them has committed an abomination, they both should be put to death,” Swanson listed. “We ought to just ask churches how they feel about some of these Bible verses and if they repudiate these Bible verses, then we ought to repudiate them and say, ‘Well, then you have no part with us. You are not our brothers and sisters and you are part of some of the most evil parts of this nation and we will consider you as such from here on out.’”
He then returned to the subject of Tiller: “Well, ladies and gentlemen, there is a God in the heavens and His is over all these things. There’s a reason why abortionists are being killed in plane crashes, why George Tiller’s father was killed in a plane crash and George Tiller was killed by a vigilante. Whatsoever man sows, that shall he also reap.”
