Excerpts from Eric Rudolph’s statement

updated 6:39 p.m. ET April 13, 2005

Excerpts from Eric Rudolph’s written statement, handed out by his attorneys Wednesday after his guilty pleas to four bombings across the South, including the deadly blast at the 1996 Atlanta Olympics. The statement marked the first time Rudolph has offered a motive for the attacks. He entered the pleas in exchange for prosecutors not seeking the death penalty:

On abortion and the government:

“I have deprived the government of its goal of sentencing me to death.”

“The fact that I have entered an agreement with the government is purely a tactical choice on my part and in no way legitimates the moral authority of the government to judge this matter or impute my guilt.”

“Abortion is murder. And when the regime in Washington legalized, sanctioned and legitimized this practice, they forfeited their legitimacy and moral authority to govern.”

“I am not an anarchist. I have nothing against government or law enforcement in general. It is solely for the reason that this government has legalized the murder of children that I have no allegiance to nor do I recognize the legitimacy of this particular government in Washington.”

“There are those who would say to me that the system in Washington works. They say that the pro-life forces are making progress, that eventually Roe v. Wade will be overturned, that the culture of life will ultimately win over the majority of Americans and the horror of abortion will be outlawed. Yet, in the meantime thousands die everyday. ... I ask these peaceful Christian law-abiding Pro-Life citizens, is there any point at which all of the legal remedies will not suffice and you would fight to end the massacre of children? How many decades have to pass, how many millions have to die? ... I think that your inaction after three decades of slaughter is a sufficient answer to all of these questions.”

“No politician in Washington will ever seriously threaten abortion on demand. And the fools who listen to them, in their hearts, know this but do not care. You so-called ’Pro-Life,’ ’good Christian people’ who point your plastic fingers at me saying that I am a ’murderer,’ that ’two wrongs don’t make a right,’ that even though ’abortion is murder, those who would use force to stop the murder are morally the same,’ I say to you that your lies are transparent.”

“Answer me, is the causus belli of promoting democracy in the Middle East more weighty for waging war than the systematic murder of your own citizens?”

“Along with abortion, another assault upon the integrity of American society is the concerted effort to legitimize the practice of homosexuality. Homosexuality is an aberrant sexual behavior, and as such I have complete sympathy and understanding for those who are suffering from this condition. Practiced by consenting adults within the confines of their own private lives, homosexuality is not a threat to society. Those consenting adults practicing this behavior in privacy should not be hassled by a society which respects the sanctity of private sexual life. But when the attempt is made to drag this practice out of the closet and into the public square in an “in your face” attempt to force society to accept and recognize this behavior as being just as legitimate and normal as the natural man/woman relationship, every effort should be made, including force if necessary, to halt this effort.”

“Any conscientious individual afflicted with homosexuality should acknowledge that a healthy society requires a model of sexual behavior to be held up and maintained without assault. Like other humans suffering from various disabilities homosexuals should not attempt to infect the rest of society with their particular illness.”

On the Olympic Park bombing, which killed one person and wounded 111:

“For many years I thought long and hard on these issues and then in 1996 I decided to act. In the summer of 1996, the world converged upon Atlanta for the Olympic Games. Under the protection and auspices of the regime in Washington millions of people came to celebrate the ideals of global socialism. Multinational corporations spent billions of dollars, and Washington organized an army of security to protect these best of all games. Even thought (sic) the conception and purpose of the so-called Olympic movement is to promote the values of global socialism, as perfectly expressed in the song “Imagine” by John Lennon, which was the theme of the 1996 Games — even though the purpose of the Olympics is to promote these despicable ideals, the purpose of the attack on July 27th was to confound, anger and embarrass the Washington government in the eyes of the world for its abominable sanctioning of abortion on demand.”

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