Wednesday’s bizarre hostage-taking incident at the headquarters of the Discovery Channel in Silver Spring, Maryland ended, thankfully, with the hostages unharmed.

Unfortunately, the hostage taker, James J. Lee, had to be killed by police.

We’re told he was environmental zealot who wanted the network to air programs that met his demands. Among those demands (coming in at #2) was this: “All programs on Discovery Health-TLC must stop encouraging the birth of any
more parasitic human infants and the false heroics behind those actions. In
those programs’ places, programs encouraging human sterilization and infertility
must be pushed. All former pro-birth programs must now push in the direction of
stopping human birth, not encouraging it.”

So, a Right-to-Lifer he wasn’t.

We’re also told, via a Maryland newspaper account following an earlier, less violent, protest outside the Discovery headquarters in 2008 that “Lee said he then felt an ”awakening,” watched former Vice President Al Gore’s
documentary ”An Inconvenient Truth,’ and decided he had been doing too little
to protect the environment.”

Now, let’s be clear, Lee was the victim of his own twisted thinking. Al Gore, environmentalists or those favoring liberal abortion laws are not in any way shape or form responsible for his actions.

But, while Lee’s alleged Al Gore moment isn’t referred to until paragraph 14 of MNBC’s online report (and then only briefly) and is not mentioned at all in the linked to NBC Nightly News report on the incident, it’s hard not to suspect there wouldn’t have been a lot more emphasis on it if his possible inspiration came from Bill O’Reilly or Glenn Beck or some other dastardly, mind-controling conservative.

The fact is people are responsible for their own actions. While less inflammatory rhetoric on any side of any issue would be beneficial, environmentalists, including Al Gore, aren’t responsible for the actions of any disturbed individual or group that twists their words and beliefs to commit heinous acts.

By that same principle, Right-to-Lifers or Bill O’Reilly are not (as they have been accused of being) responsible for the lunatic murderer who killed the noted abortionist Dr. George Tiller
or any other anti-abortion related violence.

By that same principle, Christians (including conservative Christians) aren’t responsible for every nut who twists the words of the Bible and Muslims aren’t responsible for al-Qaeda and its atrocities.

To to sure, all those mentioned groups and individuals should condemn any hateful words or actions that even claim to have a connection to their beliefs, but they are not morally responsible for them.

To allow violent or hate-filled extremists to define legitimate viewpoints held by millions of people either on the right or the left only leads to reduced understanding and hardening of positions on both sides.

It’s not the way to work out honestly-held differences of opinion.