Politics & Power Quote by Eric Rudolph

The sentence is built like a legal brief, but it’s really a moral permission slip for extremism. “Solely for the reason” narrows a messy world into a single, totalizing cause: abortion as “the murder of children.” That absolutist framing does two jobs at once. It erases competing claims (women’s autonomy, pluralism, constitutional law) and it upgrades political disagreement into a cosmic emergency. If the state is literally murdering children, then ordinary civic duties-allegiance, recognition, restraint-stop looking like virtues and start looking like complicity.

Rudolph’s phrasing borrows the language of sovereignty (“legitimacy,” “government in Washington”) to cast himself not as a criminal but as a dissident refusing a corrupt regime. It’s a common rhetorical move in anti-state violence: replace “I broke the law” with “the law broke the covenant.” The structure is also carefully exculpatory. By saying his rupture with the state is “solely” about one issue, he tries to launder a broader ideological program into a single, supposedly self-evident moral fact. He’s not confessing grievance; he’s asserting jurisdiction.

Context matters because Rudolph wasn’t theorizing in a vacuum. As the perpetrator of the 1996 Olympic Park bombing and related attacks, he operated in a 1990s ecosystem where anti-abortion militancy and anti-federal paranoia increasingly overlapped. The quote reads like an attempt to retrofit terrorism into the genre of principled resistance: a tidy sentence designed to make violence feel like conscience.