The Bell Curve:

Once again in our allegedly civilized society we have seen overpowering and unbalanced moral, religious and political convictions turn into social activism, then hatred and, finally, into violence.

And Dr. George Tiller of Wichita, Kan., is dead, slain, it has been charged, by a mentally ill man nurtured on a diet of anti-government hate to a conclusion, I suspect, that he was doing a public service of heroic proportions by removing this man from the world we all share.

Tiller was the most visible of a handful of American doctors who included last trimester pregnancy abortions in their medical practice.

His patients came from all over the world, pregnant, said Tiller, with babies who were either severely genetically damaged and wouldn’t have survived or posed a critical threat to the life of the mother if carried to term.

But because he did this openly and unapologetically, he became a poster-boy target for the mainstream pro-lifers by legal means, not violence.

Over the last 20 years, Tiller’s clinic has been the site of legal daily protests.

Twice the extremist edges crept in to bomb and blockade, and in 1993 Tiller was shot in both arms by an assailant who is now serving a life sentence in a Kansas prison.

Meanwhile, the pro-life mainstream put its hopes into a Wichita courtroom where Tiller was prosecuted recently for violating a Kansas abortion law. He was acquitted and had returned to his practice when he was shot and killed Sunday in the foyer of his church.

Most of the groups that have opposed abortion rights over the years made haste to go public with statements expressing horror at Tiller’s killing and distancing themselves from any connection with or sympathy for his killer or his motives.

There is no reason to doubt their honesty. But there were also some isolated voices like a local activist who told a Los Angeles Times reporter: “The gut reaction from everybody who doesn’t have their thoughts filtered through fear is ‘Yahoo.’”

From the other side, a Colorado physician and friend of Tiller who may likely take over his practice told the Times: “I think it’s the inevitable consequence of more than 35 years of constant anti-abortion terrorism, harassment and violence.”

And somewhere in between, the Rev. Patrick Mahoney of the Christian Defense Coalition said: “Don’t use this isolated episode to demonize an entire movement and try to take this tragedy for political gain.”

This is rational and sage counsel, but in reading about this tragedy in the Los Angeles Times, I came on a photograph that seemed to me to offer a message beyond Mahoney’s dismissal.

The picture was a close-up of the crowd demonstrating outside the courtroom where Tiller was on trial last March. Two women looking quite determined were front and center, each standing under a large sign.

One sign said: “Dr. Tiller Savior For All Women Everywhere.” The “All” was underscored several times.

The other sign read: “Jesus Saves, thewaytoheaven.org, God bless you” and included a cross.

These two women and their signs were standing side-by-side, paying no attention to one another, immersed only in their own message. There was intensity but not anger, determination but not confrontation, and as I studied this picture I wished that we might learn to deal in the same manner with problems we face daily that divide a complex society like ours.

And it came clear to me that certain issues may never be resolved beyond bare majorities and endless protests. And that we will sometimes — perhaps even often — have to accept resolutions to issues, especially moral ones, that are repugnant to us. A meeting of activists on both sides of the abortion issue called late last week by President Obama was fast coming to the same conclusion.

This doesn’t mean giving up. Support for some issues changes incrementally over time — same-sex marriage, for example. But others remain fixed in their positions and like the women with the signs can only offer hope while they do their protest things.

We need to protect those women and their rights, both from their friends who would allow frustration to push them to extremism and from opponents who would limit their rights.

We will never be completely free of either, but we need to be able to separate the extremism that drives progress from the one that leads to violence and provide a social environment that attracts the former and turns away the latter.

If there is any lesson to be learned from Tiller’s slaying, that may be it.

JOSEPH N. BELL lives in Newport Beach. His column runs Thursdays.