On Aug. 16 Steven Anderson, pastor of the Faithful Word Baptist Church in Tempe, delivered a sermon titled “Why I Hate Barack Obama.”

In the sermon, Anderson admitted he prays for the president’s death and suggested he’d “like to see Barack Obama melt like a snail,” and that the president “ought to be aborted.”

A day later, a dozen protesters carrying weapons — including a member of Faithful Word, who had brought his trusty AR-15 semi-automatic assault rifle — demonstrated outside President Obama’s speech to the Veterans of Foreign Wars at the Phoenix Convention Center.

Earlier that month, Secret Service agents took a 51-year-old man into custody outside a town hall meeting on health care reform in Maryland for brandishing a sign that read “Death to Obama” and “Death to Michelle and her two stupid kids.”

These intimidations against the president are not isolated incidents.

According to a new book, “In the President’s Secret Service,” Obama is the target of more than 30 potential death threats a day — a 400 percent increase from threats received when George W. Bush was in office.

Obama’s not the only one.

Rep. Brad Miller, D-N.C., told multiple media outlets in early August his office received a death threat from someone upset with his support for health care reform legislation.

Later that month, someone called a death threat against Rep. Lynn Jenkins, R-Kan., into her Pittsburg office, days after the congresswoman garnered national attention for saying at a town hall meeting that the Republican Party needs a “great white hope.”

It seems that at some point in the past year or so, we became a nation not of laws and debate, but of hostility and intimidation.

There has always been anger at the way our politicians run the country.

There has always been fear government will change in a way certain citizens won’t be happy with. What there has rarely been is such a marked willingness to turn to violence when things aren’t going our way.

On May 31, abortion practitioner George Tiller was shot and killed in the lobby of his church by an anti-abortion activist. Tiller was 67 and one of the few abortion practitioners in the U.S. to do late-term abortions.

Pro-life groups had long attempted to hold Tiller legally accountable for potentially practicing illegal abortions at his clinic in Kansas.

But on this day, their disagreements with the doctor were solved with the barrel of a gun.

Does Steven Anderson want to kill President Obama? Probably not.

As he said in a later interview, “I don’t want him to be a martyr; we don’t need another holiday. I’d like to see him die, like Ted Kennedy, of brain cancer.”

But all these threats, protests and calls to action add to the public perception that we’ve reached a point at which nothing else can be done and violence is a legitimate response to political defeat.

Every threat against the president or another government leader — idle as it may be — is a challenge to someone who actually is willing to commit a violent act.

And nothing good ever comes of violence.

Reach Zach at zachary.fowle@asu.edu.