When
I first got into politics years ago, the current mantra from those with a more
conservative viewpoint in my county was that we “have to protect agriculture.” That really brought me up short because in my
mind “protect” is a transitive verb. That
is, it carries a thought from one side of the noun over to the other side. Therefore, I kept asking, “Protect agriculture
from what, or to do what?” This didn’t
sit well with a lot of people who wanted to protect agriculture’s right to develop
the property willy-nilly for development.
But, they didn’t want to say that right out in front of God and
everybody, so they hid it in what sounded like a really good thing.
So,
imagine my amusement when I heard a Tea Partier say the other day, quite
pompously, “We have to trust people”.
That sounds really good, also, but what are we trusting people to
do? To further restrict women’s access
to health care? Restrict voting? Even cutting taxes further for the wealthy
and corporations? We have to be really
careful of those transitive verbs and use them correctly, and even more, demand
that politicians use them correctly as well.
When you hear stuff like that, don’t assume you know what is meant. Ask questions, and demand real answers.
Which
brings me to the death penalty. Years
ago when my own kids were quite small, there was a particularly gruesome crime
in the San Francisco Bay area. A man
named Greg Abbott kidnapped and killed a little girl. Or, that was what he was found guilty of
doing, and he was eventually electrocuted.
He never confessed. There was so
much media frenzy over this that it even reached down to Fresno. One of my daughters asked me what the word
execution meant, so I was explaining that when a person did a really horrible
thing like killing someone, that person was executed which meant that his life
was taken away; that he was killed. She
didn’t answer for awhile, then asked, “Who kills that person?”
Overtime
I have given much thought to the subject of the death penalty because of that
question, and because of other reasons. Eventually
I have become adamantly opposed to the death penalty. Now we have the situation wherein much wiser
people in Europe are refusing to sell the drugs in the United States that have
been used to render the person being executed unconscious in order to
administer drugs that will eventually kill him or her. As a result we have the example of the
botched execution in Oklahoma a few weeks ago wherein it took the man 45
minutes to die. One state is considering
bringing back the electric chair, and I believe it is Utah which is considering
using a firing squad.
We
have all of these discussions on ways to implement the death penalty, when the
subject ought to be why have it at all?
Some arguments are that it is a deterrent, but that doesn’t really stand
up to scrutiny. Others are that some
people are so rotten they deserve to die.
Or that they must be gotten off the streets. The last one is sort of silly because if
someone is put in prison without possibility of parole, that certainly gets
them off the streets. The argument that
some people are so rotten they deserve to die is the one that most people use. I find this one the most difficult to
explain. Perhaps they are – but there
have been too many people executed that have subsequently turned out to be
innocent that the danger of killing even one innocent person ought to be enough
to stop using the death penalty.
But
the strongest reason, in my opinion, is what it does to the rest of us. Our society’s obsession with guns, violence
and death are fueled to some degree with our callous disregard about whether a
prisoner might be innocent. And, we hear
a lot from the right wing about abortion.
Life starts at conception. But
one of the great secrets of our time is that more main-stream churches,
including, for some time now, the Catholic Church, are just as adamantly
opposed to the death penalty. If one is
pro-life, then be pro-life. Stop picking
and choosing whose life has more value than someone else’s.
All life has value.
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