 commonsensepoliticalthought.com |
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Sometimes, sticking to principle means accepting things that we don’t like. Sister Toldjah posted a story on her website, which she entitled A great argument for the death penalty, about how an utterly sick freak, James C. Effler, Jr., a convicted sex offender out on parole, raped a toddler in a public library. My comment is below: Well, I’m sure that the Sister Toldjah readers will disagree with me on this one, but being pro-life means being pro-life: lock him up in prison and throw away the key. This case points to two real problems: one, why was he out of jail for a sex crime with a victim (a 31 year old woman) in just three years, and two, what good is a sex offenders’ registry if the registered offenders are not kept track of in some manner? In the past decade or so, we’ve set up all sorts of registries for convicted sex offenders, but if they can simply register, and then leave the state (as this man did), it seems that the registries are of little use. (If you had to register as a pervert in Now, does this man deserve whatever happens to him, including death? Yup, sure does! But the question of being against capital punishment really isn’t about whether the criminals deserve it; it’s more about whether it is useful to society (and, if we have the power to execute someone, we have him literally helpless; we are not actually defending ourselves against him) and whether executing criminals actually helps our society. I’d say that it doesn’t. The murder rates in states with capital punishment are generally higher in states that do not, and (Statistics on capital punishment are available at the Death Penalty Information Center, a site opposed to capital punishment.) But, more than not really being useful (would it really have mattered if we had just kept the fewer than 1,000 murderers executed since 1977 in jail rather than executing them?), I’d say that it is actually harmful to our society. We are saying, to our children, to everyone, that killing people who are causing us problems is a reasonable solution. The only difference between killing unborn children or people like Terri Schiavo and the convicted murderer is that some people believe they can find good reasons to kill some people, but not others. Well, if we can find a good reason to kill James Effler, some other people found good reasons, motivated by sympathy, for starving Mrs. Schiavo to death, and 1.4 million American women find good (or at least sufficient) reasons to kill their unborn children every year. Why ought our decisions, that men like Mr. Effler ought to be killed, be of any greater import than the decisions of people like Michael Schiavo? It’s a whole lot easier to simply be pro-life, period. That means that scumbags like Mr Effler wind up living, albeit in prison. But, in the end, we are better off letting them live, and retaining a logically consistent ethic in support of life. Posted by Dana Also see Pro-Life Main Page
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