Gov. Rick Perry to EU: Texans are fine without their advice

Yeah, great job defending an indefensible policy, Rick.

Someone remind me again what’s “conservative” about the death penalty. Don’t we believe in limiting government power? Don’t we believe in not wasting money – dealth penalty cases cost more than life-sentence cases, right? And for those of us (not me of course) that believe in God, isn’t the death pentalty OBVIOUSLY MORALLY WRONG????

The death penalty is something best left in our past, and I can’t see how any self-respecting conservative could support it.

Or maybe I’m wrong…but that rarely happens. :)

Enrique on August 27, 2007 at 10:47 AM

Okay, take a deep breath. Now another. Count to ten. Enhance your calm.

Then hop down off that high horse yours, climb down off your soapbox, and put away that +6 Flaming Sword of Self-Righteousness you’re waving around.

Now the surprise: I agree with the first couple statements you make. You are painfully and very obviously wrong in theory, of course – because the Old Testament ideal of “an eye for an eye” is about as conservative of a principle as you can get.

Ah, but then you correctly point to the “government issue” power, and here – despite the fact that you’re still swinging madly with your +9 Staff of Almighty Arrogance – I agree with you.

As a conservative, I’m skeptical of the government use of power. I don’t trust them to control the border, I don’t trust them with taxation policy, I don’t trust them to control expenditures … I don’t trust them with much. As you rightly point out, the idea of limiting government power is pretty much the most basic conservative principle.

The government famously screws everything up. Giving them the power over life and death is, well, insane. If I don’t trust them in Congress, I can’t trust them with the ultimate power, now can I?

But then you start to lose me. First, on the issue of cost, I start by questioning that oft-repeated aphorism about the death penalty being more expensive. It doesn’t have to be – if someone is obviously guilty, one appeal and an execution in a couple months would be cheap in the extreme. As someone else noted, the cost comes from abuses of the system, appeals that go on for decades, etc. In theory, the death penalty could be very inexpensive.

And of course, that statement is a generalization, isn’t it? Sometimes death penalty cases are relatively cheap; sometimes life sentence cases aren’t – and then the convict lives to 90.

But my primary problem with your “cost” argument is that it only considers front-end financial costs – it does not take into consideration the enormous costs (including financial) to society, if and when the individual is released and re-offends.

Which they do so very often. I’d suggest that if you factored in all of the costs … you’d discover that even as screwed up as it is, the death penalty is a bargain.

But here’s where you really lose me: “isn’t the death pentalty OBVIOUSLY MORALLY WRONG????”

No matter how many capital letters or extra punctuation marks you use, there is nothing “obvious” in that statement.

An easy example: the recent torture, gang rape, mutilation, and dismemberment of Channon Christian and Christopher Newsome:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Murder_of_Channon_Christian_and_Christopher_Newsom

Read it all. Read it carefully. Then come back here and explain why putting those beasts down, why killing them and making sure they never, ever hurt someone else, is “obviously morally wrong.” In fact, I’d like to hear you explain how the opposite – letting them live – is NOT, by definition, morally wrong.

What is truly immoral is that we have abandoned one basic societal principle – the notion that is both Biblical and Darwinian that when members of society are a danger to that society, that they be eliminated from that society.

I’ll tell you what, O Paragon of Self-Righteous Virtue: let your child be raped and murder – and let you find out that they’d killed before and been released.

Let me know if you think the death penalty is “obviously morally wrong” in that case.

The bottom line? The bottom line is that there are obvious problems letting the government have this power? But there is nothing wrong with killing the predators in our midst; the only real problem is 1) that the government isn’t very good at it and makes mistakes, and 2) that we don’t kill enough of the bastards.

That’s the real moral problem with the death penalty, setting aside the government issue: we don’t use it enough.

Serial rapists, predatory child molestors, brutal robbers … all of these people, morally, ought to be killed. Those who make a habit of harming others should be eliminated. Period.

In fact, I think that basic idea – that do unto others, you get what you deserve, what goes around comes around sort of principle – is the bedrock of all morality.

Shorter version: you’re a dork, aren’t you?

Professor Blather on August 27, 2007 at 12:19 PM