Thursday, January 23, 2014

Why We Can't Kill

"I believe ..  that while all human life is sacred there's nothing wrong with the death penalty if you can trust the legal system implicitly, and that no one but a moron would ever trust the legal system." - Neil Gaiman

I've wavered my entire life on my beliefs about the death penalty, but I cannot stand undecided any longer. It is wrong. It is inexcusably wrong.

At first, I believed justice was served by capital punishment such as, why should someone who commits such an atrocious act be allowed to live out the rest of his or her life while their victim(s) did not? Why do they get to play god? How could I, never having experienced such a violent loss, look a mother in the eyes and tell her that her child's murderer should not also die? To try and empathize, I imagined how I would feel if someone murdered a member of my family, would I relish in seeing the perpetrator die?

Nothing good would come from it.

This is why we are the good guys: we do not murder. Our descent into capital punishment has condemned us as surely as we have condemned the accused.

We are the good guys because we are better than that. We are better than rash thinking, impulsive violence, nonsensical rage.

I constantly refer to the Christian religion, the seat of my personal faith and the community which seems to rule this country; you guide yourselves by asking, what would Jesus do?

He did not throw the stone.