With the midterm elections taking up so much media attention (as the non-stop shitstorm of political ads shows), there are some stories that slide under our respective radar. One such story is that of Christa Pike, a woman on Tennessee’s death row who just happened to survive two execution attempts via lethal injection. Aside from questions about how she would do in Atlantic City casinos, it opened up another discussion about a controversial topic, that being the death penalty.
The public is still divided on whether violent criminals should meet their maker via the world’s most lethal Tinder date, with a majority still favoring it. Of course, that means the Left opposes it, including groups like Amnesty International, because, well, the Left is fucking contrarian these days. And in the past. Well, ever, if you really think about it, and I do because there’s nothing good on TV anymore.
Needless to say (which is why I’m typing it), the death penalty is worth a gander for a Leftist Lexicon entry.
the death penalty
What the Left thinks it means – a barbaric process that should be outlawed for various reasons
What it really means – a punishment that should be the on the table for the most extreme cases
There are a lot of divergent opinions on the Right when it comes to the death penalty. Some of the faithful variety support it while others reject it, both on religious grounds. And both sides have valid perspectives on whether God would allow His followers to end a life in the name of justice. Even more secular members of the Right have concerns about whether the state should be in the business of killing prisoners. These positions show a great deal of thought and introspection.
The Left, on the other hand? They just fucking love criminals.
Take the impending executive by firing squad of Nidal Hassan, the Fort Hood shooter. Sure, he killed 13 people, but the Left want us to overlook that inconvenient truth (hey, that would be a great name for a book, unless that fuckwit Al Gore got his mitts on it) because Hassan was injured as a result of his killing spree. Now, he’s a paraplegic and the Left are turning him into a martyr for their cause.
Which is, you know, loving criminals.
Although Hassan’s circumstances are different than Pike’s, the Left’s position is the same: we can’t kill them because…well, they’re still trying to figure that part out. But I’m sure that, given sufficient time and consideration, the Left will come up with something by the end of the decade.
They’re still trying to figure out which decade, mind you…
For me, I’m of two minds on the subject. As a Christian, I know it’s God’s job to judge, and I’m smart enough not to get in His way. As a skeptic of government getting things right, I can’t completely go along with the same bunch of asshats who can’t figure out how not to spend us into insurmountable debt until the sun burns out having their fingers on the switch.
But as a human being who pays attention to the world around me, I know there are some deeply evil motherfuckers out there. And keeping these dregs of humanity alive while their victims didn’t get the same consideration has always struck me as supremely unfair. I’ve often said any murderer who doesn’t get the death penalty has effectively beaten the charge, and I still feel that way.
Even though we have clowns to the Left of me and jokers to the Right, I’m still not willing to take the death penalty off the table, but only for those extreme cases where there is no other punishment severe enough to adequately address the crime committed.
Of course, the Left loves to paint the death penalty as racist because of the races of the people on death row. My counter to that is the racial makeup of the people committing the crimes that land them on death row. Seems the FBI has some pretty detailed statistics on the matter. But, the Left believes math is racist, so there’s that bullshit to deal with.
Even if I grant the Left’s position that the criminal justice system is biased against non-whites, there’s a way to avoid it completely: don’t commit violent crimes! This is a fixable issue, kids! And, yes, I understand the racism can reach down to the local police departments, some of which make the white people in court in To Kill A Mockingbird look like a Benetton ad. The point still remains the best way to avoid a racist judicial system is to not get in a position to run afoul of it.
The problem we face with the death penalty is some of us aren’t willing to even consider using it for the worst of the worst. The fact California couldn’t bring themselves to execute Charlie Fucking Manson should disqualify them from any morality discussions. Well, that and the fact they covered for Harvey Weinstein like he had blackmail material on Hollywood.
Regardless, even when we have someone who turned in his membership to the human race decades ago, we can’t seem to bring ourselves to accept his/her resignation and wish them the best of luck in their soon-to-be-truncated future endeavors. This can be boiled down to a belief executing a criminal somehow diminishes our humanity. If we can learn to forgive those who commit the most egregious of crimes, even if it results in the loss of life, we’re lead to believe it shows we are better for not giving into our baser instincts.
And this is what the Left counts on in their anti-death penalty rhetoric.
In the Bizarro World logic the Left uses, the criminals are almost always the victim (except if they’re involved with J6 or conservative causes, then they’re all guilty) and they deserve to be kept alive in case we execute an innocent man/woman. I sympathize with those wronged by the judicial system, but I also recognize the relative infrequency in which an innocent person is erroneously punished. By playing to the fears of excessive punishment of the innocent, we have rendered justice toothless and irrelevant to the guilty.
And you can be damn sure the guilty know that.
That’s how Lindsay Clancy got a mistrial in a case where only the truly delusional believe she shouldn’t be held truly accountable for killing her three kids. And it will happen again and again until we get our heads around the guilt trip we’ve been on for decades about the death penalty.
Even so, we have to be careful not to default to the death penalty for every crime. You shouldn’t be getting it for not rewinding a movie from Blockbuster Video in 1994, but if you shot one up and don’t feel any remorse for it I’m going to have to insist we schedule a meeting with Ol’ Sparky for you. I hear he’s electrifying.
