Sanctity of Criminals’ Lives
Some groups like the ACLU, who advocate abolition of the death penalty for murder or rape, enthusiastically endorse murder by abortion.
Many Christians and religious Jews, along with secular liberal-progresssives, sincerely oppose the death penalty for convicted murderers or rapists. They are firmly persuaded that the God-given miracle of life is too precious to leave in the hands of fallible human jurors and judges.
Almost all people agree that murder, taking matters into one’s own hands without the sanction of civil justice, is forbidden. Indeed, that view is one of the oldest imbedded in society’s laws. Those same laws of society, from time immemorial, also dictated executing murderers and rapists, provided that they were brought before a lawfully constituted body and convicted by requisite evidence. Justice was fitting the penalty to the crime.
Justice was viewed from the standpoint of the whole of society, not solely from the viewpoint of the accused. Acts of rape, mutilation, or murder were crimes against the order of society, as well as against the specific victims.
Ancient law codes, from the Ten Commandments to Hammurabi’s law, were based upon an explicit reference to the gods recognized as the protectors of that society. Thus executing murderers and rapists, as well as acts of murder or rape, inevitably raise moral questions. Today those questions tend to be confined to the criminal who commits such acts. Little thought is given to the morality of protecting society from such people, as well as the rights of victims and their families. Little thought is given to the degrading effect upon society, the contempt for law and justice, engendered by limiting punishment of murderers and rapists to prison confinement, from which they all too often escape or are paroled. Little thought is given to the frequency with which escapees or parolees murder, mutilate, and rape new victims.
For more details regarding that aspect of the death penalty, see Lester Jackson’s essay on the TCS Daily website.
Many Christians and religious Jews who oppose the death penalty also oppose abortion. But many secular liberal-progressives oppose the death penalty while advocating an absolute and unilateral right of a woman to murder her baby via abortion. Why, it’s fair to ask , are the lives of ruthless criminals so much more important than the lives of innocent unborn or just-born babies?
Opposition of the ACLU and other liberal-progressives to the death penalty and their support for abortion pivot off their support for civil rights. Because a disproportionate number of murders, mutilations, and rapes are committed by blacks and other minorities, the ACLU says that the death penalty is itself discrimination against those minorities and an infringement of civil rights. Because the ACLU, and liberal-progressives generally, reject Judeo-Christian morality as a foundation of social order, they have no compunction about elevating feminist ideology over unborn babies’ right to life.
The underlying philosophical support for such doctrine is socialism’s concept of social justice. The first prominent statement of that doctrine was the work of French Revolutionary philosopher Jean-Jacques Rousseau in the middle 1700s. Rousseau asserted that, in the original state of nature, there was plenty of everything for everybody and that people were benevolent, resorting to neither aggression and crime, nor war.
In Rousseau’s imagination (he admitted that he had no historical or other evidence to support it), this idyllic perfection, the secular-liberal-progressive version of the Garden of Eden, was ended by the advent of private property rights and the structuring of societies to protect those property rights. Once someone declared a piece of ground to be his property and asserted a right to prevent its use by others, avarice, greed, aggression, crime, and war were unleashed upon a formerly peaceful and benevolent humanity.
Opposition to the death penalty rests in part upon Rousseau’s imagined benevolence of people in the original state of nature. If crime is the product of ownership of private property, then humanity can be returned to its natural benevolence by redistribution of property under a socialist regime. Murderers and rapists can be rehabilitated through the ministrations of secular social scientists, because humans are all good when not corrupted by a social and political structure that protects property rights.
This doctrine is unsupported by historical experience, indeed totally repudiated by socialist experiment, from Revolutionary France, to the Soviet Union, Hitler’s National Socialism, and Mao’s Red China. But it was the genesis of the ACLU, which was organized during the First World War to support socialists’ and anarchists’ efforts to sabotage America’s preparations for entry into the European conflict.
The ACLU, ever since, has adopted as its official purpose supporting any effort to degrade the Judeo-Christian moral ethos upon which the United States was founded.
For the ACLU and its liberal-progressive supporters, at least, opposition to the death penalty is, at bottom, just one more way to corrode the moral foundations of constitutional government in the United States, a constitutional government founded upon the essentiality of private property rights. It is precisely this same objective that governs ACLU advocacy of abortion.
Thomas E. Brewton is a staff writer for the New Media Alliance, Inc. The New Media Alliance is a non-profit (501c3) national coalition of writers, journalists and grass-roots media outlets.
His weblog is THE VIEW FROM 1776
http://www.thomasbrewton.com/
Email comments to viewfrom1776@thomasbrewton.com
Thomas E. Brewton, who maintains this blog, had the great good fortune in the middle 1950s at Louisiana State University to study under two of the 20th century's great minds: Eric Voegelin in political science, and Walter Berns in Constitutional law. These two professors opened the door of education to a glimpse of Western civilization and of American political and social thought as they had been before socialism was unconstitutionally established as the official national religion of the United States in 1933. | More from Thomas Brewton
Stumble It!
November 2nd, 2009 at 1:21 am
“Rousseau asserted that, in the original state of nature, there was plenty of everything for everybody and that people were benevolent, resorting to neither aggression and crime, nor war.”
So from the beginning, Rousseau was already totally wrong.
His whole philosophy is based on completely false premises, only inspired by romantic naivety and daydreaming.
In the original state of nature, people’s lives, just like the life of all animals in free nature, is a world dominated by merciless cruelty, random violence, and instant death around every corner 24 hours per day.
November 2nd, 2009 at 5:16 am
Since when is evil supposed to make sense?
I think it’s a mistake to compare the taking of an innocent life inside the mother’s womb with taking the life of a convicted murderer. The two have absolutely nothing in common and makes about as much sense as comparing apples to oranges. (Including rape in the mix only clouds the issue even more)
If someone doesn’t instinctively know that killing an unborn child is wrong then how do you expect them to know that two wrongs don’t make a right. (The second wrong being a case where a convicted murderer has been spared the death penalty) It makes perfect sense that someone evil enough to advocate for abortion, would be happy to see a convicted murderer, murder again in prison, or be released from prison to commit the crime again.
Obama is the baby-butcher in chief. It may interest readers to know that if no Catholic voted for him, he would not be president. Maybe pointing one’s finger at the ACLU is misguided.
November 2nd, 2009 at 11:11 am
Huh?
November 3rd, 2009 at 12:21 am
http://www.angryharry.com/esDeathForCopKillers.htm
November 3rd, 2009 at 12:51 pm
Those who are merciful to the cruel are soon cruel to the innocent.
November 4th, 2009 at 5:13 am
The problem I have with the death penalty is that sometimes innocent people are put to death. In Illinois a few years back they discovered, (I believe through DNA) that they had several people condemned by “mistake”.
Upon further investigation it was discovered that it wasn’t so much a mistake as it was criminal misconduct by law enforcement in one case and negligent police work in other cases. In one case the police approached a couple who had been responsible for a particular murder and asked them to be witnesses against a man they *knew was guilty* of said murder. Of course, the perpetrators were happy to testify against the innocent man to insure they would never be prosecuted.
This kind of behavior on the part of law enforcement is very common. It’s no secret that police use “jailhouse snitches” as witnesses in court. These snitches are often the determining factor in a conviction. The use of these snitches is nothing more than sanctioned framing of individuals, the police say they *know are guilty*.
If it could be guaranteed that the right individual was condemned to death for the crime of murder (rape is another issue entirely) I think a lot fewer people would have a problem with it. The fact that criminals masquerading as police, lawyers and judges are wrongfully convicting innocent people should be the reason why we don’t do it, not because it’s wrong. Taking the life of someone who commits premeditated murder is not wrong, but allowing them the chance to commit that crime again, either in prison, or upon release from prison, is.
Condemning people to death on jailhouse snitch testimony and most eyewitness testimony needs to stop. We need to raise the bar on what constitutes a “reasonable doubt”.
November 5th, 2009 at 1:01 pm
Death to all rapists!
Any woman who has sex with a man against his will, should be put to death!
November 7th, 2009 at 5:38 am
I do think it best not to include rape in discussions of crimes punishable by death. There are far too many false accusations and false convictions for rape.
Murder is another matter entirely, and good people on both sides can disagree. I get the irrevocability argument, that one cannot undo it if falsely convicted, on the other hand, and though I don’t know of stats to back this up, I am absolutely convinced that the number innocents wrongly executed will be dwarfed by the number of innocents murdered by repeat or undetered murderers. In other worse, I believe fewer innocents die with the death penalty.
However, that is a different argument than whether we want to trust government and judges with such power. The law has been corrupted as such that it is no longer a shield for a decent, but a weapon in the hands of the indecent, and so many things are becoming “crimes” that there may come a day when everyone is a criminal. Murder is one thing, and we’ve already brought rape into discussion, what will be next? Slippery slope? Perhaps. Three strikes and your dead laws would scare me for crimes other than murder.
There is no doubt in my mind that a murderer should pay with his own life, but that should be the only crime punishable by death. And even then, we must be careful. The burder of proof is now reasonable doubt, as it should be. Perhaps there should be added assurance for the death penalty, such as DNA.
Good discussion.