(snip)

>The other problem is with this wimpy no-responsibility pansy-butt brain-damaged druggie notion that people should somehow not be held responsible for their own deliberate actions, a notion so widespread that it is infecting even court rooms with this crippling disease of injustice and ignorance and weakening people's minds to a point so disgustingly feeble that they can no longer stomach even the mildest of duties because it is too emotionally inconvenient to do so.

Okay, all joking aside, this one caught me in the gut.

With all due respect, I think you ought to consider other people's motives and reasons for their beliefs with a smidgen more respect before going on a rant like this, particularly on an issue as serious as this.

At many times in this thread I could've gone on a rant about "heartless killers with no shred of compassion", "barbaric eye-for-an-eye murderers no better than the people they kill", "sheltered middle-class WASPs who don't know jack about the people they judge and sit in their ivory towers like Pharisees while letting the people below wallow in misery and using their God-given sniper rifles of the Law to pick off the few who skirt too close to their antiseptic perfect suburban little worlds", etc., etc., etc. Lord knows I've felt this way often enough.

But I've tried my best to avoid this. (If I did come close to an emotional rant like that in some of my posts, and I know I may have, I personally apologize to whoever they might've been directed toward. I didn't mean it.)

I've tried to listen to the points of view of pro-DP advocates, to look up Scriptural references, to look at individual cases, to think through the logic, and you know what? I respect the pro-DP position, I really do. Even though I'm very far away from believing it, I respect it and I respect those who hold it, because I understand their reasoning. And I couldn't in good conscience post anything resembling either the examples I gave above or this example Sam just posted. Which, again, with all due respect, I can at best think of as something from a moment of weakness. Because that's *not* something I could respect.

First of all, even given that the thrust of your argument is true and the people who made this legal decision did so out of emotional weakness and a desire to avoid the sight of blood, the litany of adjectives you used was totally out of line and had nothing to do with your point. (For one thing, the word "druggie" had no business being there; the argument has nothing to do with drugs, other than the fact that conservatives in general like to stick that label on liberals in general because of all the stigmas and bad feelings and polarization the Drug War has caused. That's a pet peeve of mine.)

Second of all, your remarks take a simplistic view of the situation. Do you really think that this whole thing is about dodging responsibility? To me, the government's responsibility means first and foremost a responsibility to protect the people, both at large and individually. From this judge's point of view, he was doing the most responsible thing he could by trying to help these two individuals out as best he could while doing everything he could to protect the rest of the population.

True, from your POV the enforcement of justice may be the first priority and therefore the responsibility is to kill these two or make them suffer as best we can, but please note that not everyone shares this view of the government's responsibility and some of us have good (or at least well-thought-out) reasons for our own views. And there *is* a difference between dodging responsibility and having a different idea of what the responsibility is.

(In fact, from our POV, leaving justice aside, it seems to me killing them or tossing them in prison is abdicating our own responsibility in the surest way possible; we don't want the responsibility of rehabilitating them, we don't want the responsibility of protecting ourselves from them, we don't even want the responsibility of having to tolerate them, so we take the easy way out and off them. Of course, to you probably none of those three are our responsibility. We all have different definitions.)

And before you say anything, please note that while this may certainly have been the wrong choice, it was *not* the easy choice. This decision was not terribly popular even in the UK, not counting the enormous amount of noise it's making in the US, including here. You think the judge didn't know the public would jump all over him for this? You think it's easier to defend and protect a coldblooded murderer, or to go after his blood? The easy thing to do could very well have been to toss them both in jail, from the judge's POV. Now there's a huge media splash and people screaming and yelling for blood. How was this the easy choice?

Often it's forgiving that is the absolute hardest thing to do. In the long run I think it's the most difficult thing to do in the world. Which is easier, to look at an evil person and decry him as evil and ask for his death, or to look at him and force oneself to love him and reach out to him and try to change him? Very, very few people, I think, have the strength to really do the latter, and that's one reason why rehabilitation is such a hard goal to attain.

We can disagree about whether the reasoning behind such decisions is correct, or even if the decision was made because of bias or public pressure in a certain direction, but to call the people involved in this case and everybody who shares their opinion names and attack their moral character goes beyond what I think anyone has a right to do. Especially when it seems that you're basing your rant on the idea that everyone secretly shares your opinion anyway but is too weak to carry it out. One should watch oneself carefully before making assumptions like that. (I should know this better than anyone, from trying to play Socrates and getting burned at a younger age.)

I was debating with myself whether to say this, but I will. While we're on the subject of things that make us sick to our stomachs (and, believe me, all murders like this make me queasy), do you know what sickened me most of something I heard recently? Hearing that John Ashcroft had authorized televising McVeigh's execution to be broadcast to the families of his victims.

Even assuming that the DP is just, even assuming that he was going to die in a relatively peaceful, quiet, non-gory way, I still wonder how anyone can justify the idea that watching a man die can ever be a positive or necessary thing. I wonder at the attitude that could produce something like this, and I wonder what this says about people who try to claim that the DP is about justice, not vengeance. I wonder what this says about the United States of America, what it says about those who call themselves Bible-believing Christians. The whole thing sickens me greatly. While we're on the subject.

But I know that that's not the attitude of everyone who supports the DP, and I try to look at and analyze the issues rather than belt out my emotional reaction to each and every case that presents itself to me. I try to recognize that it's a good thing that everyone has differing points of view and to keep my posts free of blanket condemnations and name-calling of people who disagree with me. And I've been gratified that, for the most part, other people have done the same thing, and done it better than I have (in my imperfect self-control). Until this thread came up.

Ar"didn't want to offend anybody, but this is really crossing the line"thur