{"id":5590,"date":"2009-10-23T12:07:31","date_gmt":"2009-10-23T17:07:31","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.shotinthedark.info\/wp\/?p=5590"},"modified":"2015-05-01T17:07:06","modified_gmt":"2015-05-01T22:07:06","slug":"kill-the-death-penalty","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"http:\/\/www.shotinthedark.info\/wp\/?p=5590","title":{"rendered":"Kill The Death Penalty"},"content":{"rendered":"

This post is an expansion of a comment in a thread<\/a> way down below.\u00a0\u00a0Partly because my monkeying with my code this morning put a crimp in my morning blogging schedule.\u00a0 Partly because the subject deserves it.<\/p>\n

I oppose the death penalty, not because I break with most conservatives on the issue, but\u00a0 because <\/em>I am a conservative.<\/p>\n

Stay with me on this one.<\/p>\n

Conservatism is about upholding time-honored truths.<\/p>\n

One of those truths is that the individual – one of the \u201cFree Association of Equals\u201d that our society is supposed to be, in the conservative view of things – is of supreme importance, and should be protected from the excesses of government. It\u2019s why we conservative natter on about things like the Tenth Amendment – because we uphold the worth of the individual; there are some things that, to protect the individual, the government should just stay out of.<\/p>\n

This directly contradicts the notion that individuals are \u201ceggs\u201d to be broken in the interest of the state\u2019s convenience to make a social “omelet”. Frequent liberal commenter “RickDFL”\u2019s left a remark in the comment section yesterday, that actually sent me looking for a remark about eggs and omelets that I coulda sworn Lenin or Stalin or Mao or Hitler made. No dice – the closest I got was Stalin\u2019s \u201cone death is a tragedy; a million deaths is a statistic\u201d – but Rick (I puke in my mouth a little bit in writing this) is right; it\u2019s something one of them would say.<\/p>\n

Conservatives do believe that the pursuit of good requires sacrifice; the Americans who died at Omaha Beach and Gettysburg and Chosin Reservoir were also of incalculable value, and they did nothing to deserve what happened except serving their country, and their loss was a tragedy for all of us. But they died (most of us believe) for a greater good, in a time and a place and for a cause for which there was no alternative, and which helped bring immense good as a result.<\/p>\n

Killing an innocent person to \u201cdeter\u201d the guilty? It brings no<\/em> good (the guilty party goes free forever<\/em>!) (I mean, what DA is going to say \u201coops – killed the wrong guy the first time! Let\u2019s try this again!\u201d), there is <\/em>an alternative, and, lest we forget, it kills an individual who did no wrong<\/em> – which is exactly who this society is supposed to protect.<\/p>\n

And it echoes Andrea Dworkin (or Catherine McKinnon?\u00a0 Jeff Fecke?\u00a0 I get confused) who said it\u2019d be \u201cgood\u201d if men got falsely imprisoned for rape, to make all the real rapists a little more afraid. It\u2019s an idea straight out of the worst of the French Revolution (which had no problem executing the innocent \u201cpour l\u2019encourager les autres<\/em>\u201c), carried on via Stalin and Hitler and Mao and Pol Pot.<\/p>\n

Hypothetically, if the system could be \u201cperfected\u201d, would I support it? Sure. But that\u2019s another tenet of conservatism; mankind can never<\/em> be perfected; the hypothetical is pointless. And to a conservative, protecting people from<\/em> the problems that human imperfection brings to government drives what government is supposed to do – including impelling government\u00a0to back out of big parts of our society.<\/p>\n

So since…<\/p>\n

    \n
  1. Mankind – including prosecutors and the police\u00a0–\u00a0can never be perfected, and…<\/li>\n
  2. these imperfections kill the innocent, and…<\/li>\n
  3. \u00a0killing the innocent is immeasurably evil, and…<\/li>\n
  4. \u00a0since a foolproof alternative exists that surely and swiftly punishes the guilty (remember – life in supermax without parole begins at sentencing; death takes an average of 12 years) while protecting the innocent<\/em>, and…<\/li>\n
  5. protecting the innocent is one of society’s supreme goods<\/em>,\u00a0then…<\/li>\n<\/ol>\n

    …abolishing the death penalty is<\/em> supremely conservative.<\/p>\n

    To me, the logic of my stance depends on the five interconnected points above – all drawn from orthodox conservative beliefs to a finely-polished “t”.\u00a0 If you want to disagree, by all means do it in the comment section.\u00a0 But if you can’t successfully attack that five-point chain of logic, I’m not sure you’ll get a lot of traction with me.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

    This post is an expansion of a comment in a thread way down below.\u00a0\u00a0Partly because my monkeying with my code this morning put a crimp in my morning blogging schedule.\u00a0 Partly because the subject deserves it. I oppose the death penalty, not because I break with most conservatives on the issue, but\u00a0 because I am […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[118,7,297,294],"tags":[284],"class_list":["post-5590","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-accidentalconservative","category-crime-and-punishment","category-favorites-culture","category-favorites-politics","tag-death-penalty"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.shotinthedark.info\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/5590","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.shotinthedark.info\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.shotinthedark.info\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.shotinthedark.info\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.shotinthedark.info\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=5590"}],"version-history":[{"count":7,"href":"http:\/\/www.shotinthedark.info\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/5590\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":53115,"href":"http:\/\/www.shotinthedark.info\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/5590\/revisions\/53115"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.shotinthedark.info\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=5590"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.shotinthedark.info\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=5590"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.shotinthedark.info\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=5590"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}