And I went up there, I said, "Shrink, I want to kill. I mean, I wanna, I wanna kill. Kill. I wanna, I wanna see, I wanna see blood and gore and guts and veins in my teeth. Eat dead burnt bodies. I mean kill, Kill, KILL, KILL." - from Alice's Restaurant
A "pro-life" Republican governor of Massachusetts is proposing to bring back the death penalty. After twenty years of a truly pro-life period of no death penalty imposed by the state, there is an effort to bring back death. The governor is suggesting concessions to gain support of squeamish pro-death penalty lawmakers whose main concern was the chance of killing the mistakenly convicted.
People and the organizations that represent them (a.k.a. democratic governments) should abide by the moral code of never killing except to defend life. This is a much simpler code to imprint on rational people than kill when you feel you have justification. Self-justifying any decision is difficult in the best of circumstances, and dangerous when the stakes are high.
So politicians raise the indirect justification of killing one person to intimidate others. This justification is impossible to prove as a fact and rarely bares out in the statistics. The justification of saving money is foolish and never justifiable is you believe life is more precious than money. And the worst argument is for vengeance (a.k.a. giving peace to the victim's families), a blood feud holdover that drives bloodlust rather than a more healthy grieving process. The justification of an eye for an eye or that there is an inherent justice in killing killers is perhaps the best argument for the death penalty. But that involves believing that the executioner in the person of the actual executioners or all of us represented by the state should be killers.
Governor Mitt Romney is providing the perfect opportunity for allowing the humane killing of truly bad people. But even in this most pristine condition and truly fair system, life is being cheapened. There is no emergency, no riots in the streets, war-like conditions, no imminent threat from general lawlessnes. The only change that would take place is that the state would regain the right to kill when life is not endangered.
I would beg the governor to visit Alice's Restaurant located in his own state and reflect on that brilliant song by Arlo. And may be then he could truly become pro-life.