COMMENTARY: Humanity, not gender, is key in capital punishment case

c. 1998 Religion News Service (Andrew M. Greeley is a Roman Catholic priest, best-selling novelist and a sociologist at the University of Chicago National Opinion Research Center. Check out his home page at http://www.agreeley.com or contact him via e-mail at agreel(at)aol.com.) UNDATED _ If women have equal rights in our society, do they not have […]

c. 1998 Religion News Service

(Andrew M. Greeley is a Roman Catholic priest, best-selling novelist and a sociologist at the University of Chicago National Opinion Research Center. Check out his home page at http://www.agreeley.com or contact him via e-mail at agreel(at)aol.com.)

UNDATED _ If women have equal rights in our society, do they not have an equal right to die by lethal injection? Is it not immoral to excuse a woman from the death penalty because she is a woman?


Does not such an excuse discriminate against women? If a woman has a right to die in a foxhole as a combat infantry person, does she not have a right to be treated like men when she is convicted of a heinous murder?

If a woman has a right to crash into the sea while attempting a”trap”on an aircraft carrier, does she not have a right to go through the grisly rituals of being a”dead woman walking?” I ask these questions because of the uproar over Texas’ plan to execute Karla Faye Tucker, the 38-year-old pickax killer scheduled to die by lethal injection Tuesday (Feb. 3). Tucker, convicted and sentenced to death in 1984 for her role in two brutal murders in Houston, has asked the Texas Board of Pardons and Paroles to amend her sentence to life in prison.

Some who pontificate about such things in the media have recoiled in horror at the prospect of executing a woman.

Is it an uncivilized horror to execute a woman? I agree that it is _ not because the victim is a woman but because the victim is a human being.

The death penalty, except under some extraordinary circumstances, as Pope John Paul II has said, is cruel barbarism whatever the victim’s gender.

Revenge is mine, says the Lord, I will repay. We humans become monsters when we lust to kill a fellow member of our species for purposes of revenge. Better that we leave it to the Lord. Better that we take seriously the words of Jesus that we should not judge lest we be judged.

I sympathize with the pain of those who lost loved ones in the Oklahoma City bombing. But do they realize how hateful and ugly they appear when they demand blood vengeance? Do they realize how unchristian they appear when demanding the score be evened?


I do not think Unabomber Theodore Kaczynski is mentally unhinged. Rather, he is an academic who took seriously and literally the ideology that many of his colleagues propounded in the 1960s and `70s. Not bothered by consistency or logic, most such ideologues went on to the”big chill”in which they posed as leftists but made their peace with American society _ and in some cases a lot of money, too.

Poor Kaczynski lacked the moral flexibility to sell out. Rather, he has been rigorously consistent with his principles and by the light of those principles is a hero and not a madman. His crime is one of fidelity.

But is he morally responsible for his crimes?

Not in his mind. He was merely fighting corporate consumerist capitalism.

Is he a criminal whatever his moral perspective?

Certainly he is, and should be prosecuted as such.

But should he be spared the death penalty because he is crazy?

No. He should be spared the death penalty because he is a human being.

At the same time, however, we might warn academics who spew forth revolutionary rhetoric that people might take them seriously.

Tim McVeigh, Terry Nichols and Ted Kaczynski are true believers. They’re men who take seriously and very literally their convictions. They are ideologues, who unlike other ideologues, push their ideologies to rigidly logical conclusions.

Most of us are not that rigid and that logical. So they are dangerous human beings. Put them all someplace where they can do no harm. But do not sink to the same savagery they have displayed.

Revenge is an ideology, too. It twists the human soul with a fury that distorts a person’s humanity beyond recognition.


And, incidentally, don’t tell me you’re a good Christian and still favor the death penalty. That’s sheer hypocrisy.

IR END GREELEY

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