Wednesday, January 22, 2003

Overturning the Death Penalty

When Illinois' governor recently commuted 167 death sentences on his way out of office, he had to know that the reactions would be swift, unambiguous, highly charged emotionally, and debated for some time to come. Hopefully, as the debate continues, both outrage and rejoicing will gradually give way to wider and more careful deliberation than our society has recently been able to generate on this subject.

One thing that the debates should accomplish is to make clear just how complex the issue of capital punishment is and how long it will take us to achieve anything close to a working consensus on it. Governor Ryan has at least made it possible, though, for a truly edifying debate to begin.

About this governor's particular decision, of course, there is much that can and will be said. I for one am bothered by its in-your-face quality, handed down at the very end of his term of office, perhaps to evade some of the responsibility for dealing with its full consequences. I am distressed that an executive can simply sweep aside the careful deliberations of jurors who do their best to decide what the facts are in extraordinarily painful cases, in order that the law can be applied fairly to them. And I am concerned for the anguish that so many members of the victims' families in these particular cases must now endure. I think they were and are owed more personal communication from Governor Ryan than they apparently received.

Issues of timing and process aside, was Governor Ryan's decision itself on sound legal grounds? For an answer to this question, most of us will have to rely on the judgments of people far more versed in the law's specificities than we are. Was the decision the right one to make, ethically? About this question, every American has both the right and the responsibility to think and to speak. How Christians in particular might begin to think about it is the subject of the rest of this column.

Apparently, it is more difficult to think "Christianly" about the death penalty than we would like to admit. For some Christians I know, the decisive reason for keeping the penalty intact is that it serves as a significant deterrent to capital crimes. Others argue for abolishing capital punishment on the grounds that enforcing the statute clogs the legal system, costing us more in the long run to put people to death than to keep them in prison for life. On a matter as serious as this one, arguments on the basis of sociology or economics seem almost obscene.

But so does another kind of argument, I think: the argument of lex talionis, the eye-for-an-eye mode of retaliation. Shed blood, and expect to have your own blood shed; it's just that simple. This approach certainly has more to commend it than the ones it superceded, that permitted the avenging of wrong by inflicting harm on an enemy many times beyond the harm originally inflicted. Lamech's infamous boast at Genesis 4: 24 put revenge at 77 times the original offense. Evidently, he regarded God's formula of only sevenfold vengeance (Genesis 4:15) as too wimpy.

It has been many years since I came across a Christian who believed that God's promise of a sevenfold retaliation on anyone who killed Cain warranted human beings' taking a similar kind of vengeance on other human beings. But I have always been surrounded by fellow Christians who have no trouble invoking the necessity of one act of retaliation per offense, subject to the criterion that the retaliation suit the offense. The implication for the present discussion is easy to draw: kill somebody, and expect to be killed in turn, preferably of course at the hands of duly constituted officers of the law.

To the lex talionis principle, it is tempting to apply the sixth commandment. However, the act of killing that the commandment prohibits bears little resemblance to the act of putting to death people who have taken the lives of others for no good reason. What does apply to the principle is what Jesus himself says about it at Matthew 5:38-48. Certainly, Jesus is not addressing here the question of executing someone convicted of murder. But he is addressing the application of an-eye-for-an-eye as the basis for taking action against wrongdoers, persecutors, and enemies. Simply put, he's telling us to take it out of circulation. What I find especially interesting in this whole passage is the last verse, wherein Jesus enjoins us to quit limiting our goodness toward one another, so that we can better imitate God's unlimited goodness to us.

You don't suppose, do you, that there still might be a place after all in our penal system for rehabilitation rather than revenge?

As they say, more later.

Wednesday, January 08, 2003

A Little Less Self-Expression, Please

In the middle of a volatile Board meeting I attended a while ago, one member suddenly rose up out of his chair, pointed his finger sternly at the chairman, and shouted (with a couple of especially nasty words omitted): "I can say whatever I feel, anytime I want to, to anybody I want to, about anything I want to, and you'd better not ever forget it! " He then launched a barrage of even nastier words that laid waste to everything the Board was trying to do, as well as to most of the members on its numerous committees, including myself. His rampage went on for a very long time.

To exchanges like this one, the operative reaction is all too often: So what else is new? Nastiness happens. You do not have to be a member of a prestigious Board to get away with it yourself. You can be rich or poor, famous or unrecognized, white or black or red or yellow, Republican or Democrat --- just yourself --- and with impunity let your self-expressions spill over people like ketchup drowning a baseball park hotdog. It's all part of the American way, isn't it? Are we not free to express whatever we feel and think, whenever and however we want, to whomever, whether anyone else wants us to or not?

Maybe. For example, if we are ever going to forge a lasting consensus on the major issues confronting our society and the world today, everyone who will be affected by others' decisions must be heard. And our decision-makers cannot possibly hear everything that they need to hear unless we are allowed to express ourselves freely and openly, without fear of reprisal. Agreements arrived at without adequate discussion usually unravel quickly.

To be sure, democratic processes are messy. One minute they veer dangerously toward a tyranny of the majority and the next toward sheer anarchy. Ensuring a free flow of ideas often looks like the very worst way of going about things --- except for all the others.

But then again… Recently, I read about a father's immobilizing discovery that his college-age daughter was posing for a pornographic Internet web site. He was devastated by the girl's assertion of her right to display herself in any way she chose. It could have been worse, I suppose. Others are vigorously claiming their own right to self-expression by posting computer-generated images of much younger girls and boys on child porn sites.

It was to my fellow Board member's great credit, in my judgment at least, that though his great-grandfather was a fanatical Ku Klux Klanner, he himself has long been an outspoken opponent of anyone's claiming the right to burn crosses on other peoples' lawns. However, he doesn't think that we have the right to burn American flags either. Another powerful guy I know is very angry that Trent Lott recently "caved in" to the media-driven demands of people who denied his right to express honestly-held Dixiecrat sympathies in public forums.

These anomalies of outlook are vexing. The best way through them is the way of clear, careful thought and respectful discussion. However, what passes for both these days is blatant and uncompromising self-assertion, as in: your right to self-expression is inversely proportional to the degree of offense your exercising it arouses in me.

Though this formula clearly offers a way to reduce unwanted acts of self-expression, none of us is likely to succeed in invoking it; the obvious self-interest behind it destroys its credibility immediately. Here is another injunction that holds more promise: "Whoever calls his brother 'good for nothing' deserves the judgment of the court; whoever calls him 'fool' deserves hell-fire." (Matthew 5:22, REB) If we want to cut down on self-expressions that are unnecessarily hurtful to others, this is something that will really do it. There is nothing self-serving about the injunction; its words are from Jesus, to all of us together.

What lies behind Jesus' warning against deeming others fools is ancient Israel's faith that all human beings are created in the image of God. For Christians, it is this image that Jesus Christ died to restore. Calling someone a fool or worse for not agreeing with us, for being too different from us, or for not doing things our way blasphemes both our own created nature and the other's.

As the song says, "what the world needs now is love, sweet love." The people in it also need, not rebuke, but encouragement, to bear God's own image as God intends. When the obsession to express one's own feelings, opinions, and aspirations gives way to the desire to help others express their own best and true nature, our families, communities, churches, and nations can become something better than the self-serving institutions they now tend to be.