That every life is a sacred gift from God
Catherine Bennett notes an interesting juxtaposition.
In terms of knowing the enemy, much of it, in the US, will certainly resemble the Alabama misogynists – the 25 white, male, no longer young Republicans who have just stripped half their state’s population of reproductive rights. Photographs have been generously distributed. But, as the men would probably be the first to admit, they couldn’t have ushered in a generation or more of unwanted children without assistance from at least two women combatants, Terri Collins and the state governor, Kay Ivey.
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Signing the ban into law, Ivey celebrated “a powerful testament to Alabamians’ deeply held belief that every life is precious & that every life is a sacred gift from God”. Give or take, as they appreciate on Alabama’s death row.
Hours after criminalising abortion, Ivey ruled that the life of a convicted murderer, Michael Samra, was not sufficiently precious for her to feel like saving it. He was killed by lethal injection, with witnesses to testify that this particular sacred gift from God had been returned dead, with the governor’s compliments.
By “every life” Ivey meant…um…give me a minute here…
You just don’t get it Ophelia. Baybeez in the womb are innocent lives. Criminals, brown people, and poor people are fallen lives, to be sent to judgement by Jeesus ASAP.
Would they execute a pregnant woman?
Comparing abortion to the death penalty is…not a great argument.
Michael Samra killed two adults, a 7-year-old, and a 6-year-old. So, yes, many people believe he voided the preciousness of his life.
And, no, Chigau, no Republican would advocate executing a pregnant woman. Come on.
Every life that hadn’t been used to kill other innocent lives in a wanton manner. Yes, we can argue about the implications for war, etc., but here we’re talking about someone that murdered two kids.
Unless you’re willing to argue that innocent and guilty lives are completely equivalent, this is a nonstarter.
There is nothing inconsistent about supporting the death penalty and opposing abortion. Let’s have better arguments than this.
There is plenty that is inconsistent about supporting the death penalty and opposing abortion.
For one thing, Christianity holds that we are all, equally, sinners in the eyes of God and our only hope of salvation is the forgiveness of Jesus Christ. If you execute someone, you deprive them of the opportunity to repent, and you blaspheme by presuming to do God’s work when God reserves the right to take life – that is why, after all, abortion is supposed to be an evil (although it didn’t used to be). I agree that anyone who murders should be taken out of circulation for good, even if they genuinely repent. But killing murderers doesn’t bring their victims back, and nor does it deter other people from murdering. Besides, there are far too many incidents where the wrong person has been convicted. Reparations can only be made to the living.
I am in favour of all possible ways of preventing abortion short of telling pregnant women that they should not, or may not, have one. Accurate sex education. Free contraception. Free maternity and child care. Increased benefits whilst at home raising children. No woman should ever be coerced or cornered into abortion being her only choice because she can’t afford to continue a pregnancy that she would otherwise be happy with. Good quality crèches in universities and other places of learning, so that mothers don’t have to be deprived of an education. Watch the demand for abortions drop precipitously, but never to zero – because there will always be women and girls for whom pregnancy is dangerous, doomed, or just unwanted. So pregnancy termination should be a free choice, without any reason having to be put forward for wanting one.
Even so, an embryo or fœtus is not a person. They have no memories of the past, nor hopes for the future. No-one would consider it odd if someone refused to donate organs – or even mere blood – to an adult in a vegetative state; indeed, nobody would ever be asked to do that. But women are somehow are supposed to risk life and health in support of a fœtus so that some other people can feel good about themselves.
Tell that to every single innocent person that has been executed or is sat on death row awaiting their own miscarriage (fittingly) of justice. The innocence of the condemned doesn’t appear to bother those who support the death penalty – the innocent keep being executed but the death sentence keeps being handed down -and the innocence of foetuses (if innocence is a word that can apply to an insentient foetus) is no more than a smokescreen to disguise the true agenda – the control of women.
And if Alabama is able to get away with this, it will be because of women like Susan Collins, who pretends to be the only person in the country who doesn’t know what Brett Kavanaugh will do to Roe v. Wade the first chance he gets. And Shelly Moore Capito, Joni Ernst, Deb Fischer, and Cindy Hyde-Smith, who didn’t bother to pretend because they’re all proud of being A-OK with fucking over their fellow women.
Oh Skeletor would you STOP. I’m not stupid – not that stupid. I actually do understand that murderers are different from fetuses, and that there are arguments for the death penalty. I don’t need that explained to me. The point as presented in the article is that Ivey SAID WHAT SHE SAID and then hours later did the opposite. Explain to her about bad arguments, and stop treating me like a slow-witted child.
There are a great many problems in the Samra case..
He was a teenager at the time of the killings, which were committed by his younger friend with Samra’s help. There is evidence of brain dysfunction. The prosecution did things like claim Samra was a member of a Satanic gang.
Alabama has a bizarre system of laws regarding murder. One example is: if a couple of unarmed guys break into a house, and the resident shoots one of them, the other can be charged with the murder of his friend.
Here is an Equal Justice Initiative article about the Samra case. EJI fights racial inequities in the justice system.
https://eji.org/news/alabama-executes-brandon-samra
Even if one were for the death penalty, the lethal injection is somewhat problematic, if not downright sadistic. It is a three-stage execution, carried out by non-medical staff (executing people would be in violation of the hippocratic oath) who aren’t even qualified to insert an intravenous needle.
Stage one: an opiate is injected to relax the condemned and put them into a sleep. Because of what follows, it is important to note that this is not a painkiller, and it is difficult to know whether the condemned is asleep or just too relaxed (doped?) to respond to stimuli.
Stage two: the opiate is followed by a paralytic drug, leaving the condemned unable to move a muscle or to breathe. If still conscious they will now begin to suffocate. This is not essential for the execution; it is administered for the comfort of the spectators, ensuring that they see nothing so distressing as the condemned struggling during the final stage.
Stage three: the final drug induces a heart attack…eventually. In the meantime, if the condemned is conscious – which is difficult to judge because of stages one and two – they will feel as though fire has been injected and is spreading through their body, and they are completely unable to communicate that they are in unbearable agony because they are completely paralysed.
How is this not cruel and unusual punishment? They are literally torturing people to death.
And I can’t count on both hands and both feet the number of people that have told me they would rather that the innocent get executed occasionally than that the guilty go free.
In other words, not even every innocent life is precious (though I am sure the executed are probably guilty of something – jaywalking, going 45 in a 30 mph zone, taking cookies when they were three, lying to their wife by saying ‘no darling, that dress does not make you look fat’).
Tigger, well said.
AoS, there was a relatively recent case of an execution that was stuffed up exactly because the IV was incorrectly inserted. The condemned was only partially sedated and partially paralysed when the final round was injected. The result was he writhed, gasped and grunted for a prolonged period before finally succumbing. Distressing to the witnesses and outright torture.
I strongly oppose the death penalty in all cases. While I acknowledge the visceral desire for vengeance and to rid the world of monsters who are guilty beyond a shadow of a doubt, I believe the conviction rate of innocents is far to high to countenance the death penalty. Even one innocent killed is unacceptable. Apart from that, I believe a society is as good as the way it treats the sad, mad and bad within it. The death penalty is an ethical stain that gnaws into societies entrails inducing a kind of madness and evil all of its own.
An attitude that brings us to Trump World: people voting against their own sef interest to have the opportunity to see others get screwed over even worse. They’re happy with whatever he does so long as there are people they can point to who are punished, who can’t “get away” with stuff anymore, who aren’t allowed to get more (or even as much ) of anything that’s good as they do.