Leonard Pitts linked the death penalty with love. In his column this morning he mostly wrote about how the politics of espousing and retaining the death penalty in a couple of states, Virginia and Texas to be exact, was an important consideration for its aspirants to political office.  In these states you had not just to be for the death penalty, but must love it. The distinction is important between different candidates.  Which one loves it more and if you can decide this you cast your vote for – what?  Well, the death penalty.

Now murder is important in our society. We spend an inordinate amount of time thinking about it for our eyes and ears are directed to the hosts of programs on the television and reports in the newspapers.  Our local paper, the Miami Herald, often highlights these cases to the exclusion of the mass murders going on in other countries.  Actually, you can think of the thousands of people each year who are murdered (in a sense) by others who neglect their official duties to protect and serve.

But, this is about socially and legally sanctioned murder.  It is very much like who will throw the first stone.  If a community still kills by stoning, the decision to say go still has to be made.  We stone people with words in this country.  We do it with attitude and would never think of throwing stones at a defenseless person who the social group decided must be murdered in an orderly, legal and humane way.  Well, the humane thing is what has made many states do away with hanging and gassing.  I believe an option still exists in Idaho to be legally murdered by a firing squad.  In any of these cases the state or the legal entity that we cannot escape decrees that murderers and very bad people must be murdered by the state and the needle with poison in it is deemed more humane than the other methods.

If you think about it, we are a moral country and we believe in the death penalty.  We got rid of it after the Liberal do-gooders had a chance to have their say some decades ago.  But they seem to be in the minority today and the moral, faith based gang are out to keep the death penalty and, perhaps, to expand it.  I do not really know what is in their minds about public murdering, but they are a significant population that demands more law and order programs and love the chase scenes reenacted in shows that lovingly go into detail how some miscreant creates havoc, Then, he is chased by those who protect and serve and a whole fleet of helicopter news teams. These seem to be there to record every detail that will later be shown as part of the ritualized process of preparing to murder the one who was spotlighted and followed to the conclusion demanded by us.