Lex Talonis

"What you do unto the least of them, you do unto me."

The American Christian Right is, in one of its darker aspects, a death cult, having few observable scruples when it comes to slaughter. When the opportunity arises to burn their witches with electric fire, women, children, the insane and the retarded often get no mercy, nor do those who argue for it on their behalf. Kent Scheidegger, legal director of the Criminal Justice Legal Foundation, a pro-death penalty group, doesn’t think that frying the living innards of the innocent is any problem, Jesus or the Ten Commandments notwithstanding. "It doesn't appear to be shaping up as a major issue," He said yesterday with regard to the question of Roberts’ position. In response to 85 year old Supreme Court Justice Stevens’ statement last Sunday that our system has flaws, Scheidegger offers only "I wouldn't say that 20 or 30 cases out of 8,000 constitutes a broken system."

In most cases, our idea of justice is to make happen what we want to happen to someone we hate and in most cases, what we want to happen is vengeance. Giving back the money you stole, repairing the damage done: these things are justice. Killing puts nothing right. Despite the countrywide infatuation with Biblical authority, our concept of morality seems increasingly based on personal anger, either against perpetrators or more disturbingly, against those in the categories we put individual perpetrators into in order to simplify difficult questions.

Beyond the question of how we treat the guilty, lies the hazy territory of how we treat the falsely convicted. The arrival of DNA technology has allowed us to prove what we haven’t wanted to know – a very significant number of innocent people have been condemned to death and this has turned away the wrath of many former anti-life advocates. It has only increased the blood-lust of others and often these others are the God-is Love fundamentalists. Our Christian Right, very concerned with the humanity of a single-celled organism is apparently not at all concerned with the humanity of real people and this manifests itself in the frenzy they exhibit with respect to Supreme Court nominees.

We have a Christian President, who “Answers to a higher Father” yet ignores what he would have to insist that lofty patriarch demands if only he could actually read the scriptures he purports to credit. Scrutamini scripturas – let’s look in the Bible; what would Jesus do? That’s what we tell other people, what we act upon is anger. Their faith is primarily a pedestal upon which to display that anger.

Is our soon-to-be Supreme Court Justice an angry enough man to continue to support the killing of the guilty even if it inevitably means the killing of the innocent? Who knows? We can speculate that his wife has influenced him ( she is against the Death Penalty as well as abortion) but whether or not he, like the man who nominated him, can mock the pleas of the condemned and wash his hands of the killing of innocents remains to be seen.