re: "The Man I Saw Them Kill" (The New York Times, December 18, 2020)
It is natural to feel that some people deserve death. As I read Ms Bruenig's description of the child killer, his own child no less, Mr. Bourgeois, I thought it seemed reasonable that he should die.
But then, a majority pretty well everywhere once thought it reasonable, only natural, as it in fact is, to hold some humans to be owned property. In living memory, a majority everywhere thought it an unnatural abomination that men love men sexually, and that it was OK to imprison, torture or kill loving humans who practised such ungodly abominations.
And that's the problem. Being natural or godly sounds so reasonable, but when dig just a very little deeper, the moral bankruptcy of such facile belief systems is apparent. Murder, rape and the rest are also very natural - ask those who eagerly went along with pogroms against Jews in Europe, with lynchings of Black people in the US: they and the rest likely believed in all sincerity that they were doing god's work to cleanse society. They were wrong.
Killing for vengeance, which is all the death penalty ever is, is indefensibly wrong. That Trump is keen to set records as the killer president is the true moral abomination here. That his fans cheer on the legal killings under the law and order slogan but proves the moral failure of that ideological mindset.
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The above comment was submitted by Felix Qui to The New York Times article.
It is published there at https://www.nytimes.com/2020/12/17/opinion/federal-executions-trump-alfred-bourgeois.html#commentsContainer&permid=110661836:110661836
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