(This is a brief excerpt from the essay “A Future Worth Living” that will appear in Provocations: Don’t Call Them Libertarians, AA Lies, and Other Incitements, by Chaz Bufe, which is scheduled for October publication.)
The religious folk in large part responsible for the “war on drugs,” attempts to outlaw abortion, anti-blasphemy laws, anti-sodomy laws, obscenity laws, attempts to outlaw contraception, etc., justify their positions with perverse, often transparently faulty, “moral” arguments. Why? To mask the fact that they simply enjoy inflicting pain upon the “immoral.” (You might object that some of these repressive measures no longer exist in the United States, but the point is that they’re gone despite religious conservatives, not because of them.)
Probably the clearest example of the religious tendency toward “moral” sadism is the support by religious conservatives of the death penalty. At this point, it’s beyond dispute that this penalty is applied very unequally, with its victims being primarily poor and nonwhite.
It’s also beyond dispute that many, many innocent people have been wrongfully executed, and that more are scheduled to be. A current estimate puts the percentage of the wrongfully executed at 4%. Frankly, this seems low, given widespread prosecutorial vindictiveness and misconduct (withholding exculpatory evidence, for instance), the routinely inadequate legal representation of poor defendants, and the notorious unreliability of eyewitness testimony.
All this matters not a whit to conservative religious folk. It doesn’t matter to these “freedom lovers” that handing the government the power to kill its citizens is the ultimate triumph of the state over the individual. Nor does it matter to these “conservatives” that they themselves routinely portray government as being unable to find its metaphorical butt with both hands.
No. They support capital punishment for one overriding reason: they want blood. And it doesn’t matter to them that the blood of innocents is mixed with the blood of the guilty.
Related articles
- Jeremy Kyle’s sadistic moralising conveys a wider social resentment | Richard Seymour (theguardian.com)
- Sadism and Religion Go Hand in Hand – The Culture of Religious Child Abuse (theageofblasphemy.wordpress.com)
- Arizona Republic Newspaper Finds Capital Cases Are Rife With Misconduct (prosecutorialaccountability.com)
- Shocking Number Of Innocent People Sentenced To Death, Study Finds (jtm71.wordpress.com)
- Definition of the Day 3/8/14 (seesharppress.wordpress.com)
Sharp and Pointed 