Interesting coincidences in history are on display this week. Here’s an article on Slate about a case involving the death penalty for child rapists. And now, the Pope’s visit has inspired numerous articles on how he has protected Cardinal Law and others involved with child rape in the priesthood. (Here’s one by Christopher Hitchens, for example)
So, we have people in Lousianna arguing that child rape is a crime so abhorrent as to deserve the death penalty, despite the general historical practice of only executing murderers in this country. We also have people going to see the Pope during his visit to gain spiritual sustenance and inspiration, despite his role in protecting Cardinal Law, who protected multiple serial child rapists and knowingly endangered other children by moving the rapists from parish to parish without warning residents of those parishes.
I just find it interesting that these two extreme views are on such vivid display this week. Child rape is a heinous crime worthy of execution versus it’s not that big of a deal to protect a child rapist from justice. Particularly interesting is that the first view is probably held by a much larger percentage of the U.S. population than the second, but the Pope’s visit will inspire far more numerous crowds than the supreme court case and generate all sorts of well-wishing, praise and prayers. There’s just a wealth of ironies and contradictions in these stories.
On this set of contradictions, I find myself a bit in the middle. I oppose the death penalty, primarily because of a belief that our criminal justice system just doesn’t work very well. It is too prejudiced against the poor, too racist, too prone to human errors and involves too many lawyers to be consistently correct. And I think if we are going to have the state killing people, we should have a much higher degree of confidence that the state will get the right person and not just find a scapegoat that is easy to convict.
I also have a very bottom line economic objection with the death penalty. It is too damned expensive. It costs far more to go through all the appeals processes of a death penalty case than it does to keep someone in prison for life. For those who argue that the cost could be brought down by eliminating or streamlining those appeals, I would refer back to my first point. The system makes a lot of mistakes already. If you are going to have executions, you also have to have due diligence in catching and eliminating those mistakes.
On the other hand, I’m no fan of Popes either. I still haven’t gotten over the whole “say the sun revolves around the earth or we’ll burn you at the stake” issue, the inquisition, the crusades or those other historical errors of the supposedly divine dude in the silly white hat. But those are all problems from the old days. This hiding and relocating of child rapists issue is one completely on display in the here and now. Whatever good comes from the Catholic church (and I am willing to admit that the church does a lot of good things as well and that it does truly do help many people), it is still hard to overlook the fact that high-ranking members of the church willingly and knowingly protected child rapists and even assigned them to other jobs where they could attack other victims.
So, I guess the logical endgame for this contradiction is that in America, we hate child rapists enough to kill them, but we can still love and adore the people that protect them …