stuff

[Douglas <dougwils@moscow.com>]

Dear visionaries,

Garrett opposes the death penalty for various reasons, but one of them is
that the innocent have sometimes been punished. But this is no reason for
opposing the death penalty -- it is an argument for judicial reform. We
don't want the innocent spending the rest of their lives in the slammer
either. Executing someone for something they didn't do is horrendous. But
life without parole under the same conditions is no day at the beach
either.

I really wish that liberals would not play the race card in discussions
of capital punishment because it gives encouragement to racists out there
who want to argue from those same statistics that blacks, for example,
are more likely to be guilty of violent crime. Justice really needs to be
color blind, and we need to practice this in our debates. If we find it
is not color blind, then let us address that problem -- rather than
tacitly approving racist life-time incarcerations over against racist
executions.

Ted asks what war America has been in that meets the criteria of
Christian just war criteria. A simple one is the War for Independence.
Non-combatants were harmed in that war, as in all wars, but in just war
theory this can never be adopted as a deliberate tactic, as it was in the
bombing of Dresden.

Ted previously argued that the laws would never permit murder colonies. I
pointed out that with abortion clinics they do just that. Ted responds
that this is not murder because the law permits it! So Ted wins that
argument, by definition at least. It appears that "facts and
logic" are just what we need.

Re: agnosticism. The government's case before the 9th circuit in favor
of the "under God" phrase was as follows: no school
children are being forced into any religious position with the phrase
because the phrase is religiously meaningless.