The earth will be rid of an evil man tonight

America carries out the death penalty with scandalous infrequency. In fact, it barely carries it out at all: there were just 37 executions in the United States in 2008. As a result of our extreme abstemiousness when it comes to the final solution, there are many thousands of convicted murderers in this country who shouldn’t be alive, but are. At the same time, we are the only Western nation that has the death penalty. And by our deeply felt support for capital punishment we show, notwithstanding the gross decadence of so much of our society, that at our core we still believe in the objective reality of right and wrong—a statement that to my knowledge cannot be made about any other Western country.

From the AP:

RICHMOND, Va.—Virginia’s governor refused to spare the life of John Allen Muhammad and cleared the way for his execution Tuesday night for the sniper attacks in 2002 that left 10 dead and spread such fear people were afraid to go shopping, cut grass or pump gas….

“I think crimes that are this horrible, you just can’t understand them, you can’t explain them,” said [Governor] Kaine, a Democrat known for carefully considering death penalty cases. “They completely dwarf your ability to look into the life of a person who would do something like this and understand why.” …

Kaine, Virginia’s first Roman Catholic governor, has openly expressed his faith-based opposition to capital punishment, but promised as a candidate in 2005 that he would carry out Virginia’s death penalty law despite his beliefs.

Concerning Kaine’s statement, “I think crimes that are this horrible, you just can’t understand them, you can’t explain them,” Gintas, who sent the story, writes, “Kaine is a moral idiot.”

I’m not sure I agree. Being a liberal and an opponent of capital punishment, Kaine cannot be expected to have an understanding of the reality of evil, since by definition all liberals deny the objective existence of good and evil (except for the objective evil of white racism and the objective sanctity of black people), and almost all opponents of capital punishment are liberals. Yet despite his opposition to the death penalty, Kaine pledged to carry out the law as governor,and is doing so, and he even declined to give Muhammad any more delays.

As a liberal, he is unable to give a moral account of why he’s doing the right thing, but he’s doing it anyway. So I would give him a break on this one, and thank him.

Also, see this VFR entry from October 2008 about John Muhammad’s non-Eloi wife and the revelation of what he had actually planned to do in his 2002 murder spree: he planned to murder 180 white people in 30 days.

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Larry G. writes:

He died, ironically, at 9:11pm.

Gintas writes:

He’s done.

You make a good point about Kaine not being a moral idiot.

LA replies:

Thank you.

Posted by Lawrence Auster at November 10, 2009 08:54 PM | Send