Conservative Soup - food for thought

March 1st - International Death Penalty Abolition Day. This is a tough issue for me. On one hand, I am for the death penalty. But as a Christian, it is hard for me to support the idea of snuffing a human life (except in self-defense or war, of course) - as a child of Christ, the criminal can still be forgiven by God. As a man, I have no capacity to forgive the murderers, rapists, and child-abusers. Do I feel bad when they feel the pain and death of execution? No, I really don't. But, the fact that they are children of God is my concern. I don't stay up at night worrying though.

MY big problem are those that make this a keystone issue while millions of INNOCENT men, women, and children suffer through death and torture in numbers a thousandfold to those killed by lethal injection in the U.S. Where should our concerns lie? Should we be defending these criminals BEFORE doing all that we can to eliminate the greater horrors in the world? It is hard for me to imagine that this should be the case.

It is estimated that Saddam Hussein had executed over 60,000 men! While I understand the Left response to this fact would be "there were no weapons of mass destruction!" (as if we haven't heard enough of that!). But, my question is: "where was the outrage of the Left?". Were those that demonstrate against the death penalty equally outraged against about the heathen Saddam's murders and tortures? No, they were waiting for relatively minor offenses carried out at Gitmo to get angry. Please! The typical response above only underscores another Leftist hypocrisy.

Chairman Mao - 40 million deaths, Hitler - 34 million, Stalin - 20 million. The outrage has pretty much always been pointed at America - not to the greater atrocities.

Will