There’s a Moral Reason That McVeigh Must Die....

The likely execution of Timothy McVeigh has presented opponents of capital punishment with a serious dilemma. None of their usual arguments for keeping all murderers alive applies here: McVeigh is not a member of a minority group, his guilt is not in doubt, and he had the highest caliber defense. Moreover, all polls indicate that most Americans--even a majority of opponents of capital punishment--support McVeigh’s execution.

Consequently, opponents have launched a particularly vigorous campaign against executing murderers. Given the fervor and ubiquity of editorial opposition to capital punishment and the belief of increasing numbers of religious people that it is always immoral, it is a good time to rebut these arguments.

First, we who support capital punishment for murder--and only for murder--ask opponents to acknowledge that allowing all murderers to keep their lives after deliberately taking others’ lives is, at the very least, unjust. If a man steals your bicycle and society allows him to keep and ride around on that bicycle, most of us would find that profoundly unjust. Why, then, is it just to allow everyone who steals a life to keep his own?

The answer is that it is not just. Indeed, it is a cosmic injustice. Opponents of capital punishment acknowledge this, if only by implication. They never argue that keeping all murderers alive is just, but rather that innocents could be executed, that murderers of whites are disproportionately executed, that rich defendants get better lawyers and that Europe doesn’t have capital punishment but Iraq does.

Second, allowing all murderers to keep their lives diminishes the worth of human life. The way society communicates what it thinks about a crime is by the punishment it metes out. Yet opponents of capital punishment claim that taking a murderer’s life reduces the worth of human life. This defies logic: If taking away a murderer’s life reduces the worth of human life, taking away a rapist’s freedom presumably reduces the value of freedom. But of course, the opposite is true. Taking away criminals’ freedom is our only way of showing how much we value freedom.

The radical secularization of society also has led to greater opposition to capital punishment. There is a direct relationship between the amount of secular education a person receives and opposition to capital punishment. Thus it is rare to find a liberal arts professor who advocates it.

How are we to explain the increasing opposition to capital punishment among religious Americans? One major reason is that, thanks to the influence of the universities and the media, secular values now influence religious values more than vice versa. Mainstream Protestant and Catholic thought has always affirmed the right of a just government to take the life of murderers. As for Judaism, while many of the ancient rabbis opposed capital punishment (largely because they lived in the gladiator-loving, mass-crucifying Roman empire), Judaism’s primary source of values, the Torah, is emphatic about capital punishment for murder. Putting murderers to death is the only law repeated in all five books of the Torah.

Another reason is the mistranslation and subsequent misunderstanding of the Sixth Commandment. The original Hebrew reads not “thou shall not kill” but “thou shall not murder.”

As for the current opposition of the American Catholic bishops and the pope, an additional reason is their opposition to abortion. They perceive that they will garner more respect for their opposition to abortion by unequivocally opposing killing anyone except in personal or national self-defense. Hence their constant reference to the “seamless” ethic of life. But Catholics who wish to retain their religion’s millennia-old support for capital punishment can cite the church’s greatest thinker, St. Augustine, who wrote in “The City of God” that it “is no way contrary to the commandment ‘thou shalt not kill’ to put criminals to death according to law or the rule of rational justice.”

Allowing every murderer to keep his life is simply immoral. In their hearts, when confronted with McVeigh, even most opponents of capital punishment acknowledge this. It’s sad that it takes the murder of 168 people for many to acknowledge what their hearts know.