The D.C. Sniper was executed this evening in a show of patriotic posturing and irony at 9:11 pm.  It’s been some time since we had the opportunity to chew on the old death penalty issue, hasn’t it?  It’s kind of become an accepted notion that it’s OK.  At least for terrorists.  That, and torture.  Well, maybe not just terrorists… we’ve kind of just thrown it into a catch all that includes anyone we think might be a terrorist.  But that’s not quite right, either, is it?  Pretty much all we need is for you to be a Muslim.  But wait; actually, you just need a name that sounds Muslim!

    Have we really fallen this far?  We put an idiot in the White House for eight years, and we allow him to guide us back 50 years to the hay day of the KKK?  Do we just start shooting Muslims on the street?  And then what?  Those Koreans are starting to look a little bit fishy.  Lots of black Muslims out there, better start shipping them out, too.  What happened to us?

     Don’t get me wrong;  certain people probably should be executed. (although we won’t bother with the fact that most proponents come from the religious right, who tend to tout the bible… yeah, the book with the ‘thou shall not kill’ memo in it) but somehow, we have allowed the government’s scare tactics to bring racism back to the front, and to make it acceptable.  The death penalty has always been racist by nature;  the percentage of minorities sentenced to death has always been disproportionate.  But now, we don’t care.  We’re encouraged to doubt minorities, and suddenly racial profiling is on the verge of not only being accepted, but demanded.

     So many of our fundamental precepts are being discarded.  America was founded as a refuge from discrimination, yet somehow we are on the verge of becoming the persecutors.  What I’m suggesting is this; these cases should be dealt with on a case by case basis, and we may want to stick with an old concept called due process.  Should the Texas devil be executed?  Probably. But maybe, instead of grabbing our torches and pitchforks and making the decision based on his ethnicity and religion, we should decide because he’s a piece of garbage who took the lives of a group of Americans.  If he was a white Catholic, you can be sure we wouldn’t be concerning ourselves with how his religious beliefs played a role, and we wouldn’t be attacking other Catholics.  In fact, we would probably be trying to figure out what was wrong with the poor guy, why he snapped.

     Again, to be clear, I’m not remotely insinuating that we should feel bad for the Texas devil, or concerned with why he did what he did.  He mercilessly killed people, most of them American soldiers.  Fry him.  But we should be reacting just as strongly to the Florida shooter, and similar incidences.  And we don’t.  We run around the globe blowing things and people up in the name of equality; perhaps we should practice some in our own back yard.