After reading Adam Winkler's Gun Fight and reading the treatment of the debate by Pascal-Emmanuel Gobry, I had further confirmation that there are certain issues in American life ostensibly infused with disproportionate moral import where the advocates for one side or the other, aside from the shrillness and sanctimony that accompanies said advocacy, usually conduct their debates in ways that result in their losing a considerable modicum of respect [which they might not have to let bother them] and, more importantly, credibility [which they might want to think about].
In theory, it sometimes doesn't matter which side of a debate is right. It's more satisfying to watch insufferably sanctimonious advocates for one position or another--sometimes, it's both sides in a particular debate--try not to have their brains explode when confronted with serious paradoxes. These are especially endemic to the gun, death penalty, gay marriage, abortion and immigration debates. Something having to do with Eros and Thanatos, perhaps; but these are more pronounced in the US than anywhere else.
The recent botched execution of Clayton Lockett further amplified the capital contradictions. From the left, they had to deal with the fact that if there ever was a poster child for the death penalty, Lockett was it; aside from the fact that clamoring for violation[s] of his rights invariably meant that the rights of his victims were ignored or deemed less important, he continued to present a clear and present danger to numerous individuals--both inside and outside--even while on death row.
From the right, the attempts to pretend that the process is humane while state governments chase their own tails trying to purchase the needed drugs and the added Keystone Kops-like attempts to revive Lockett just made them look ridiculous. The truly honest ardent death-penalty proponents might have had to own up to the fact that somebody might figure out they actually WANT the process to be painful: the same Supreme Court that declared that executions violate the 8th Amendment when they are "nothing more than the purposeless and needless imposition of pain and suffering; or [] grossly out of proportion to the severity of the crime"--aside from implying that some pain and suffering is not "purposeless and needless", and can be administered in "proportion to the severity of the crime"--went even further when it declared that "the expectation of pain and terror on the part of the defendant" was such a part and parcel of the death penalty that it therefore, ipso facto, could not be cruel and unusual.
[I've been told by various medical professionals that if states wanted to truly dispatch the condemned quickly and painlessly, 15 well-placed fentanyl patches would do the trick, the whole process running its course in 5 minutes.]
Now to keep my brains from exploding, and just in case people may have missed my previously stated positions on execution and gay marriage--and since I don't remember writing about abortion and had just a fleeting treatment of guns--here they are in a nutshell:
Guns: the 2nd amendment does allow for individually-owned weaponry AND for serious regulation of firearms [just ask Justice Scalia], even to the point that we should have a federal registry.
Death Penalty: the death penalty needs to be kept on the books for, as Rabbi Aharon Soloveitchik put it, "extraordinary threats to public order". [Clayton Lockett and Malik Nidal Hassan qualify.] But the process needs to be transparent [which states make a mockery of when they render attempts at drug procurement and compounding to be "state secrets"] and equitable [cue the associated racial/socio-economic imbroglios. Either way the system stinks.]
Abortion: as far as government involvement goes, it should be safe, legal, and rare. I would call its employment as contraception without mitigating circumstances [economics don't count] morally dubious at best, but there are cases beyond even rape, incest and threats to the mother's life that I think mandate that the process be allowed even up to crowning. Personhood legislation is ridiculous; it is never equivalent to infanticide. And any attempt to ban contraception is not even worthy of consideration. The left has its own special paradoxes to deal with in this arena [Kristen Powers especially nails it] but basically, they are easy to explain: conservatives want small government, less regulation and more privacy, except here; liberals want to government to protect the disadvantaged [they would sooner protect endangered animals than human fetuses, and--I won't say someone--something is getting hurt], except here.
Gay marriage: restating what I wrote in 2008--my religious principles as I understand them preclude me from full-on advocacy, but that's theology, and other than the purely theological, there is no truly logical reason to morally oppose homosexual relations between consenting adults. Conservatives have failed to make any salient secular case for themselves in this arena and should stop pretending that it can be anything but a religious issue. All other arguments are ontological.
Oh, and immigration: we should take a cue from Mexico's laws--2 years in the clink and deportation for the first offense, 10 years in the clink and deportation for the second offense. And a really big wall on the Southern border. Plus, this will have the added bonus of keeping the private prison lobby happy if they're forced to release everyone convicted of low-level drug offenses, with a much bigger pool to draw from. Or--we could just annex the rest of Mexico and finish the job[s] we started in 1836 and 1848.
