Day: July 13, 2000

Death Penalty Opponents Lose High Stakes Gamble

    It finally happened. Anti-capital punishment activists started to get on the bandwagon of Ricky McGinn, who is scheduled to be executed in Texas. In 1995, McGinn was convicted of raping and murdering his 12-year-old stepdaughter, Stephanie Flanary.

    DNA testing had been done previously on pubic hairs and semen found on the body of the victim, but the tests at that time were inconclusive. McGinn, who maintains he’s innocent, wanted to have the material re-tested using more accurate tests that are now available. The state of Texas denied such an avenue, but Gov. George W. Bush gave McGinn a 30 day reprieve to conduct the testing.

    And the results apparently show what prosecutors maintained all along — the pubic hair belongs to either McGinn or a very close maternal relative of his. This pretty much puts the nail in the coffin for McGinn, and in the long term for the anti-capital punishment movement.

    Capital punishment foes like to tout new polls showing that support for the death penalty has declined in recent years — today only two-thirds of Americans support capital punishment despite the well-publicized incidents of innocent people ending up on death row. That’s down from a high of 80 percent a few years ago. Most of that drop can probably be ascribed to the question over guilt and innocence, but DNA testing is going to take care of all their fears.

    Already smart death penalty supporters are taking the obvious step to secure the future of capital punishment — they are pushing for laws to grant those convicted of capital crimes additional appeals to resolve DNA-related evidence issues. Once that is in place and Americans are assure that, wherever possible, DNA testing is done to make sure that the odds of an innocent person are astronomically low, support for capital punishment will again reach into the 80 percent range. In fact, with the advent of widespread DNA testing I wouldn’t be surprised to see capital punishment instituted in many states that currently don’t execute criminals. (such as Michigan, where I live).

    Although the anti-capital punishment forces have done an excellent job of winning individual battles and freeing innocent people from death row, but they’ve lost the war for the hearts and minds of the American people on the morality of the issue. The coming use of DNA to reduce the risk of executing innocent people will only further cement the pro-execution stance of most Americans and put the anti-capital punishment movement back at square one.

Marriage Isn’t A Recent Invention

Laurie Essig is a lesbian with a message — marriage, whether
between gay or heterosexual couples, is wrong. And Essig isn’t about to let
tiny details like historical facts get in the way (Same-sex marriage).

Essig’s argument against marriage is the typical radical feminist
view that was borrowed from Marxism — marriage is an inherently
oppressive social institution. “Although we like to pretend that marriage is
natural and universal,” Essig writes, “it is an institution founded in
historical, material and cultural conditions that ensured women’s
oppression…”

The logical fallacy here is jumping to the conclusion that any
social institution created by an oppressive culture must itself, by
definition, be oppressive. Taking this argument at its face value is what
leads some radical feminists to condemn things like science as inherently
oppressive to women.

But Essig really drops the ball when she bizarrely claims that
“Monogamous, heterosexual marriages were an invention of the Industrial
Revolution’s emerging middle-class.” This claim is so absurdly wrong that
it’s unbelievable the Salon editor’s let it pass.

Monogamous, heterosexual marriage didn’t exist until the Industrial
Revolution? That assertion would have come as a shock to the Romans,
the Hebrews, the Greeks and a whole host of other societies that
practiced monogamous, heterosexual marriage. Has Essig really never noticed the
numerous proscriptions against adultery in the Old Testament? Or read
any of the tedious Church writings on marriage in medieval Europe?

Even in cultures where monogamous marriage was not the rule, some
form of marriage institution is pretty much universal (anyone who
disagree is more than welcome to name a single culture that had absolutely no
marriage-like institution).

In fact, although clearly most Westerners today might not want some
of the sexist excesses of medieval or even Victorian marriage, marriage
survives as an institution precisely because it appeals to something
very deep in the human psyche. Essig finds this impulse to marriage
appalling.

What annoys me is that no one, not even queers, can imagine anything
other than marriage as a model for organizing our desires.

Essig does have a point that the state shouldn’t favor (nor
penalize) marriage over other forms of personal relationships. Someone who
wants to remain single shouldn’t be penalized for that decision (although
today it is married couples, not single individuals, who are penalized
by the tax code).

Other than that, though, Essig’s attack on marriage as a social
institution is historically inaccurate and absurd.