SANCTITY OF LIFE

Can one support the death penalty and in the same breath claim to preserve the sanctity of life?

I don’t expect any disagreement if I say, humans are different from animals in that we possess an ‘awareness’ (‘sentient’ is the term often used to describe this sense of awareness, many refer to it as ‘reason’) that places us at a higher plane of existence than animals. As much as Trooper, my French Bulldog, is as smart a dog as he can be and is an enjoyable company because of his affinity and loyalty to me, he would not have the level of ‘awareness’ that a fellow human being would have no matter how dumb that individual may be.

The sense of awareness that we all have as human beings, which I wouldn’t hesitate to call, Soul, is what endows us with the sanctity of life. Being human has the benefit of the sanctity of life. Reading this, if you’re a Christian, may cause you to reel in your pants right now because you would say that the image of God and the fact that we’re created by God, and nothing else, give life the character of holiness or sanctity! You may even be starting to cite Bible verses here. Relax! I’m talking of the same thing. I was trying to simplify it, but now you have made we write more sentences just to assuage your religious sensitivities. Jeesh!

Where was I before I was rudely interrupted?

The soul is what marks us out from animals. And it is important for us to see every human being as having the sanctity of life to avoid treating others or being treated ourselves like animals.

Killing another human being (without valid reason, like self-defense) is beyond the pale as it violates the sanctity of life that we all want to preserve. But does killing another human being make the killer lose his own (let’s just say the bad guy is male) sanctity of life?

According to supporters of the death penalty, when somebody kills another human being the killer, in turn, needs to be killed as punishment to preserve the sanctity of life. They would say, too, that punishment of the killer and compensation to the victim must be in kind. It would seem that anything short would not be enough recompense for the life taken away.

For the supporters of the death penalty sanctity of life is only good until one person takes the life of another human being. Killers can be killed because they have, presumably, lost all claims to being human by taking away the life of another person.

Here are my problems with this thinking:

How is the sanctity of life preserved when another human life is taken by the death penalty? It is totally absurd to say that killing the killer preserves the human need to promote and preserve the sanctity of life. Let’s grant that the killing of the original victim violates his sanctity of life. But if we’re going to be consistent about it, doesn’t the killing of the killer also violate the sanctity of life of the killer as a human being?

The death penalty does one thing. It accepts the notion that some of us who have taken the life of another have become sub-humans and thus have lost any claim to the sanctity of life and can now, in turn, be killed without consequences. This is the only way that the death penalty can be meted out without decimating the sanctity of life, that is, killers need to be turned into sub-humans to remove their right to life.

Supporters of the death penalty would like society to have the prerogative to be able to reclassify killers from human beings to animals, which is the only way the death penalty can be justified without conceding that such punishment also violates the sanctity of life.

But nobody can really turn off the humanity of a person, no matter how heinous his action has been. A mango will always be a mango even if turns rotten. You may not want to eat a rotten mango, but, sorry, it remains a mango despite your feelings about it.

Holding on to the sanctity of life and at the same time supporting the death penalty doesn’t make sense, unless we make some arbitrary decision that those who have killed another human being have descended, by some dint of fiction, into a sub-human state. And who is to make this decision that a guilty person has passed into an animal state? The justice system that everybody concedes is flawed? Imposing the death penalty is humans playing God, and flawed humans at that!

There is danger in accepting the idea that we can arbitrarily switch off a man’s (let’s just stick with males this time) innate nature, or, as I described it, soul, and turn him into an animal because he has killed another person.

This is a slippery slope because if we give in to our penchant to dehumanize others who we feel are undeserving, where do we stop?

Many supporters of the death penalty would also take away the sanctity of life of, aside from killers, rapists, drug pushers, plunderers, even if there are no lives lost in these crimes no matter how dastardly they may be. This is not a hypothetical situation because we have seen this before in Europe, Rwanda, Srebrenica and elsewhere where genocide was committed against millions of people just because they belong to a certain race.

We don’t even have to wander far in geography and history. In this country, the Philippines, we are being told that people connected with illegal drugs are not humans and can be disposed of at will if they resist arrest or by vigilante groups, who are, as reports would have it, also run by the police.

The death penalty is also a final act where no rehabilitation or redemption is even allowed for those who have committed a grievous mistake against the society but have seen the errors of their ways. Everybody should be given a chance at rehabilitation and redemption even if they need to be incarcerated for the rest of their productive lives. Further, because of the imperfect justice system the death penalty doesn’t allow mistakes in the system to be rectified. That many innocent people have died by capital punishment because of the flawed system should give us a pause about imposing the death penalty.

Why do we lust for blood when we can punish killers and others in a manner that would preserve our humanity? The death penalty is a serious threat to the sanctity of life of us all.

Even assuming that we can re-classify killers as animals, sub-humans are not necessarily less deserving of life. We just don’t kill animals even for food. We treat them humanely providing them legal protection against cruelty. Under the law, the animals we eat are limited to certain species. Eating animals outside of the list is liable for the crime of cruelty to animals. Vegans would even assert that all killings of animals are cruel. Our societies acknowledge now that sub-human species also deserve to live.

The elephant in the room is in everybody’s mind that may be familiar with the violent story of the God of the Old Testament. If the death penalty is so bad, why would God impose it? And he imposed it on the most trivial of offenses, like violating the Sabbath (Exodus 35:2) or children dishonoring their parents (Exodus 21:17).

This is a good question and would require a full treatment elsewhere. But suffice it to say that God in the Old Testament is intent in preserving a nation to accomplish his plan of redeeming and claiming back his creation that has gone astray. There are plenty of sick things that happened in the Old Testament in the process of God going about his plan that are hard to explain, and his seeming penchant for violence is one of them.

Here is another one. Jesus came from the family of David who came through the lineage of Perez (Matthew 1) who, in turn, was born from the incestuous relationship via prostitution between Judah and his daughter-in-law, Tamar (Genesis 28). The Savior of the world was born from a scandalous situation in the Old Testament. Does that mean that incest and prostitution are not really evil because God seemed to have employed them in bringing forth the Messiah through the nation of Israel? You can make your own conclusions.

The point, however, is that the violence of God, including his seeming penchant for killing people (remember the genocide and infanticide he ordered in Deuteronomy 7) in the Old Testament is hard to explain. There are books that have attempted to do so. But one cannot champion the death penalty “because God has done so” but gloss over the other violent things that God has also done in the Old Testament. Those who support the death penalty on the basis of God’s explicit commands to his chosen people in the Old Testament cannot also be selective on the crimes that they think deserve the death penalty. God has commanded capital punishment on many offenses and supporters of the death penalty on the basis of the Old Testament cannot just pick and choose from the offenses that God said the death penalty should be imposed. If you propose that God is pro-death penalty, then you should stand with him all the way!

The Old Testament and its literal reading can easily turn our brains into a pretzel. But the good thing is that Jesus has clarified all this in his life, death and resurrection. He is the full manifestation of God and God’s mouthpiece in our time (Hebrews 1:1-3).

Jesus has raised love as the foundation of the Christian faith. He told Christians to imitate him and love their enemies even to the point of death (Ephesians 5:1-2)! It is hard to say we’re following Jesus if we agree to kill anyone, even if they have made grievous mistakes, including the killing of another human being. Jesus must filter everything we read in the Bible, particularly the Old Testament. Not all that we read in the Bible has equal value. This is a mouthful to say, but it is true. Jesus should be the final filter of our reading of the Bible. It would be hard to operationalize what Jesus said and how he lived and treated others, like his lesson on loving enemies, by supporting the death penalty. There is no clearer definition of an enemy than somebody who has disrupted our society by killing another person and from whom we all have to be protected, and who we can easily dismiss as an animal. Jesus enjoins us to love that dastardly fellow, not kill him!

Jesus is the ultimate champion for the sanctity of life of all human beings even if society feels like treating some of us as less than humans and would deserve the death penalty.