THEY are the biggest donors to the Church, but their employees do not get just wages.
Their children go to exclusive girls’ or boys’ schools run by Catholic priests or nuns, but hold bacchanalian parties on weekends and holidays.
They proudly wear uniform heralding their membership in fraternal service organizations, but practice open-marriage arrangements.
And they attend Mass regularly, even receive Holy Communion, but advocate the reimposition of the death penalty.
Split-level Christianity, that’s what it is; I can now hear my high school teachers exclaim in unison.
So this move of resurrecting the death penalty to curb crimes will not go quietly into the night. It will appear or disappear from president to president, despite their Christian faith.
The late strongman Ferdinand Marcos declared martial law, supposedly to stem the tide of communism and to curb criminality. The country was placed under military authority, and civil rights were suspended.
Yet, after four years of martial rule, Marcos decreed the use of death penalty, a tacit admission that the tactics of the former dictator and his military caboodle failed.
When the genuine people power ousted Marcos to make Corazon Aquino president in 1986, among her first moves that same year was the abolition of the death penalty.
Six years later, Fidel Ramos succeeded Aquino. He then reinstated capital punishment by lethal injection. Coincidentally, Ramos is Marcos’s cousin and a former military man.
In 2006, Gloria Macapagal–Arroyo became president. One of her better decisions was the abolition of the death penalty. Thus, all death row prisoners were moved to life imprisonment.
So, here we are again, this move to resurrect the death penalty. The move is nothing new nor surprising, especially because the current president has a penchant for violent thoughts and do-this-or-else statements.
Now, House Speaker Pantaleon Alvarez is adopting the tack of his president-friend, both in substance and style.
In Alvarez’s mind, killing is good while preserving life is bad? Begging the question indeed.
Have Alvarez and his fellow honorable men and women considered the findings of many studies on the matter?
One study corroborates the findings of an earlier study in 1996. Eighty-eight percent of the leading criminologists in the US said they do not believe that death penalty is an effective deterrent to crime.
Those contemplating to commit crime do not think of consequences.”
This is corroborated by an article penned by a former US District Court and Court of Appeals judge H. Lee Sarokin, “Is it time to execute the death penalty?”
He writes, “…deterrence pays no part whatsoever. Persons contemplating murder do not sit around the kitchen table and say ‘I won’t commit this murder if I face the death penalty. But I will do it if the penalty is life without parole’.”