I really don't get these people.
Yesterday Peggy Noonan expressed her disappointment at the Moussaoui verdict. She wrote that "what we witnessed here was not the higher compassion but a dizzy failure of nerve."
She celebrated her fondness for the death penalty by writing that "It is the
expression of a certitude, of a shared national conviction, about the value of
a human life. It says the deliberate and planned taking of a human life is so
serious, such a wound to justice, such a tearing at the human fabric, that
there is only one price that is justly paid for it, and that is the forfeiting
of the life of the perpetrator."
It makes no sense to me, but she believes that the way a society expresses how deeply it values a human life, is to take one.
But the thing I just can't seem to get is how she rationalizes this position with her deep love and devotion to the Catholic Church and to the prior Pope. She did actually write the book, "John Paul the Great: Remembering a Spiritual Father." But he was adamant in his repudiation of the death penalty. And he also thought that Catholic teachings were what made a Catholic a Catholic. As Noonan made clear, he felt that a body of beliefs developped over a 2,000 year span were not to be picked over like apples at a fruit stand - selecting only those which you personally found most attractive.
The Pope made his own, and the Church's, thoughts on both the War in Iraq and on the death penalty clear. He knew them to be abominations that were an affront to God.
So how does Miss Peggy get the right to disagree with her Spiritual Father? I don't get it.