Here’s a story that could only come out of Texas in an election year.
The current lieutenant governor of Texas, David Dewhurst, has announced a proposal to execute child molesters. First offenders would be sentenced to a prison term of no less than 25 years, and repeat offenders would get the needle (none of that namby-pamby “Lethal injection is cruel and unusual punishment” stuff here in Texas, no sir). You can read about it in the Fort Worth Star-Telegram: Dewhurst says repeat sex offenders who prey on kids should die.
Now … let me preface all of this by pointing out two things.
First, this is an election year, which always makes it difficult to believe what politicians say, because they like to say stuff that sounds good to the voters but have no actual plans to enact. The fact that Dewhurst came out with this just a couple of weeks before Texas started early voting strikes me as convenient timing.
Second, in the state of Texas, we vote separately for governor and lieutenant governor — they don’t come as a set like president and vice president. It is theoretically possible to have a Republican as governor and a Democrat as lieutenant governor, and it wouldn’t make such a ruckus because they’re both glorified office managers anyway. (The state legislature meets for a four month session every two years. The rest of the time the governor can sit around and play with his hair.) This sort of reinforces my first point, meaning that the guy has to campaign for himself and can’t just sit back and get high on the governor’s hairspray fumes.
Back to the issue at hand. I’m a little torn about this, I truly am. I am certainly no fan of the child molesters. Like many most gay men, this issue is a double-edged sword for me. Not only am I disgusted by pedophilia, I am also disgusted by people who think that most gay men are pedophiles or secretly want to be. For the last time: there’s a difference between having consentual relations with another adult man and coveting your kid’s underage cheerleader friends. That’s YOUR fantasy, not mine.
As Ron White (the comedian from the Blue Collar Comedy Tour) likes to point out: in Texas, we have the death penalty and we use it. Heck, we used it yesterday — and try to find any stories about that on the wires. We execute people so often it barely makes the news.
As disgusting as I find the issue of child molestation (and I do) I’m just not sure I can get behind the idea of imposing the death penalty for a second category of criminal. If we’re going to resort to such extreme measures, why not use castration as the punishment of choice? Think about it. If you were a child molester, wouldn’t castration actually be a worse punishment than execution? They could do a massive public awareness campaign based around some slogan like “If you don’t use it responsibly, you’ll lose it,” featuring a prison surgeon holding a big, rusty knife. What man wouldn’t cringe at that? Heck, I’m kind of cringing right now.
Anyway. It will be interesting to see where all of this leads. As the Star-Telegram points out, even if such a measure were passed it probably wouldn’t make it through the courts. Is it election year pandering, or are they getting serious about expanding the death penalty? And will anyone even remember about it after next Tuesday?
Stay tuned…
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