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| Ms. Tucker Wobbles the Goalposts |
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| we need to rethink all this again |
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This is Dark Cloud on Wednesday, February 04, 1998. A woman died in Texas yesterday, the first of her gender that lovely state has put down since the Civil War. She was a drug crazed prostitute who cheerfully killed a sleeping couple with a pick ax with an accomplice back in 1983. She had said she got a sexual thrill from that horrible event, leaving corpses so mutilated that veteran police gag at the memory to this day. She had also, rather convincingly, claimed conversion to Christ in prison, and had become such a different person that people as powerful as the Pope and as disgusting as Pat Robertson had asked pardon on her behalf. She herself had become a benign presence, and even for the cynics who looked for it, there apparently was never a hint of deceit or hypocrisy about her. She had married a minister during her incarceration, and she spoke of her God in totally nonchalant way. She did not beg or demean herself in explaining why she would like to be pardoned, and she did not provoke any unpleasantness in interviews, at least in those shown on national television. If this was a fake conversion, it was impressively done. In contrast, a bearded fat man, the husband of one of the victims and who campaigned for her death, came across as not only callous and pointlessly vengeful but giving every indication that his joy leading up to the prisoner’s death was not many degrees different in kind than hers in committing the original murder. He was unpleasant, to say no more. Texas put down more prisoners last year than the rest of the states combined, and there is no doubt that if they caved over a pleasant looking white girl who’d come to Jesus, it would not look good when they subsequently lined up black and Hispanic males and made them face the death house, even if some had found Allah and/or repented. So last night, they put her to sleep. The fat man was ecstatic. Vengeance, claims the Bible, is God’s; this can be and is interpreted in two basic constructs. It is God’s alone to administer or one does God’s work in carrying it out. To us atheists, watching men blow up abortion clinics, it seems a hollow argument. To those of us who have no trouble flensing the case of drug or alcohol addled teenagers who kill a Seven Eleven clerk during a robbery from, say, Charles Manson or serial killers, the woman now ash in Texas was a savable item, one form whom much might be learned and expected. The case was made, but the people who made it would be unlikely to open their hearts if she had been named Juan or Rufus and had huge tattoos on the biceps. The connections between gender, sex, and murder have obvious to, among others, military historians for a long time, but their observations, arguments, and conclusions – conflicting at no point with biological, anthropological, or sociological data – rarely makes much of an impact in civilian life. Whether Ms. Tucker thought it preferable to meet Jesus now rather having to thank the likes of Pat Robertson for a delay is an open question, but it is still damned disturbing to watch people get the same kind of relief from killing her by proxy than she candidly admitted she got by her hands-on act. It is more disturbing yet to know that alpha-male wannabes line up like social climbing sheep to save an attractive woman even though their reasons for so doing would never impel them to save a male, even one to whom Jesus was closer. A very unpleasant episode. |
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