Dec. 19, 2005
 
MANN TALK: Thoughts Evoked by Recent Reading
 
By Perry Mann
 
Hinton, WV (Special to HNN) – I read that West Virginians for Life (What West Virginian is not for life?) have advised Bill Wooten not to seek a senate seat, because they will target him for defeat. And to show that they mean it, they have spent $1,000 to run ads in newspapers hammering him with the word that he received from them a 100 percent pro-abortion score as a legislator. It is a Mt. Everest of impertinency and officiousness to tell anyone, but especially to tell Bill Wooten, that he should not run for office. These people for life who live well are so certain that they are doing God’s work that they know no bounds to the means they use to shape the world in their image.
 
Let me say that if I could shape the world as I would wish it to be, every pregnancy would be celebrated and carried to term, every child born to this world would be wanted and cherished, every child would be healthy and wise and find a place in the world where it could be happy, have a family, enjoy its senior years and die at home with family around its death bed. But such a dream is a dream that never has been and never will be---but it is a dream the realization of which everyone should work toward. It is, I believe, the dream of Bill Wooten.
 
I hereby suggest a way that West Virginians for Life can save money and yet win the election. Senator Russ Weeks upon his surprise victory in the last election over Bill Wooten announced that he won because it was God’s will, a somewhat exaggerated and perhaps erroneous assessment of the cause of his victory. Nevertheless, why should the Lifers spend money for ads to defeat Wooten when God according to Weeks has already decided whom He will finger next for the seat? The Lifers should send the money to a Home for Pregnant Teenagers and pray for Weeks or Del. Sally Susman, who is Pro-life, to win. It would be a shoo-in, if, indeed, Weeks had Heaven’s help to defeat Wooten. And he still has influence up yonder.
 
But I am a bit skeptical as to how Weeks won, so I am betting on Wooten, praying for his victory and, to prop my prayers, sending him monetary help, in due course, in the event that my prayers fall on deaf ears or no ears at all.
 
Supreme Court Justice Antonin Scalia is a Catholic. Yet I read that he is an ardent supporter of the death penalty. His certainty in the moral rightness of the killing people for killing people is derived from St. Paul. Scalia gets his support from the Saint’s following declaration: “Governments are ordained of God and become God’s instruments to execute wrath upon him that doth evil.” Considering Christ’s view of capital punishment, a view one can rightly infer from his teachings and life, I suspect that Scalia has a preference for St. Paul over Christ because St. Paul’s eye-for-an-eye ethic appeals more to Scalia’s animal passion than does Christ’s turn-the-other-cheek ethic. And I suspect that St. Paul’s homophobia and his death-penalty predilections are not reflections of God’s will but of St. Paul’s will. After all Christ was God’s son, not St. Paul.
 
Also, I read that Scalia has said the following: “Indeed, it seems to me that the more Christian a country is, the less likely it is to regard the death penalty as immoral. Abolition has taken its firmest hold in post-Christian Europe, and has the least support in the churchgoing United States. I attribute that to the fact that, for a believing Christian, death is no big deal.” Really? In a country that is bankrupting itself trying to keep the half dead alive and that scorns euthanasia!
 
Why, in view of Christ’s teachings, would a Christian country not consider the death penalty immoral? And why would a non-Christian country consider it immoral? The answer to me is apparent: Most Christians become Christians in order to gain salvation and a blissful hereafter by the simple and easy ritual of belief and baptism. The challenge of the Sermon on the Mount is thereby and effectively circumvented. Why concern oneself with the death penalty when one can read St. Paul and ignore Christ and still go to Heaven? Non-Christian countries are concerned with this life because they do not believe in an after life. For them morality is more than just faith and ritual; it is a guide to the good life here and now and its observance essential to peace among men.
 
In saying that death is no big deal for Christians, Scalia confirms the above analysis; that is, Christians need not bother themselves much about morals and life because they are going to die and go to heaven. If some young indoctrinated Mormon or Jehovah’s Witness proselytizing me expressed such a belief, I would understand. But for a Supreme Court Justice---mature, educated and involved in the issues of the world as Scalia is---to believe as Scalia apparently does, I cannot understand. In fact, I can do nothing but shake my head in disbelief that this nation has as a Supreme Court Justice a religious fundamentalist who apparently believes in the inerrancy of the Bible and defends the death-penalty notwithstanding that his church is opposed to it. And that it has a president who claims that Christ is the most important person in his life; yet he initiates preemptive war, rains ruin on a nation, takes from the poor and gives to the rich, knows no bounds in retaliating against people who cross him and sulks because he cannot torture free of criticism.
 
On torture, I have recently read about a method that was used during the Inquisition to force heretic to confess. I haven’t read that it has been used at Abu Ghraib, yet. The method was to tie the hands of the suspected heretic behind his back, tie weights to his feet and then hoist him by his tied hands to the ceiling. For hardcore heretics, the inquisitors would suddenly release the person and let him drop until he nearly reached the floor then would stop him with a jerk, disjointing his limbs. It’s called the strappado. Few victims did not admit to having heretical beliefs.
 
Finally, I read that four Christians inspired by Christ’s example have gone to Iraq as peacemakers and have been captured and are being held hostage by the Insurgents. Their fate as I write is uncertain. But whatever happens, one must admire their courage and sacrifice and give credit to religion for their exemplary deed. But one can question their discretion.
 
Thus are my thoughts for this week, evoked by what I have read.
 
Perry Mann is a former teacher, a lawyer, a former prosecuting attorney of Summers County and a regular columnist for the Nicholas Chronicle in Summersville. Born in Charleston, WV, in 1921, he lives in Hinton. The portrait accompanying this column is by Robert Shetterley from his book “Americans Who Tell The Truth.”