[photon]

Originally Posted by MolsonInBothHands

Photon,

Respectfully, you tried to parallel homosexuality and pedophilia, and how society perceives and deals with them. Can you not see the fundamental difference between them? Can you not see one requires severe reaction while the other does not? Even when homosexuality wasn't given the level of acceptance it has today, was it ever considered as evil as raping children?

I give up. Of course I can see the fundamental difference between them! I didn't try to parallel them at all, I only said that homosexuality USED to be viewed by most of society (incorrectly) the same as pedophilia and that if killing to clean out the gene pool was accepted they would have been killed as well.

Ignore that then and take any other thing that nowadays we're more enlightened about, my point remains the same.

There is a reason homosexuality has obtained the higher level of acceptance than child rape. Without putting words in anyone's mouth, I hope we can at least agree on that.

Well of course! One's something private between two adults, the other is an act of violence.

... and for that I do not see how your parallel has any bearing on this topic.

Only that often what society views as wrong and (in your case) deserving of instant death with no recourse is changeable. What used to be thought of as horrible (say interracial marriage) is now commonplace and acceptable. I'm not discussing the rightness and wrongness of these things, I'm trying to discuss the wrongness of the idea of killing people based on things that are thought of as wrong at any given time.

In the future I would hope that being abused is thought of as a terrible wrong, but the ability to help the victim is so great that the downside of the abuse is almost zero. At that point would killing the abuser be justified? Because the difference between then and now is only a matter of our ability to heal the mind.

As far as who gets to be the judge, well it certainly isn't me, and never will be, but that doesn't mean I don't have an opinion about the manner in which we proceed.

I am not going to get into the slippery slope argument with you and draw a line where people do and do not deserve to die. I will just simply say this particular man, in this particular case is on the wrong side of that line.

You may call it a middle aged response, but protecting the right to live of monsters such as this man, and keeping the potential alive for reoccurance is not what I consider progress.

We can all have opinions, but our system of dealing with stuff like this has to be based on far more than opinion. Because slippery slope or not, that line has to be drawn (and already is in countries that have death penalties). I didn't say that we should be keeping the potential alive for re-offending. Find other options.

In my opinion, any time a society has to kill a member, even if for the greater good, is a failure of that society (be it war, capital punishment, or the crimes themselves).