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I am entirely opposed to the death penalty. It is, to me, indistinguishable from a calculated, cold blooded revenge-murder, perhaps worse in a way because it's state-sanctioned and because it requires the condemned to rot in a cell while doing nothing but anticipating his or her own death.
The revenge-minded among us (society at large, rather than just DU) say things like "it's no less than they deserve" or "they've surrended their right to live" or "capital punishment is a deterrent to others contemplating the same crime" or the like, but these are always offered as if they were self-evident and undeniable truths. Nonsense.
However, though I reject capital punishment, I nonetheless share your desire to see certain people "dancing on the end of a rope." If someone harmed my family, for instance, I would kill the transgressor with my bare hands, resuscitating him if possible so that I could kill him again.
But the difference between that sentiment and the pro-capital-punishment contingent is that I recognize that my emotion-driven opinion is not a fitting source of legislative or judicial wisdom.
Law is never enacted wisely when it is enacted from emotionalism. One need look no further than the PATRIOT act to see that this is true. Likewise Congress' choice to give Bush the authority to invade Iraq. In both cases, emotionalism was allowed to trump reason and logic, and look where it's gotten us.
So as long as you can restrain your own bloodlust and keep your "dancing on a rope" ideas in the realm of the hypothetical, you're not really being a hypocrite. You're not calling for (or enacting) legislation to achieve that goal, nor are you going on a vigilante hunt to accomplish it.
You are reacting to something with your emotions, just as 6 billion people do all the time. But unless you decree your emotionalism to be a matter of policy, you can still be opposed to capital punishment.
And, as the saying goes, the mere fact that you can ask the question of yourself suggests that you retain a commendable skepticism of your own viewpoint.
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