The Boston Marathon bomber got the death penalty last week, which was all right with me, an opponent of the death penalty.
I don't think I've contradicted myself at all.
The bomber's brother got killed in the vast police manhunt. And that was all right with me, too.
The young man sentenced last week might as easily have been shot dead then as well. And that also would have been all right with me.
I'm apparently highly agreeable to the situation, whatever it is.
This is not a new position for me.
Years ago I spoke at the annual fundraising dinner of the Arkansas Coalition to Abolish the Death Penalty. I felt obliged to relate that it was all right with me that Oklahoma City bomber Timothy McVeigh got the death penalty.
Nobody gasped. I think the audience of dozens of death-penalty abolitionists knew what I was saying.
It was that one's position against the death penalty is a matter of general policy based on a general judgment and general morality, not one filled with consistent passion in all specific instances.
I can favor a tax increase and hate to pay it. I can be against a tax cut and yet be rather pleased to spend it.
I can be against abortion if ever confronted with the option in a personal matter, but in favor of a woman's right to it generally.
And I can oppose the death penalty and shrug when the Boston Marathon bomber gets it.
The problem lies with people who can't or won't shrug. They believe evangelically that they must be consistent in their views and that all of us must be made to abide in all cases by their views.
We need more shrugging. We need a national holiday to observe shrugging.
One's general public-policy position will always matter more than a specific personal exception. It will be more thoughtful, more reasoned and more defining than an occasional and inevitable bout of contradiction or indifference.
A pastor or priest could explain that one can maintain general faith and yet experience specific doubt. He or she would probably assert that the challenge of a truly faithful life is to cling to the general faith, not necessarily pre-empt or purge every specific doubt.
It would have been all right with me if the young man in Boston had been sentenced to life in prison. Left to me, that would have been the verdict.
I don't have a thirst for the young man's blood. The truth of the matter is that I just don't care about him, except that he pay a price and never bomb again.
When I made a post on social media last week about my seemingly contradictory positions on the death penalty and the Boston verdict, conservative Republican state Sen. Jim Hendren of Sulphur Springs, a friendly and frequent sparring partner, replied: "[That's] why you need conservatives."
All right, then. I'll buy that. If we must endure conservatives--and apparently we must--then as good a use as any of them is to make sure we kill a monstrous terrorist whose life-or-death question is one about which I lack passion or preference.
That's an infinitely better use of conservatives than denying equal rights or cutting capital gains taxes or defunding community health centers or undoing the private-option form of Medicaid expansion or sending letters to Iranian leaders to seek to sabotage foreign-affairs diplomacy.
Conservatives also need liberals, you know.
Otherwise they'd have no Social Security or Medicare. Even now, it is conceivable that they remain opposed to those social programs as general policy. But they probably spend the Social Security check and they probably submit their medical charges to Medicare.
Thus the moral of today's story is that you needn't be pure. It is that you need only to compartmentalize your general faith and your specific doubt.
It is that passion and indifference are not contradictory, but human.
It is that we'd all get along a lot better, and that we'd fashion a more functioning politics, if we insisted that our passionate personal view of morality guide our personal behavior but not necessarily anyone else's.
We need these occasional encounters with a healthy indifference. We need more frequent ones with a healthier ambivalence.
So let's lift a glass of the fruit of the vine. Let's offer a toast to shrugging.
If you don't want to take a sip, believing it to be wrong, then that's fine. Just leave my glass alone.
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John Brummett's column appears regularly in the Arkansas Democrat-Gazette. Email him at [email protected]. Read his blog at brummett.arkansasonline.com, or his @johnbrummett Twitter feed.
Editorial on 05/19/2015