I’m not jumping on the bandwagon. I was driving it a long time ago.
So we see Pat Robertson is not in favor of harsh sentencing for petty drug possession. It’s about time, Pat. Where have you been?
In my youth, I was a fan of Pat Robertson and his ministry. It did me some good, but it was not without some measure of harm. That’s the real world. It’s not possible to have unalloyed good on this plane of existence. It took some years to wash out the purely cultural element of prissy middle class oppression. We owe the very existence of the police state to such culture. My primary complaint has always been: You can’t farm out social correction to impersonal forces of the state. God holds you directly responsible for acting to correct those within your family to protect the social order. He holds you responsible for reaching out to those lacking such a family network, but He also holds you responsible for recognizing the real threat is someone who rejects such a social order, because that was the social order He revealed as His command.
But in the ancient world, mercy was a part of the definition of justice. Only in recent Western thinking has it been separated. True justice is attempting to heal the moral fracture, and it requires a broad consideration of everything you can know about the situation. It requires evaluating sagely what drives the fracturing incident, and fixing the underlying problem. Yes, that sounds like liberal coddling, but liberals use the wrong philosophical assumptions, and thus the wrong methods, for addressing those problems. Liberals want to dissolve the family in favor of the state, and that’s just plain evil. Justice is the family taking responsibility for what their kin do to the social order God has commanded us to establish and preserve.
Yes, an improbable vision. So what can we do in the meantime? Let’s at least promote the idea harsh mandatory sentencing across the board is cutting off your nose to spite your face. It’s just an excuse for not dealing with real problems, a major case of NIMBY, the fantasy chasing of a perfect life defined by some damned lack of common sense. Yes, I used that word in it’s literal sense, because Satan loves that attitude. It allows him to sell one drug to one group, and sell another to some other group because the first bunch create Hell on earth, and people need to get away from that. Of course, you probably know the whole Drug War thing served a commercial purpose. It drives up the price of certain popular products so the backside of government can profit handsomely when it sponsors the shipment of those products into the US. Think the CIA and crack cocaine, which permitted the bonus of targeting certain ethnic groups for destruction. On top of that, the massive increase in convicts justified the massive new private contract prison industry. It’s well documented, but an unpopular truth.
So maybe a little sanity is leaking into the message of some crazed wannabe “prophets of God” — it’s about time!
