Tag Archives: Murder

News

Woman killed for opposing her daughter’s arranged marriage

4 Comments

Story in the UK Telegraph. (H/T Jihad Watch)

Excerpt:

A Pakistani woman has died in Italy after her husband beat her with a brick for opposing the arranged marriage of her daughter, triggering a wave of outrage among Italian politicians on Monday.

The daughter, 20-year-old Nosheen Butt, was admitted to hospital with a cranial traumatism and a broken arm after her 19-year-old brother beat her with a stick in the courtyard of their building in Novi, near the north Italy city of Modena.

According to Modena prosecutors’ initial findings, the father Ahmad Khan Butt, a 53-year-old construction worker, threw his wife to the ground and beat her with a brick while the brother Umair attacked his sister.

“The victim did not want her daughter to have an unhappy relationship like the one that had been forced on her,” said deputy Modena prosecutor Lucia Musti, who is in charge of the investigation.

[…]…the father had been in Italy less that 10 years and was the owner of the local mosque.

Is that normal for Islam? Answering Muslims actually has a look at the issue in more detail.

I personally think that the death penalty would be appropriate for both of these men. We need a deterrent to stop this from ever happening again.

Videos

Should we kill children who impose obligations on us?

23 Comments

This woman thinks that we should. (H/T ECM)

Lori Ziganto writes:

According to author and columnist Virginia Ironside, most adopted kids would be better off dead. As would most children she considers “unfit”. In fact, she says, a “loving” mother would smother a sickly child with a pillow, because the “suffering” of being ill makes that life meaningless and not worth living. She made these vile assertions in defense of abortion while appearing on the BBC’s Sunday Morning Live during a discussion grossly entitled “Can abortion be a kindness?” First, her odious attempt to argue that abortion is a “loving choice” because some kids, in her mind, are unwanted. Her tunnel-visioned, sad excuse for a mind can’t seem to fathom the fact that the children are always wanted, by someone. You know, like people with hearts and compassion.

[…]To pro-abortionists, an illness is a reason to kill a baby. In fact, they believe that life is expendable for any reason if it doesn’t fit into your personal plans. This includes life that is outside of the woman’s body. Ms. Ironside, like most pro-abortionists, also fails to mention those pesky babies who won’t cooperate and who survive abortion attempts. Much like our President, who gives them so little thought that he, as a Senator in Illinois debating a Born Alive bill, said this:

As I understand it, this puts the burden on the attending physician who has determined, since they were performing this procedure, that, in fact, this is a nonviable fetus; that if that fetus, or child — however way you want to describe it — is now outside the mother’s womb and the doctor continues to think that it’s nonviable but there’s, let’s say, movement or some indication that, in fact, they’re not just coming out limp and dead..

However you want to describe “it”. Sort of like the suffering “things” Ms. Ironside referred to above. And, not coming out limp and dead. How dare they insist on having the human will to live and the strong spirit to survive.

This is what that fabulous, adorable Jennifer Roback Morse is always saying about feminism. The feminist idea is that relationships are never engaged in order to serve others, but only to make the strong women happy and fulfilled. Women in relationships should never have to fulfill obligations to other people, feminists tell us. Everything should be about selfishness, amusement, and personal fulfillment – including using men and children for those ends – or even killing them if they become too demanding.  (Men and children are “needy” and “pouty” – they have no right to have expectations about what women should do). The feminists have forgotten that there is a purpose for the suffering that is part of self-sacrificial love.

By the way, I spent most of last night listening to Jennifer Roback Morse lectures from her conference. If you listen to the first Bill Duncan speech, (or maybe the second), he talks about this refusal to take on the natural obligations to others in a relationship context. Look, relationships can’t last if the person is unwilling to honor their commitments. If you make a vow to take on those obligations to love someone (and children) self-sacrificially then you have to do it. Whatever happened to compassion and nurturing?

And like my virginity post showed, the ability to fulfill those obligations depends on a host of other decisions that you’ll have made before you ever get married – decisions about chastity, but also decisions about volunteering, education, earning and saving. The habits you set when dealing with people of the opposite sex before you marry affects how well you can potentially treat a spouse. If you use other people like objects, you don’t suddenly magically develop the capacity to love them self-sacrificially with magic vows. You can only love as well as the decisions you make. Unselfishness has to be a practiced habit in order for the marriage to last.

UPDATE: Alisha has more here.

News

How to defend the Biblical view of capital punishment

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Here’s a Yahoo News story, and pay attention to the victims and their view of capital punishment.

Excerpt:

The leader of a former gang of Houston teenagers who raped and murdered two young girls walking home from a neighborhood party 17 years ago was executed Tuesday in Texas.

Peter Anthony Cantu, 35, was strapped to a gurney in the Huntsville Unit prison death chamber and administered a lethal injection at 6:09 p.m. CDT. He took a single deep breath before slipping into unconsciousness, then was pronounced dead eight minutes later as relatives of his victims, Jennifer Ertman and Elizabeth Pena, looked stoically through a window a few feet from him.

Asked by the warden if he had any last statement, Cantu replied: “No.” He never looked at the witnesses, including his victims’ parents.

“Nothing he would have said to me would have made any difference,” Adolfo Pena, who lost his daughter in the attack, said after watching Cantu die. “He did a horrendous crime to these two girls. He deserved to die and 17 years later, he died. Not soon enough.

“It’s been a long time coming,” said Pena, who wore a T-shirt bearing pictures of both girls.

I’ll leave out the brutal details of the crime, and jump to this:

Jennifer’s father, Randy Ertman, who witnessed all three executions, said before Cantu was put to death Tuesday that the apologies meant nothing to him, that it was too late for apologies.

[…]Ertman said if the death penalty was intended as a deterrent, all five members who had been sentenced to die should have been hanged from trees outside Houston City Hall years ago.

“That would be a deterrent,” he said.

Ok, now look at this Fox News article which talks about whether it works to deter more violent crimes.

Excerpt:

What gets little notice, however, is a series of academic studies over the last half-dozen years that claim to settle a once hotly debated argument — whether the death penalty acts as a deterrent to murder. The analyses say yes. They count between three and 18 lives that would be saved by the execution of each convicted killer.

[…]”Science does really draw a conclusion. It did. There is no question about it,” said Naci Mocan, an economics professor at the University of Colorado at Denver. “The conclusion is there is a deterrent effect.”A 2003 study he co-authored, and a 2006 study that re-examined the data, found that each execution results in five fewer homicides, and commuting a death sentence means five more homicides. “The results are robust, they don’t really go away,” he said. “I oppose the death penalty. But my results show that the death penalty (deters) — what am I going to do, hide them?”

Statistical studies like his are among a dozen papers since 2001 that capital punishment has deterrent effects. They all explore the same basic theory — if the cost of something (be it the purchase of an apple or the act of killing someone) becomes too high, people will change their behavior (forego apples or shy from murder).

That’s the only question we should be asking – does it work? Not “how does it makes us feel?”. I don’t care how it makes anyone feel except for the victims. I only care about the victims. If the conviction is good, and they accused admit their guilt, the death penalty should be on the table.

The Bible supports the idea of capital punishment, and if you want to explain to people why the Bible supports it, you need to give specific examples, talk from the point of the view of the victims, and reference the relevant research, keeping in mind that academics are vastly more likely to skew the results in favor of the liberal “murderers should not be punished because no one should be punished” view.