Being from Utah, I am used to the occasional, okay...consistently regular, ignorant comments made about a number of subjects ranging from politics, science, health, economics, you name it. Although I am not generally a confrontational person, if I hear someone spouting off something I feel is inadequately represented, I feel obligated to offer a rational argument explaining why they may be entirely off-base. I'm not saying that I am the logic queen and that anyone who thinks differently from me is irrational, but sometimes I wonder if these people were raised in closet with fox news as the only visual and auditory stimulation.
In my human rights class tonight, we got into a discussion about why the U.S. still insists on holding on to the death penalty as a viable form of punishment when most of the world has deemed it a violation of basic human rights. There were a number of different opinions presented from other classmates, mostly involving the U.S. needing to stay strong and not swaying to international pressure to follow international law, because that would make us look weak and *gasp* lose the respect of the rest of the world. I find this argument to be not only obnoxious, but dangerously ignorant. There are a number of people, at least in this state that feel that because they are American, they are some how entitled to some bizarre sense of power...We're Americans, we can do what we want! I think that if the U.S. wants to be apart of an international community, it only makes sense that we adopt the laws that we expect others to follow. Outside of Asia and Africa, there are very few countries that still use capital punishment, how is it that we are right and the rest of the industrialized world is wrong? Are criminals more violent in the U.S., and therefore need to be more punished than criminals in other countries? It just doesn't make sense to me.
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