Gassing people is wrong

Over the years, my writing on this topic—why Alabama should not gas people—has admittedly been perhaps a bit too lofty, too lofty, too idealistic, and just too over-the-top. My rhetoric against gassing—and against the death penalty—has often drawn on insights from great American writers like Harper Lee and James Baldwin, philosophers like Henry David Thoreau and Jacques Derrida, even people from such diverse walks of life as the late Sir Walter Moberly, Malcolm X, Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr., and the still-living Rep. Chris England, Democrat of Tuscaloosa. I have also argued in these pages, in print and online, with the help of a Jewish cantor, that the Nazi gassing of the Jewish people—our ancestors—is reason enough for the people of Alabama to demand that their state immediately abandon its heinous decision to gas people. Before Alabama went down this evil path of gassing, I co-authored an essay, also in this newspaper, with a highly respected doctor from Emory University, in which I explain in meticulous detail why the first execution by nitrogen gassing in Alabama last January was “cruel and unusual”—which it Was according to the unbiased accounts of multiple media witnesses (and despite the biased and delusional statements to the contrary by Alabama Attorney General Steve Marshall, Alabama Governor Kay Ivey, and anyone who draws a paycheck from the Alabama Department of Corrections). But as I admitted at the outset: My approach was patently wrong. It was not persuasive enough to produce any movement toward change. And now Governor Ivey has scheduled a third nitrogen gassing execution for November 21, a week before Thanksgiving. A second nitrogen gassing execution has long been scheduled for September 26. It bears repeating: These dates for the gassing executions were set despite the first barbaric torture by gassing and execution of Kenneth Smith in Alabama in late January—which Alabama authorities stubbornly refuse to acknowledge. So, in this essay, rather than relying excessively on the views of famous and influential figures in history to argue why people should not dehumanize and destroy each other—by gassing or other methods of killing to achieve “justice”—I want to address this situation of gassing and hideousness in a more open, simple, direct, and easily understood way. In the course of inhumane and barbaric events, good people have a duty to insist that other people do not participate in and perpetuate such events. Killing is an inhumane event because, although it is committed by humans, it cannot be tolerated in a civilized society and must be stopped if possible. That is true when it occurs in war, even in a so-called “just” war, in cold-blooded murders that take place in our neighborhoods, and it is also true of state officials who consent to, plan, justify, and carry out executions. It is absolutely ridiculous to think that Alabama – and all of America – can ever again be considered a land of free, brave and compassionate people if Alabama continues to allow its zeal for punishment, for deadly vengeance, to cloud its judgment and corrupt its morals. Other nations are taking notice of what the most powerful democracy in the world is doing – including in the heart of Dixie. If you live in Alabama and do not want to go down in history as someone who did nothing at all to improve this situation, you must elect judges and politicians who are opposed to gassing and to the death penalty in general. One must demand that the politicians and officials in Alabama be willing to change course on these experiments with nitrogen gas, to rethink lethal injections and simply stop them. (By “they” I mean killing.) This is not just friendly advice. It is the moral obligation one has as a citizen of a state that recently began executions by nitrogen gas.