Idaho’s regression into an ignoble past of firing squad should shock our sensibility | Opinion

Firing squad

Last week, Idaho Gov. Brad Little signed a retrogressive bill that would allow the state’s death-row prisoners to be executed by firing squad.

The bill’s proponents believe that bone-fragmentizing blasts to the heart causing tormenting pain for at least 10 seconds is a humane method to end a person’s life.

Dating back to 1571’s Tyburn Tree in London, when it was a carnivalesque public spectacle, the death penalty did not effectively dissuade capital crime; and now a “refined,” cloistered event, it almost certainly has no intimidating power over future murder, which often is an impromptu act of impassioned or intoxicated circumstance. So, divested of its myth of deterrence, what is left but bareboned vengeance?

Idaho’s regression into an ignoble past should shock our collective sensibility. The sacredness of life must be a steadfast principle, untouched by mercurial exception.

Codified murder can be reduced to abject grade-school math: a life for a life. Across centuries, the remaining void moans as a graceless wind, through stake-charred lips and guillotined necks and self-righteously toothy Idaho state legislators.

Scott R. Hammond, Boise

Anti-LGBTQ

Proposals are being debated in legislatures around the county that scapegoat and demonize drag and the LGBTQIA community. This hateful, lying, and maligned speech adds to the already multiple ways our community is targeted in Idaho. We are accused of horrid things in the name of “protecting” children, which is a lie. Criminology studies have consistently shown straight men to be the most dangerous to both women and children. Indeed, if you want to talk about protecting children then start with the churches. How many children have been harmed for decades and decades in Catholic, Evangelical, Southern Baptist, and Mormon groups who protect abusers? The cases are legion.

Do people not realize we are also parents or have other family who are LGBTQIA? We are fighting to protect them from supporters of these hateful laws who feel now even more emboldened to attack us both physically and emotionally.

We aren’t going anywhere and we won’t go back to the closets. Why can’t we agree that we aren’t going to get rid of each other, we are all human beings who share the same space, deserve respect, and have to find a way to build a future together?

Samuel Paden, Garden City

Drag show?

I went to a packed Morrison Center to see the touring Broadway play, Hairspray, about an overweight teen who loved to dance. It debuted in Broadway in 2002 and made into a movie in 2007. The teen’s mother was played by an actor in drag and has always been played that way. The play was funny, touching and did have some sexual innuendos. The audience loved the show.

Watching the show made me realized that if HB 265 passed (banning sexual explicit performances in public places where minors had access), this show would be considered illegal in Idaho. The Morrison Center is a public place, minors were there and someone could interpret some of the content as sexually explicit. One of the bill’s definitions of sexual conduct is “sexually provocative dances or gestures performed with accessories that exaggerates male or female primary or secondary sexual characteristics.” Subjective definitions like this could trigger a frivolous lawsuit by an “offended person.”

What an embarrassment to Idaho that this touring Broadway show of 22 years would not come here due to a vocal minority and deprive Idahoans and parents of their first amendment rights to determine what they can watch.

Linda Beebe, Boise

Freedom

Some Republican members of the Idaho Legislature don’t know who to trust. They don’t trust women, they don’t trust parents, doctors, teachers, librarians, voters, other elected officials. I have to say, they don’t trust democracy. But they do trust conspiracy theories, half truths, untruths, lies, even if told by the “right” people.

In spite of what they might say, they’ve lost the spirit of freedom. They don’t trust free people to make decisions for themselves about their own lives.

Brian Goller, Boise