You don’t thumb through the phone book for a plumber when you have a toothache. People searching the editorial page of a newspaper for reliable results of scientific inquiry are in the wrong place. But as the comic section shrinks, opinion makers are replacing it as entertainment, although they’re not as amusing.
When lawyers moonlighting as columnists call abortion murder, it doesn’t inspire confidence in a profession that’s on call to defend worse accusations. Indeed, the law as an institution broadens the definition of the taking of a life by such distinctions as degrees of homicide, euthanasia and capital punishment (to name a few), to convenience the courts when they prescribe applicable defenses or indictments that won’t tax the public conscience. If only there were more than one degree of “dead.”
But even if the courts (and the news media) keep abortion just as diversified and ambiguous on objectivity and statute, a freshly confirmed conservative Supreme Court judge calls it “the law of the land.”
Pundits of either stripe who on one hand vilify an individual for coming to his own decisions about issues like abortion and on the other hand mitigate the just deserts of real criminals such as rogue cops and politicians, lose credibility by confounding their audiences with an unreal sense of right and wrong.
People are what they are. It’s just as ill-conceived to call them innocent when they murder, as it is to call them murderers when they do not.
Noe Serna, Lima
.neFileBlock {
margin-bottom: 20px;
}
.neFileBlock p {
margin: 0px 0px 0px 0px;
}
.neFileBlock .neFile {
border-bottom: 1px dotted #aaa;
padding-bottom: 5px;
padding-top: 10px;
}
.neFileBlock .neCaption {
font-size: 85%;
}
