Terrorism in Montana
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I lived in Maryland many years ago and it’s a good thing I’m not living there now. Why? Because yesterday I attended a church meeting about Montana’s efforts to rid this state of its death penalty. If I still had been living in Maryland in 2005 and 2006, simply attending a meeting like this would have landed me on the state and federal terrorist watch lists. This Washington Post article tells me I could be in a heap of trouble for my Biblically supported views against capital punishment. The Maryland Judicial Proceedings Committee is now studying the matter and there is at least some hope that sanity will soon return to Maryland.
We love to hate terrorists but defining what we mean by “terrorism,” has proved to be troublesome, if not downright impossible. A Wikipedia article describes the semantic indecision and confusion about it very nicely. There are over a hundred different definitions of terrorism floating around and the only common ground among them seems to be that the term involves some kind of violence or threat of violence (as do other things, of course, like boxing and American football). Reuters refuses to use the word, substituting less accusatory terms. The Terrorism Act of 2000 is so broad that it includes disruption of a computer system when violence is intended. On and on.
Now for a bit more about the Montana meeting I attended yesterday. One of the speakers was David Kaczynski, brother of the famous Unabomber. Others were family members of murder victims, families of death row inmates, and death row exonerees. Terrorists all, I suppose, because they argued that the death penalty should be abolished. I could be very wrong here, but this would seem to argue against violence rather than for it.
About 150 people from various denominations attended the Missoula church meeting, including Catholics, Methodists, Episcopalians, Lutherans, and many others. We rallied to give our state legislature the backbone to remove the violence of capital punishment from its statutes. If Montana is anything like Maryland, our church meeting was probably infiltrated by an undercover agent and we’re all probably on the state and federal terrorist watch list by now. Or worse.