Hmmm, here’s an interesting excerpt referring to the Borden shootings. Can’t say I ‘get’ the whole article, but I agree witht he basic premise….
Still, one can understand family and friends refusing to believe the cherubic 14-year-old was nothing but a victim in the squalid affair. But what excuse do the chronically incurious and uncritical media have in view of the emerging—and incriminating—evidence?
“Probably none” is how MSNBC’s Clint Van Zandt, a private investigator, evaluated Borden’s possible involvement in the murders. The sentiment was seconded by John Kasich, sitting in for Bill O’Reilly. They were not alone. Out of liberal deference to youth, and Franco Zeffirelli’s film, “Endless Love,” some members of the media even called the two “the couple.”
At the funeral, family friend Bill Bradford waxed poetic about Kara’s “ability to reach out in compassion and touch even the most unlovely people.” They’d been touched by an angel, no less. Church elder David Sheaffer assured reporters that there was no strain between Kara and the other children and that the family was supportive, refraining from any finger pointing. Acquaintance Vera Zimmerman contributed this corrosive cliché: “They were good kids … they just made some bad choices.” Oops. There was more talk of faith-dictated unconditional forgiveness.
These all-too familiar spasms of no-fault forgiveness, however, are more a distillation of the mass culture than a reflection of any real religious sensibility. If anything, they are a sign of people adrift in a moral twilight zone. In so charitably absolving and embracing alleged killers and their culprits, well-meaning clergy and flock are supplanting the power of the God whose mercy they claim to represent; evincing religious doctrinal failure; and doing injustice to the victims, to society, and, inadvertently, to the offender.
For mercy without justice is no mercy at all.