When a father, husband or son executes a young woman for disobedience to the family’s honor code, whatever that code is, how does the word ‘honor’ fit with that killing? This is a question some countries and cultures are attempting to answer to this day. Perhaps we in the west just shake our heads in stupefied outrage saying: “thank God I live where I live and believe what I believe. How can this happen, ever, anywhere?” Unfortunately, we are teeing up this country in our own homes for similar outrages with a different vocabulary. This writer sees such things as private militias, death threats to federal judges, newspaper editors, legislators, public servants and people with controversial gender views as the first bubbles to rise in a pot being prepared to boil. I also see the tepid responses of the current executive leadership in government to these vigilante actions as low level tolerance. These weak responses serve as dog whistles for potentially fatal crimes as long as those crimes are steeped on the appropriate ‘honor code’. The problem is ‘honor’ and ‘evil’ have been historically separated only by a very thin gray line.

The religious tradition that commands; “thou shall not kill”, also has also historically parsed out the exceptions for certain killings using the rationale the commandment intended only ‘innocent blood’ shall not be spilled. That raises the questions of who is innocent, who is guilty, and who gets to decide? The teacher Jesus saved the woman from stoning with the instruction that the innocent sinless man should throw the first stone. The many potential executioners selected themselves out of the role based on their own honest assessment of their own human states. Retreat for them was the ‘honorable’ thing to do. At the very least, the Christian stance should be, based on this parable, no adult is completely innocent and therefore no private human authority has the moral right to kill or even threaten to kill as a vigilante. Such threats and actions would seem according to teachings to be mortally and morally wrong. 

A modest proposal for good.

To prevent ‘honor’ from slipping into ‘evil’, the private person needs to understand that no private authority or the private family authority has a claim to innocence and lethal execution of any nature. Capital punishment, is according to most societies, restricted to the realm of civil authority and even that is contested. That said, to avoid evil, the civil authorities must show the humility of requiring the strict discipline of the fair and just due process for any crime. It seems civil execution, lethal or otherwise, of any alleged crime without a fair due process is no less morally evil for the public sector than that private execution of a woman by her own family. Vigilante execution and crime enforcement without due process are simply wrong. Honor and Evil are words that must exist in clear worlds of meaning in order for good decisions to be made. This American society in its inception recognized all blood to be innocent until such time as public and legitimate due process is conducted and guilt is determined. That was good and needs to be good again.