Johnny Paul Penry, like any six-year-old, believes in Santa Claus. He knows some people say it's not true but he reckons Santa's "down in the North Pole". Johnny spends his days with crayons and colouring books. Also, though he can't read, he likes to look at comics. When he was given a test to match words with drawings, he identified a door as a dress, a chicken as a drum and a hat as a flag. The reason he has trouble reading is that his IQ is only 56, which is not bad for a six-year-old.
The problem is, though, that Johnny is 44. And the day after tomorrow, some men will take him to a room, where they will strap him to a table and give him a lethal injection. "I think it's a cruel thing to do," Johnny told the New York Times recently, "to put me to sleep."
He won't be the first severely mentally retarded man to be executed in Texas during the governorship of George W. Bush. The affable president-in-waiting signed the death warrants for a man who thought he had been sentenced to death for not knowing how to read and kept trying to learn, so he would be saved; for another guy who kept asking his lawyer what he should wear to his own funeral; and for a youngster who, when the guards asked him why he hadn't finished the pudding he had ordered for his last meal, replied that he was saving it for after the execution.
Even in Texas, which tends to see the death penalty as a symbol of state pride like the Alamo and ten-gallon hats, polls show an overwhelming majority opposed to executing mentally retarded people. Last year, the Texas senate, dominated by Bush's Republican Party, approved a Bill to replace the death sentence with life imprisonment for people found to be mentally retarded. But George W., the charming guy with the boyish smile, came out against the measure and it was dropped.
None of this was a big issue in last week's presidential elections, since Al Gore is only slightly less gung-ho about the death penalty than Bush. But a very substantial proportion of the American electorate did vote for Bush because he is "pro-life". Being pro-life in this context does not mean having qualms about the death penalty or being squeamish about the killing of a man like Johnny Paul Penry. It means being against abortion.
ALMOST certainly, by the time Johnny Paul Penry is falling into his final sleep, the Taoiseach will have announced that we in Ireland are to be blessed with yet another "pro-life" referendum. The delaying tactic through which the Government avoided the issue for two years, while keeping the so-called Independent TDs sweet, will have run its course with the publication tomorrow of the all-party committee report on abortion. The fig leaf of seeking consensus will be dropped and we will be all set for another futile charade. But first, let's ask ourselves how we got into this mess.
In a sense "we" didn't get ourselves into this thing at all. The problem didn't arise organically from the soil of Irish social and political debate. It was grafted on. Back in 1981, when the idea of an anti-abortion amendment began to surface, there was no prospect of any Irish government liberalising our Victorian abortion laws. The pro-abortion lobby was tiny. No serious political party wanted to touch the issue. In fact, even now, after two decades of revolutionary social change, there is no strong political lobby advocating anything like the kind of liberal abortion regime that applies in Britain.
The bizarre notion of putting into the Constitution a ban on practices that had already been strictly outlawed for over a century made sense only in relation to America. In the US, of course, abortion really is a constitutional issue. It was a Supreme Court ruling on a constitutional case that made abortion legal. The ultimate aim of the Christian fundamentalist right in the US, therefore, is to have an anti-abortion amendment inserted in the constitution. The huge intellectual influence of that movement on conservative Irish Catholicism is the only reason we are now gearing up for our fifth abortion referendum in less than two decades.
What makes this truly grotesque, however, is the flagrant hypocrisy at the heart of this movement. There are, both in America and in Ireland, sincere opponents of abortion who hold to the belief that human life in all its forms is sacred. Like the late, great Cardinal Bernadin of Chicago, they know that a "pro-life" stance has no credibility without resistance to militarism, the death penalty and conditions that deprive people of dignity. Whether or not one shares their views on abortion, such people deserve the utmost respect.
BUT they are a small minority in the international anti-abortion movement that takes its bearings from American fundamentalism. The centre of gravity of that movement is way to the right of centre. Its real political muscle is exercised by people like George W. Bush, whose notion of being pro-life includes the right to own assault rifles, the right to cut off welfare payments from unmarried mothers, and the right to oversee the killing of a man with a mental age of six. It is a cynical con-job in which abortion is used as a Trojan horse for smuggling in a lot of cruel and hateful ideas.
I am not, let me stress, suggesting that the majority of those who make up the anti-abortion movement in Ireland share this cynical agenda. I am suggesting they have pulled us once before into the slipstream of a nasty, heartless crusade that has nothing to do with us.
Before we let them do it again, let's answer one question. Does anyone believe some formula of words in article 40.3 of the Constitution will make the slightest difference to a situation in which more than a tenth of pregnancies in the Republic now end in abortion? Unless someone can provide convincing evidence that it will, we should remember we are sufficiently rich in home-grown hypocrisy without importing more from Texas.
fotoole@irish-times.ie