Precious and irreplaceable human life

A couple of weeks ago I heard Sister Helen Prejean, an advocate for eradicating the death penalty, speak. She told about her experience of being the spiritual director to a man on death row, which she wrote about in her book "Dead Man Walking," which was made into a movie. Sister Helen spoke about the fact that people sentenced to death are fellow human beings and therefore should not be killed. On the other side of the issue, she spoke about the victim's family's deep pain caused by a person's choice to commit an atrocious crime and the courage it takes for victims' families to speak against the death penalty, which many are now doing. Sister Helen stated that killing the person who committed the crime would not heal the family or bring back their loved one. Killing someone -- illegally or legally -- always causes emptiness and waste of precious, irreplaceable human life.

We are not to defend the terrible choices of a person, but we are to defend the personhood of the person, who is made in the image of the same God we are made in the image of, loved just as much by the God who loves us, like us because they need love, too. Every person, no matter what we have done, has a dignity beyond words because God willed us, made us and wants us. We have no right -- legally or illegally -- to go against God's desire to have someone present on earth.

In 2012, the United States ranked fifth in the world in capital punishment, preceded only by China, Iran, Iraq and Saudi Arabia.

Nationwide, our state of Missouri ranks fifth for the number of people murdered under the death penalty. We are currently proposing a bill that would institute a firing squad as a method of death penalty murder -- as a backup plan in case we have to keep obtaining the lethal injection drug illegally from pharmaceutical companies in Oklahoma since Britain won't supply us with it anymore. We would call the people who kill on this firing squad "peace officers."

Our state murders people under the death penalty at midnight. If there was no shame about it, no shadow over our conscience, we wouldn't conduct the lethal injection at midnight, in the dark, when everyone else is sleeping. As if it never happened.

We have to stop being people of violence and start being people of love. Love doesn't kill; love is life-giving. God doesn't promise that loving people will be easy, but he asks us to love anyway, entrusts us with it. The only way to heal is to forgive. We have to remember we are not each other's enemy; evil is the enemy. We are put here to help each other overcome it.

We are people, and our fundamental need is love. It's what God created us out of; it's what he created us for. When you get down to the essence things, everything and every person in the world, with every action, is saying either "I love you" or "I need you to love me." Who are we to withhold love from someone?

Mia Pohlman is a Perryville, Mo., native studying at Truman State University. She loves performing, God and the color purple -- not necessarily in that order.