I'm talking, of course, about the imminent execution of pick-axe murderer Karla Faye Tucker in a Texas prison this coming week. It has been fourteen years since Tucker committed her heinous crime, to which she now freely admits (including such lovely details her getting sexual pleasure from swinging the axe), and she claims that she is a changed woman. You see, while on death row, she found Jesus.

That has lead to an unlikely coalition which has come together to try and stop Tucker's execution. In addition to the usual human rights groups who protest the death penalty as a matter of course (and rightly so), several leading religious conservatives are leading the charge. The most well known of those evangelicals is none other than Jery Falwell, no doubt taking time off from the anti-Clinton right wing conspiracy to save Tucker's life.

The basic argument goes something like this. When Karla (with a "K", as the Hooters once sang) axed her victims to death, she was a hideous, awful person, whose acts deserved the untimate punishment, death. But over time, she has come to see the errors of her ways and, through a rebirth in Christ, effectively become a new person. Karla the axe wielding psychopath is dead. Long live Karla the Christian crusader.

I have to admit that, in the cold logic of a law school Philosophy of Law course, this is an excellent hypothetical. Assuming someone is deserving of death when the crimes are comitted, does that desert change if the person truly changes her ways? In the cruel flush of dawn, however, what this comes down to is the simple fact that, conversion or no, Texans don't have the balls to execute a woman. In fact, the last time a woman was executed in Texas, the stars and bars flew over the capital in Austin. Texas's long standing Southern disposition towards protecting the women folk (which often, of course, meant protecting them from nasty things like careers and educations) now comes to blows with its equally longstanding rush to kill human beings.

That is the simple truth here. The fact of Karla's conversion is irrelevant, except that it looks good on TV. Does anyone out there seriously believe that if Karla was Carl, a black man who had found Allah in his 14 years on death row, Jerry Falwell would be begging for his life to be spared? The cynic in me says that even if Karla was black we wouldn't be having this conversation, but that might be going to far.

So, there is a bright line in Texas, which leads the nation (and several other COUNTRIES!) in executions. A bright line that prevents women from being executed. What does that all mean? It is just another example of the absolute and total lack of equality with which the death penalty is applied, in any state. Study after study shows that your chances of being executed depend more on your race, sex, and your lawyer (most executed criminals were represented, poorly, by public defenders or other court appointed lawyers), regardless of evidence and such. There is so much evidence that the American Bar Association, a group so large and diverse that it rarely agrees on anything, called for a moratorium on executions because of that inequality.

I should state, I suppose, that when I say Texas, I'm really talking about this large group of people whose voices make up this outcry. The State of Texas appears rather firm in its intentions to execute Tucker. Some suggest that Governor George Bush is looking to use this for political gain, to show he's tough on crime, just in time for 2000. Perish the thought!

In the end, I hope that Karla lives a long and productive life in prison and that she escaped the needle. However, it should not be because she is a woman or a born against Christian, or both. She should live out her natural life because this whole situation will lead the American people to confront the inequity and immorality of the death penalty, and join the rest of the civilized world in doing away with it. Forever.