An eye for an eye, a stone for a monument

A Mississippi Republican legislator, Rep. Karl Oliver, has called for the lynching of people who seek the lawful removal of Confederate war memorials in New Orleans.

Oliver posted on Facebook,

The destruction of these monuments, erected in the loving memory of our family and fellow Southern Americans, is both heinous and horrific.

If the, and I use this term extremely loosely, “leadership” of Louisiana wishes to, in a Nazi-ish fashion, burn books or destroy historical monuments of OUR HISTORY, they should be LYNCHED!”

While gratifying, and certainly justified, in over 4000 cases between 1877 and World War II, as man’s executing the judgments of God, lynching seems less poetically just than another punishment sanctioned by God and his agents on Earth: stoning.

Stoning- called “lapidation” in its official sense, is a more Biblically-approved method of execution than lynching, with more mentions than any other method.

John 8:7 offers its advocates a powerful justification of the rightness of their acts, as well.

Surely using the very material from which such movements are made to punish those who would profane them, is justice indeed.

In 2013, a Republican candidate for the Oklahoma House, Scott Esk, made a series of Facebook posts expressing support for reviving the practice of stoning, at least for LGBT Americans.

Although he claimed not to remember the 2013 articles, Esk affirmed the views he expressed in 2014. He got 5.3% of the GOP vote in the party primary that spring.

In 2015, Bob Jones University president-by-birth Bob Jones III was chagrined- he said- to discover he, too, had called for stoning the gays, at a Washington, DC rally of Christianist leaders in 1980.

Jones said he was sorry, and prefers that gays be allowed to live without other civil rights.

Stoning also enjoys widespread support abroad, as a 2008 Amnesty International report demonstrated:

‘The size of the stone used in stoning shall not be too
large to kill the convict by one or two throws and at the
same time shall not be too small to be called a stone.’

-Article 104 of Iran’s Islamic Penal Code

More recently, ISIS terror groups have been vigorously restoring the practice, though when they do it Republicans says it is a bad thing. Of the fourteen nations in which it is legally practiced, they are more reticent.