Another nail in the coffin?

In a busy news week where you saw the president reverse decades-old policies concerning Cuba, the continuous unwinding of the Sony hacking attack, and the murder of nearly 150 children and teachers in a school in Pakistan by Taliban terrorists, it would be easy to overlook the little story about President Obama commuting the sentences of eight federal prisoners under the auspices of the Clemency Project.

The stated goal of the Justice Department’s Clemency Project is to free prisoners who are serving excessively long sentences, namely sentences that they would not get if they were sentenced today because of changes in the law.

I am of two minds about this project and its goals. From a strictly humanitarian viewpoint, we can all agree that there is something unfair about people being behind bars for a decade or more for crimes that might have merited sentences of a year or less if they went to court today.

On the other hand, laws change, but if lawmakers wanted to apply those changes retroactively they could easily have done so by including provisions to that effect in the legislation.

But there is an even more worrisome concern about this first batch of commutations, and that is obvious when you look at the list of prisoners. Every one of the eight prisoners freed was selling drugs as dangerous as heroin and methamphetamine, although mostly cocaine.

That makes me wonder whether the Clemency Project is really just a first step toward legalization of all drugs — a way to make the dealers who prey on young people and poor people into some kind of working-class heroes who are meeting the under-served need of their community for (yep, you guessed it) meth, heroin and cocaine.

That would be just one more cornerstone of Western civilization pulled out of the foundation of our society, along with the sanctity of marriage, the sanctity of life (abortion), respect for law and order, religious freedom, free enterprise and self-reliance.

Not sure how I could be so cynical as to think that a campaign organized by the Justice Department could be for purposes contrary to the well-being of our nation, our culture and our society, but perhaps it’s because I have watched the federal government support the dismantling of so much of what we used to take for granted as our rights and responsibilities.

Legalized drugs would just be one more nail in the coffin. Maybe that’s why so few people notice this kind of thing anymore. The view from inside a sealed coffin does not offer much perspective, nor for that matter much hope.