Stoning

So a child shall perhaps have a mental disorder when a parent has committed adultery. What do you think will happen if they must watch their loved parent stoned to death?" This is an appeal to emotion. We have to deal with logic. A child does not have to watch his parent get stoned to death. As a matter of fact, a child does not have to watch his father get sentenced to death for committing murder either. We are simply dealing with capital punishment of a different form and different scenario to murder. The form is stoning, not e.g., hanging or lethal injection. The latter, i.e., the crime, is adultery within marriage. Next, my opponent asks, "Will that not be a more traumatizing event?" Considering that I already refuted this, I can tell my opponent that certain children might not live or be able to see one of their parents get punished for their severe crime due to the fact that they have poisoned themselves with hard drugs or have entered gang environments, which are all very probable results of adultery. An article that is about two decades old says, "While an affair is taking place children sense that the parent is expending emotional energy outside the family, the specialists say. As a result, the children may become anxious or frightened, or they may sense rejection and feel they must have have done something wrong." [1] The same article says, "But increasing clinical evidence and a recent study suggest that the subtle changes in an adulterous parent's behavior can unsettle children, regardless of whether the truth leaks out and even if the children are too young to understand what is happening." Not only are children able to sense that something is wrong within their family, but they start suffering from anxiety (and obviously stress to begin with, since anxiety results from it most of the time), and they also become frightened. What does anxiety do to the human being? It makes him suffer from certain phobia, social anxiety, OCD, and so on. On top of that, other effects are sleep disorders, depression, suicidal thoughts, severe restlessness, worries, low self-esteem, and I can go on for a long time. A long list of anxiety effects can be found. [2] The second reference even distinguishes between anxiety at home and anxiety somewhere else. Anxiety at school, for instance, leads to: learning disorders, separation anxiety, concentration difficulties, ad infinitum (figuratively). There are too many effects for me to write them all here. To add one more thing, the first article goes on to say, "[children] tend to exhibit anxiety symptoms, with clinging, bed-wetting, thumb-sucking, fire-setting, temper tantrums, night terrors - in fact, anything that seems an appropriate response to the fear that their family is about to be wiped out.' What kind of a sane, caring, and reasonable person will deny that adultery is a severe crime? Notice how it is completely voluntary not only to marry, but also to adulterate. A strict punishment sends the message to a society that morality and people are against such crimes, and people will think twice before committing such a crime once more, or to begin with. Such a strict punishment might help deterring this crime one way or another. The adulterer will not be able to adulterate again, and he will not be able to cause trouble to his family once more. It will not eliminate the crime, though. Crimes are inevitable. And, another important thing to mention is that adultery is to be strictly punishable as far as I am concerned, but due to risk of innocents being sentenced to death due to faulty reasons, I therefore possess the view that four reliable witnesses should witness the direct act of adultery (intercourse) take place, and these witnesses must be mentally stable and have a clean record of some sort (i.e., a positive reputation). Therefore, the chances that innocents get sentenced to death are minimal. Even if that happens, mistakes are common in most things in the world. That being said, when children suffer from numerous physical and mental consequences as a result of parental adultery, the probability and possibility that their futures get wrecked or severed are both tremendously high. A child will have mental scars that will make it harder for him to become educated, make friends, be able to care for his future family, and he will withal feel depressed, stressed, and very angry at what has happened to him. Gang environments can get filled up with children who are abandoned by their parents: either physically, mentally, or legally - or all three ways. Adultery can lead to all those, and certainly does. Even divorce itself, which sky-rockets nowadays due to factors like adultery, leads to grave consequences. A site says, "The most frequent delayed onset negative consequences center around anxieties and fear of the child that s/he will repeat the failed marital or love relationship that the child observed during the divorce." [3] This is regarding long-term outcomes of divorce. It also says, "there is a serious potential for these changes to become chronic if a custodial parent does not reconstitute the relationship with the child or becomes involved in a new relationship which overwhelms the relationship with the child." One thing we should also take into consideration is the fact that adultery can lead to consequences that are comparable to murder. In some cases, they are worse than murder. When you murder a person, his life is over. He stops suffering. But, when you, being a parent, forsake your children and spill water of pain on them which will be very hard to dry, suffering does not stop immediately. Indeed not - it goes on and on, and might be passed on through generations. The child who grows up being mentally severed, he might (as studies suggest) have a hard time settling with his future family (i.e., spouse, children), and he might hurt them emotionally, too. In certain cases, children who experience adultery in their families commit suicide due to severe anxiety. They become lonely (which is a depressive mental state) and might enter violent environments in order to feel existent among people. It should be evident that this crime is not a mere moral crime. It is a crime against humanity and its future. It is a crime that splits loving couples, harms innocent children. Is is a crime that can be compared to murder, and even exceed it in level of consequences. Stoning does not have to deter the crime by definition of capital punishment. But, letting people in a society realize how grave this crime is, evolving a strong moral opinion against the crime, and so forth, stoning can contribute to that. It marks that a society will rather see a criminal face justice than spend billions on treating children and adults who suffer from consequences that their criminal parents showered on them. Sure, it is not a pretty sight when you see a person being sentenced to death. But, is it a pretty sight when children are being sentenced to long-term mental consequences? Is it a pretty sight when a child with lots of good opportunities in life becomes a criminal due to the crimes committed by his parents? Is that a prettier sight to anyone? I hope not. I hope that I am forgiven for arguing in the last round, but people tend to forfeit (which is why I didn't argue in the first round), and I will not debate much nowadays, so I took this opportunity to make an argument for stoning. To conclude, stoning is harsh, but not wrong. It is more wrong not to act in opposition to a horrible crime against innocent, young people. Justice is needed. I thank my opponent. References [1] http://www.nytimes.com... [2] http://www2.massgeneral.org... [3] http://www.childadvocate.net...