When Looper's attorneys asked the judge to force Gibson to give a sample of his voice so it could be compared to the Dedmon tape, the prosecutor refused to give it and the judge decided that Gibson could not be forced to provide a voice sample. Although Gibson may be part of the story, he will not step out of the case. There is no outcry over any of this official misbehavior. Yet Looper was singled out and nowhere in the history of this region has so much disgust and repudiation of a man been so thoroughly orchestrated by his political adversaries. Byron Looper, for all his foibles, is the victim of a culture where the pendulum of submission to authority has rendered average citizens plain stupid, and in their stupidity they rely on authority to deliver them from itself.
People leave it up to agencies and bureaus to perform the tasks assigned to citizens in a democracy.
When a politician is murdered, it cannot go unavenged because it might embolden the citizenry and there might be wholesale murdering of politicians. It used to be newspapers, but with the decline in the number of independent publications competing in the marketplace of ideas, the voice of dissent has been quieted. Fewer than one dozen corporations now control the mainstream media in the United States, and they are driven by profit and desire for influence, not by reform or justice. When Christian newspaper editors meet for the first time in Nashville in May, perhaps it will come as a revelation to them that they can do God's work by pursuing questions in this case and talk about their bottom lines at the same time. Otherwise, they will have been corrupted just like the politicians.