Related articles and links |  1 of 5

This isn't what they mean by balancing the scales of justice
Where's Victor Hugo when you need him? Two nations this week came up with two radically different solutions to the age-old question of whether starving people are justified in stealing food to feed themselves and their families.

Venezuela has not yet wholly decriminalized the act, but Supreme Court Judge Alejandro Angulo Fontiveros is in charge of drafting changes to the country's penal code, and has proposed a clause allowing the hungry to steal food and medicine.

"This is a guide for judges to avoid injustice," Fontiveros told Reuters. "They lock up for years a poor person who lives in atrocious misery and what they need is medicine." (It's not the only controversial change, Reuters notes: Other proposals would allow abortion and euthanasia.)

It goes without saying that critics argue such a move would encourage theft, even if it applies only to nonviolent crimes.

About 20 percent of Venezuela's 25 million population can't afford basic food needs, says the government. Private analysts say the figure is even higher.

In North Korea, however, nearly the whole country is starving. "Hundreds of thousands" have died in the country's famine, Amnesty International reported this week—and not all of them as a direct result of malnutrition.

"Some North Koreans, who were motivated by hunger to steal food grains or livestock, have been publicly executed," Amnesty International researcher Rajiv Narayan told the Associated Press. "Public notices advertised the executions, and school children were forced to watch the shootings or hangings."

The Amnesty International report says the group "has received reports that indicate that public executions have declined" since the famine's peak in the late '90s, "but there is concern that executions are still taking place secretly in detention centers."

Yikes. Surely there must be some just solution between licensing theft and executing the hungry. What we could really use is the wisdom of Solomon. Hey! What do you know? Here he is: "People do not despise a thief if he steals to satisfy his appetite when he is hungry, but if he is caught, he will pay sevenfold; he will give all the goods of his house."

Pundits on The Passion
We're still a month away from The Passion of the Christ's arrival in theaters, so Weblog isn't going to comment on every single piece of Passion commentary that comes down the pipe. Two must-reads today, however, are conservative Catholics on the dueling comments from Pope John Paul II's personal secretary and Mel Gibson's publicity department.

As it turns out, this is much more than "he said/he said." An e-mail sent to Gibson's folks bore the name and address of Joaquin Navarro-Valls, the official papal spokesman. Not only did it support the story that Pope John Paul II responded to the Passion with the comment, "It is as it was," but the e-mail encouraged the dissemination of the quote, ""I would try to make the words 'It is as it was' the leit motif in any discussion on the film," the e-mail said, according to Dallas Morning News columnist Rod Dreher, who received a copy. "Repeat the words again and again and again."

But Navarro-Valls says the message was a fake. "I can categorically deny its authenticity," he said in an e-mail message to Dreher. The Dallas columnist went to Wall Street Journal columnist Peggy Noonan, whose December 17 column most publicized the reported papal endorsement. In reporting that story, Noonan received a message from Navarro-Valls's e-mail address that seemed to support the quote—and certainly did not deny it, when Noonan had asked for more information on it.

next page... |  1 of 5

January (Web-only) 2004, Vol. 48