The Good Slave Read Online Free PDF Page B

gender.   “Fags will be fags,” one Supreme Court justice famously said when upholding the death penalty for sodomy and all associated homosexual sexual behavior, including open-mouthed kissing.   (A peck on the lips might be okay, but never not a prick.)   It was Josef Messinjure himself who had once proclaimed, “The only fair and merciful sentence for the suffering homosexual is death. Death frees the sinner of his sin while sparing the Church-State the financial and moral burdens of caring for irredeemable degenerates for whom there is absolutely no hope of repentant rehabilitation.”
    There would be no appeal, either.   After the Holy Revolution they were outlawed for all but Party members and their families.   Master Josef had been disgraced and defrocked by his fellow clerics and subsequently The Party had given him the boot, so no appeal for his seditious son.   (The POG kicked out most party members either while they were on trial or immediately after their conviction, so in reality appeals were nearly non-existent.)   Besides, the Church-State would want to make an example of Stephen Messinjure, the perverted progeny of a heretical traitor.   There would be no quick, painless beheading or peaceful drifting off into a drug-induced oblivion for Stephen Messinjure.   Even a firing squad would be too quick and clean.   The Party alone appointed all judges and granted them complete discretion in sentencing.   Publicly The Party rationalized that this policy as an assurance of strict adherence to the letter of the law.   Subversively, however—of course, naturally, without a doubt—it also guaranteed leniency and retaliation when the POG desired it.
    “Stephen Messinjure, the depravity of your crimes is almost unfathomable,” the judge read in monotone from a prepared statement.   “The testimony of human suffering that you inflicted upon others was, at times, agonizing to hear and painful to watch.   Your heinousness, in my estimation, is made all the more heinous because it was all about sex—inhumane things one human being did to other human beings, seemingly without remorse and without regret.   The conduct which the jury found proven at trial beyond a reasonable doubt in and of itself merits the most severe penalty.
    “In my humble estimation, you received the fair and full trial that every defendant in this country is entitled to.   Therefore, I am compelled to impose a just, fair, and adequate sentence.   The most serious crimes deserve the most serious punishments.   If there is to be any deterrent effect, it must be for me to mete out a sentence that recognizes the gravity of your crimes; any less would not show sufficient respect for the law or the rule of law.   After an orderly proceeding in which both parties were very well represented by counsel, a jury did the hard work that jurors do and rendered a fair and just verdict that reflected careful review of the evidence and application of the law.
    “Mr. Messinjure, at this point I would ask you to please rise.”
    Master Josef’s lawyer stood, but Stephen was overcome with grief and didn’t rise as the judge had ordered.   He just hung his head low and sobbed.   The judged motioned to the bailiff who marched over to the defendant, put a hand under his arm, and roughly jerked him to his feet.   Stephen almost fell but the bailiff had a firm grip.
    “Mr. Messinjure,” the judge continued, “having considered and weighed all of the sentencing factors under Church-State Code 1984(a), it is the judgment of this Court that you are hereby committed to the custody of the Bureau of Prisons to be executed by means of lapidation until you are dead.”
    The courtroom exploded, and this time the excitement was genuine.   Just a few decades earlier nearly everyone in America would have had to look lapidation up in the dictionary if asked the meaning of the word.   Since biblical law was now the law, however, everybody knew it