The Feehery Theory

The Castro Boys

May8

By John Feehery

The Castro boys’ mugshots.

Yesterday morning, Barbara Harrison was on the radio, promoting a story for the local NBC newscast, about a baby who was found in the garbage, barely breathing, who grew up to be a 23-year old college graduate who is doing great today, thanks to the person who found her in the plastic bag and the family that helped to raise her.

Later that day, came the revelations of three women who escaped from three brothers named Castro.  The women were held as sex slaves, repeatedly raped and beaten for more than a decade.

That was bad enough.  It turned out the three women would be beaten even more when they became pregnant, and that five of those pregnancies were ended, either before or after the kids were born.

I was pro-life before yesterday.

I am more pro-life today.

The Castro boys should get the death penalty for killing those kids.  I know those children were products of rape and I know that under some definitions, under the famous rape and incest provision, those kids shouldn’t be considered kids at all.  Under some definitions of the law, they should be considered merely fetuses.

I don’t care.  The Castro boys should be executed for killing those kids.

And the executions should be slow and painful.

I have gone wobbly on the death penalty in recent years.

I think our Justice system makes plenty of mistakes and some people are wrongly accused and wrongly convicted.  So, I think we need to rethink the death penalty.

But not in this case.  The Castro boys should be executed.   And they should be executed slowly and painfully.

The 23 year old college graduate who is doing quite well, thank you very much, is doing well because the scared girl who produced her didn’t have the heart to kill her.

That’s a good thing.

She didn’t get an abortion.  If she did, the 23-year old college student wouldn’t be a college graduate.  She would be just like the five poor “fetuses” who were killed by the Castro boys, the guys who deserve to be executed.   She would be dead.

That scared girl shouldn’t have put her baby in a plastic bag.  She should have dropped her off at a church or a hospital or anywhere else where she could be found and cared for.

If it weren’t for the grace of God, that 23-year old wouldn’t have been found 23 years ago.

We need to make it easier for pregnant girls to leave their babies in places that somebody will care for them.  There are plenty of people who desperately want little babies to adopt and to care for and to proudly attend their college graduations 23 years later.

Sadly, there are also a few people who want brutalize young women and then discard the product of those rapes as if nothing happened.

People who do that need to pay the ultimate price.  They are killing little children.  That is murder, pure and simple.

I usually don’t get on my soap box in social issues.  But yesterday helped to clarify one thing in my mind.  The Castro boys need to be executed.  Slowly and painfully.  It’s that simple.

Don’t Show this Post to Your Kid

Apr29

By John Feehery

Fuck is a great word, and yet it not to be used in polite company.

“Fawk you.  Fawk off.  Fawk this and Fawk that.”

Fawk (or Fuck, as most people say it) was the primary expressive word of my college roommate, who happened to be from Boston.

It was my first real face to face meeting with somebody who regularly used the F-word in daily conversation.

“Fecking great.”  “Fecking fantastic.”  “For feck’s sake.”  “Ah laddie, you are fecked now.”

My second time I was exposed to a constant barrage of the F-word is when I traveled to Ireland.  The Irish say fuck (or feck), a lot.

Fuck is a great word, and yet it not to be used in polite company.

Fuck somehow maintains an elite status of the words that you are  not supposed to use, especially if you are on television, unless of course, you are on cable television.   Then you can say it all the time.  Fuck is the lion in the animal kingdom of swear words.  It is the king of the Swear words.  The C word is not to be used ever.  And I mean it.

You can use “fuck” on occasion.  You just have to be careful about it.

I thought about the strangeness of the word “fuck” when David Ortiz, the Red Sox slugger, let fly with the word that shall not be named when addressing a stadium full of the Bostonians in the days following the Marathon Bombing.

Big Papi’s rallying cry was simple but direct:  “This jersey that we wear today, it doesn’t say ‘Red Sox,’ it says ‘Boston.’ We want to thank you Mayor Menino, Governor Patrick, the whole police department for the great job they did this past week. This is our fucking city.”

It was a cry from the heart, and for most Bostonians who use the word fuck as if it were a synonym for “and,” it was pitch perfect.

According to Wikipedia, “Fuck in its literal meaning refers to the act of sexual intercourse. It is an English word that is often used as a profanity, either to denote disdain or as an intensifier.  The origin of the word is obscure. It is usually considered to be first attested to around 1475, but it may be considerably older. In modern usage, fuck and its derivatives (such as fucker and fucking) can be used in the position of a noun, a verb, an adjective or an adverb. There are many common phrases which make use of the word, as well as a number of compounds incorporating it, such as motherfucker.”

Fuck is a very useful word.  As the Great Wiki points out, “The word is one of the few that has legitimate colloquial usage as a verb, adverb, adjective, command, conjunction, exclamatory, noun and pronoun.”

Despite its usefulness, fuck is not held in high esteem by the government.   While the FCC gave Big Papi a break, it hasn’t always looked the other way.  Bono and NBC had to defend themselves against government regulators when he used the word “fucking,” on a live telecast of the Golden Globe Awards.   Cher and Lionel Richie both had to defend themselves all of the way to the Supreme Court for using the word on television.  They escaped without having to pay a fine, but they had to pay the costs of the court fight, not only with money, but also with reputation.

You don’t win many brownie points for saying fuck on the public airwaves.

I have young kids and I don’t really want them to start spouting off swear words before they hit their teen years.   But that doesn’t meant that I don’t let fly a few “fucks” every once in a while within their earshot.  I know it is not polite.  But shit happens.

I am not in the camp that if everybody starts saying “fuck this” or “fuck that,” Western civilization is going to start collapsing.   And I think it is somewhat ridiculous that the penalty for knowingly putting fuck on the public airwaves can be pretty expensive.

That being said, I would recommend that you keep your “fucks” to yourself if you are around school children.   Let them learn how to properly swear from their friends, not from their parents or friends of their parents.