Pondering...

It's Friday of a holiday weekend am I'm currently sitting in a tiny office in the back corner of my church working on putting together a list of people, United Methodists especially but anyone is welcome, who are willing to call and/or write a letter (not email) to their legislators in Jefferson City regarding the death penalty in MO. Specifically, I'm working my part time job for the MO Annual Conference Social Justice Team who have made it one of their specific goals to speak out against the death penalty. To me, this is a no brainer - "Thou shalt not kill" is pretty plain English and I don't see a lot of room for interpretation (but then I did read a book for a class once regarding the translation of "kill" which could also be "murder" and then there are BIG interpretive debates). I also really love the bumper sticker that says "Why do we kill people to show that killing people in wrong?" Go ahead, Big Unit - I figure you have an answer. :)

Thus far in my work, it's been a lot of research and set up kind of stuff - making a database to store the names and addresses of folks who sign on to the list, tracking down the names of people who have been parts of similar things in the past, looking up current pastors of churches who signes a resolution calling for a moratorium on executions in MO at 2006 Annual Conference, etc. It's been fun, but I'm now getting to the point where it's going to be a lot of phone calls to people that it is presumed will not want to hear from me. I kind of feel like I'm a telemarketer, but I'm not really sure why the expectation is that people will cringe when I mention the death penalty. Can you help me understand this? I really want to understand all sides of the debate...