Choose Life

End the Death Penalty

I call this kind of art informative art, although I think this piece would make a great poster so I guess it could also be called poster art. In it I combined sloganeering with the use of a contemporary right-wing Christian message. Our society is slogan driven. Slogans are a good way to get a message out. They are short and clear and readily identifiable with an ideology. In this piece I have used the Choose Life slogan but turned it around to express my own opposition to the death penalty. I believe the death penalty to be morally wrong

Part of this piece deals with the execution of minors. At the time I created it, earlier this year, it was still legal to execute those who had committed crimes while a minor. The United States Supreme Court ruled it unconstitutional to subject minors to the death penalty just within the last few months. At the time of the ruling the U.S. was the only industrialized country in the world still subjecting minors to the death penalty. All of the others had outlawed this practice years ago.  It is interesting to me that there was strident condemnation of this decision by many white American males. While the vast majority of minors subjected to the death penalty in this country have been male children of color, the group most in favor of this practice has been white men. In other words, many white men feel the need to execute black boys. Kind of makes you wonder.