BBC preaches forgiveness for man who murders his partner.

But we were able to tell Conor how his actions affected us and participate in crafting a meaningful sentence for him.

WTF, I'd have been "crafting" a noose for him. Personally I think people just talk crap like this because they just opt out and can't deal with the situation.
You don't go round shooting people because you've had a toxic argument with them you walk away. If you can't do that then you need to be removed from society permanently.

Another aspect of this is it is quite performative for the parents in the longer term. Forgiveness was done publicly not privately and they have written a book about it. As I said above I think forgiveness, because of its exceptionally high emphasis in religious contexts, can be used as an external value where people can gain public attention.

I think similarly of Erika Kirk if I’m honest. She live in a culture that has forgiveness at the pinnacle of virtuosity so forgiving someone in such a public context has a performative aspect to it.

Personally I view forgiveness as a completely internal process that demands accountability so even if the person being forgiven cannot accept responsibility due to their own capacity for accountability, it is an intrinsic part of forgiveness otherwise I think it is a form of avoidance and spiritual bypass and a means to gather attention.

Exactly.

This reminds me - although the situations are clearly very different in important ways - of the debate over something the Holocaust survivor & Nazi hunter Simon Wiesenthal wrote in his book The Sunflower. While a prisoner, he was summoned to the bed of a Nazi officer who was dying, and the man asked for forgiveness. Wiesenthal refused to forgive, and several notable Christians questioned this bit of the book when they read it.

Personally, I agree with the writers who defended his refusal to forgive. There's a couple of points in these articles which I think are relevant more broadly:

' Eva Fleischner, a Catholic interfaith specialist and another Sunflower symposiast, argues that “Christians—and non-Christians in their wake—have misread, and continue to misread, [Christian texts] interpreting Jesus’ teaching to mean that we are to forgive anyone and everyone. . . . The element that is lost sight of is that Jesus challenges me to forgive evil done to me. . . . Nowhere does he tell us to forgive the wrong done to another.”

https://firstthings.com/the-virtue-of-hate/

"They paint it as though this must have come out of the blue for everyone, rather than the reality that, like many abused women, their daughter was manipulated and abused for years, and tried to get away but couldn’t. If they didn’t forgive him they might have to confront their own role in keeping her trapped with her killer."

I think so too...thinking about the religious connotations, Jesus is more or less reported to have said, "Forgive them , for they know not what they do" and that still gets tied into domestic violence and murder all the time
"He was a lovely guy"
"He just snapped"
"He says he doesn't remember doing it"
"It was like a different person was doing it"

I strongly agree. If he was tired of arguing, why didn’t he just walk away? We know, because he admits it, that Ann asked him not to kill her. This was a deliberate murder with, as far as I can see, no mitigating factors. The judge should not be swayed by the parents’ forgiveness. The only person whose opinion counts is Ann, and he silenced her.

According to that article I linked above, while Ann was on life support, dying, having suffered shotgun wounds that blew off her fingers and struck her in the face...

Her father was busy hallucinating that both Ann and Jesus were asking him to forgive her murderer, and felt "a wave of joy" when he decided he was going to forgive him, and that he loved him.

Meanwhile, Ann's mother went to visit her daughter's murderer in prison, and cried with him, forgave him, and then had a good old laugh with him, before going back to hospital to turn off her daughter's life support.

Later, when Ann's parents talked to the state attorney, "It was easy to think, Poor Conor, I wouldn’t want him to spend his life in prison, but he’s going to have to,” Kate says."

Poor Conor.

I'm aghast at just how little Ann's parents cared about her.

Agree @Heggettypeg

What's wrong with all this is that A shouldn't get to "forgive" B for what B did to C.

I wonder if Ann's sisters have forgiven him too, and what they think about their parents' decision to support and excuse their sister's murderer. I notice they haven't said anything publicly.

Also, this article sheds some more light on the situation: https://www.nytimes.com/2013/01/06/magazine/can-forgiveness-play-a-role-in-criminal-justice.html It's paywalled but you can read it using this - removepaywall.com.

Imo this shows the dangerous aspects of some types of US Christianity.

Jesus preached forgiveness but that doesn't mean ignoring abuse of women or that someone who murders or abuses shouldn't be punished. The Bible in fact has several examples of at least one form of abuse of women (rape) being punished : Dinah, Susannah and Tamar.

Imo this ties into how patriarchal theology urges women to forgive. Some churches urge counselling by untrained church pastors and prioritise keeping the couple together rather than keeping women safe from abuse. This is partly why women's church attendance is falling.

I've noted some people on MN argue that guns in US help women defend themselves against attackers, and there certainly have been cases of that

But let's not forget that guns are also often used by abusive men to shoot their partners

I read that article earlier and found it very odd, in particular this sentence; :

'But Conor was exhausted from arguing and wanted it all to be over,'

This article was not about forgiving an abusive man who murdered his young partner , it was about providing excuses for him. Outrageous reporting.

This is Florida we're talking about.

A linked article says that if Ann's parents hadn't spoken up, he would've faced life in prison - and in Florida, a life sentence means you're in there until you die. So no. Realistically, he wasn't necessarily going to be released.

But her parents made sure he will be.

Wow, what a terrible bloody mother.

I understand that she's grieving, but it genuinely sounds like she values the emotionally abusive man who murdered her daughter more than she ever valued her daughter! They shouldn't have been facilitating the pair's relationship at all - they should've been trying to protect her from him.

But clearly she still thinks he's just lovely despite the fact that he executed her daughter in cold blood (of course, they never kill themselves first, do they?). Her language in talking about him is all justifications and excuses, and she almost sounds as though she thinks her daughter was partially responsible, and brought it on himself.

Aww, the poor baby was just so exhausted by arguing that he had to shoot his girlfriend

And I'm forever confused by people (mostly Christians) who think that forgiving the perpetrator is required for them to 'move on'. It's not. Acceptance works fine too. But Christianity is obsessed with forgiveness.

I'm disgusted in this woman, frankly. It sounds like she's failed her daughter in both life, and death.

I agree, what sort of excuse for shooting your girlfriend (and not yourself, I note) is that?

I would interpret that question as referring to a belief that marriage to the right person will bring out the best of both parties. And trying to prompt her to reflect on whether a marriage to this particular person would achieve that.

It is not clear whether they have ever seen him as abusive or would be able to allow themselves to accept that.

With Ann on life support, Kate decided to visit Conor in jail.

Kate told him both she and Andy loved and forgave him. "And when I said those words, I just felt a peace come over me."

Days later, Kate and Andy made the difficult decision to turn off Ann's life support.

I am trying not to judge because I have thankfully never been in her shoes, but I struggle with this. Also her determination to excuse his behaviour and almost blame her daughter. I imagine that may help her live with herself but I don't think it's right.

My understanding was that forgiveness in Christianity was tied to repentance, however everyone has their own interpretation and perhaps she has more heavily been sold on quotes such as:

"For if you forgive others their trespasses, your heavenly Father will also forgive you; but if you do not forgive others, neither will your Father forgive your trespasses."
— Matthew 6:14-15

Perhaps she felt she would go to hell if she didn't forgive him and that was her true motivation.

In the excuse letter she wrote to her daughter she wrote:

"Forgiveness allowed us to move forward and heal," she says. "Do we continue to feel grief?

"Of course we do. But we aren't imprisoned by our grief."

Except she forgave him before her daughter had even died. She prioritised visiting him in prison over being at her daughter's side. She seemingly prioritised her own "peace" over her daughter.

But Conor was exhausted from arguing and wanted it all to be over, "so he pulled the trigger," Kate says.

He was exhausted and wanted it to be over so he shot... his girlfriend. No, sorry, doesn't ring true. That's not normal or understandable behaviour.

The whole thing comes across to me as someone who feels tormented by her conscience and her loss and has woven a narrative to allow her to live with that. I would not begrudge her that if she wasn't using it in the way she is.

For what it's worth, I believe that society is safer when we focus on rehabilitation and I don't think locking people away in dehumanising damaging institutions for decades makes their future nextdoor neighbours safer. I think Scandinavian prisons are much more effective at making communities safer and reducing reoffending than our broken system or the US system.

But that shouldn't be tied to whether the family of victims forgives them or not. The sentence he received seemed more likely to improve community safety, so I think that should be the preferred sentence irrespective of the victim's family forgiving or not. Victims and their families should not be the ones determining sentences.

Had similar thoughts.

Exactly.

I do wonder if the parents “had” to forgive the bastard because they’d pushed their daughter to be in that position in the first place - the way they don’t mention the abuse before the murder but describe the relationship as volatile, talk about how they liked him, etc. They paint it as though this must have come out of the blue for everyone, rather than the reality that, like many abused women, their daughter was manipulated and abused for years, and tried to get away but couldn’t. If they didn’t forgive him they might have to confront their own role in keeping her trapped with her killer.

Apologies, having reread the OP, I see my question has already been answered. I have asked MN to remove my post.

Agree.

I think there is a significant tendency to weigh forgiveness far above accountability these days. I don’t believe it is a real value that people hold, I think it is more likely a misapplication of religious values basically a religious manipulation pushed by culture. I personally think it is the wrong way around. Start with accountability then understanding then forgiveness.