BBC preaches forgiveness for man who murders his partner.

[ArabellaScott]

What the fuck, BBC?!

https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/articles/cnv6ne1zqyro

We are told a story which could only have been recounted by a man who murdered his partner, which is accepted without question. And then preached at about forgiveness.

This mother can do and say what she wants, I wouldnt presume to censure her. But the BBC has effectively written an apologia for abuse, domestic violence, and murder.

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.

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.

"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"

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/

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.

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.