I will post my findings and argument for or against Reservation Rewards here in the comments section of this post.

You, and others who have multiple months of charges, also have ten months of interest that they collected on your money and additionally that you may have paid to your credit card company. I’d like to see litigation that reimburses victims for their accrued interest on both counts.

Another key point is that when you call them, ask how you got signed up (which web site). Then complain to that web site and make it clear that you will no longer be their customer and will actively tell others to avoid them. It’s important to make it clear to web sites that sign up with Reservation Rewards that they will LOSE customers. That’s the only thing that will ultimately cause them to break their affiliation.

Thank you very much for your post. You bring a dimension of thoughtfulness to this discussion that my original post lacks. All I would say in response is to nuance or clarify my original statements in light of your contribution here.

Generally speaking, I am opposed to the death penalty as a form of punishment. I believe a Christian worldview directs one to engage in punishment more as discipline rather than punitive. As a disciplining agent, a punishment would be thoughtfully designed for rehabilitation and restoration depending on the participation and engagement of the convicted. This is how the Father deals with me, and how I believe he would have me deal with others. Death is alone the decision of the Maker as a consequence of sin and I as one, who apart from Christ would be also under the sentence of death, am in no cosmic position to condemn anyone to death. At least that’s where I’m coming from presently.

So what I’m challenging is the basis for the decision to overturn the death penalty for Patrick Kennedy, the step-father who raped his eight year old daughter. When Justice Anthony Kennedy wrote ”The death penalty is not a proportional punishment for the rape of a child,” I believe the proportionality to be much different than he seems to indicate.

Some of those I have interacted with who have been raped are angry; some are broken; some are doing rather well; some are men and some are women. I think recovery has to do with being in an ongoing environment where there is a high level of trust and stability (as you point out). The sense of injustice I have with the Supreme Court ruling is not so much that they are not killing a child incest-rapist, but that there seems to be a notion, at least in the article I cited, that the death penalty for the child incest-rapist is disproportional in that it is believed to be a disproportionally severe punishment for the crime. I would say it’s disproportionally light-weight, given that the rapist is killed painlessly, while many of the victims, though not all, are killed by slow painful death over a lifetime.

Oscar Wilde makes this point poignantly in his Ballad of Reading Gaol:

Yet each man kills the thing he loves
By each let this be heard,
Some do it with a bitter look,
Some with a flattering word,
The coward does it with a kiss,
The brave man with a sword!

Some love too little, some too long,
Some sell, and others buy;
Some do the deed with many tears,
And some without a sigh:
For each man kills the thing he loves,
Yet each man does not die.

God designed children to be incredibly resilient to trauma IF they are given the proper love and counseling right after the trauma. The permanent damage and horrendous ’scaring’ occurs when the childhood abuse is internalized (kept hidden or disassociated) by the child and is never dealt with. Another crime occurs when the victim is not secure in the love of his/her caregivers to expose the abuse and feels it has to be kept hidden. (I sadly know this from personal experience.) However, when a child rape is exposed, it is an opportunity for the child to get the help he/she needs to mitigate the trauma and an opportunity for the perpetrator to get the help he/she needs (while serving a prison sentence) if warranted.

Child rape is so inhuman, so sick and so unnatural, it begs us to question what could possibly have caused one person to inflict this on another; certainly something extraordinary. It is so right when you say that rape lacerates the soul, but fresh wounds are easier to heal and leave minimal scaring than those wounds that have festered unattended for many years. The long, unattended wounds (if the rapist actually possesses them) also deserve attention, not summary execution. I can’t help but look at the rapist and say, “But for the grace of God, there go I.”