Catholic and Enjoying It!
As I have noted previously, there is the actual teaching of the Church on the death penalty, and then there are two basic ways of trying to distort and ignore it. Progressives try to say that the DP is just as immoral as abortion. Meanwhile, reactionaries try lots of different strategies to blow off the Church’s teaching and plead for death penalty maximalism. In the course of doing so, they make lots of incredibly bad arguments (see the link). However, at the time I wrote the above, I had not run across this particular embarrassing act of intellectual prostitution:
A lot of jails and prisons in the US are barbaric. Death would be preferred by just about anyone entering them. These liberals think they have a clean conscience but the murder, gang rape and other acts of savagery against inmates is something I could never sentence anyone to. I would have no problem sentencing a first degree murderer to death at all. I would never want to be responsible for knowing a prisoner would face grave acts of torture, humiliation, rape murdered or even sentenced to a life as a sex slave. If this is Catholic Mercy, you can keep it. I prefer Catholic Justice.
Wow. Fascinating to watch allegedly “prolife” Catholics now resorting to the language of mercy killing in order to defy the Church’s teaching on the death penalty. The notion of making prisons safer rather than putting prisoners to death doesn’t even enter the mental universe of this commenter. Now we are to believe that killing prisoners is not vengeance or defiance of the Church’s teaching, but just an expression of tender mercy for lives unworthy of life. Why not just use the German term “lebens unwertes leben”? And if “prolife” people are going to start trotting out that language, why stop with prisoners who have miserable lives? There are a lot of miserable people our culture wants to kill in order to save itself the hassle of putting up with them save them from suffering.
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