I get mysteriously signed up for a lot of spam mail from various orgs who seem to think I am what (I have recently been informed) is known as an \u201csocial media Influencer\u201d.\u00a0 I\u2019m not altogether persuaded that this is a judgment of me that is in contact with Reality, but given the volume of mail I get from various people, it appears that lots of people disagree with my assessment.<\/p>\n
As a result, I have a regular ritual of unsubscribing myself from mailing lists.<\/p>\n
But not from all of them.<\/p>\n
Here, for instance, is one of the mails from Conservatives Concerned About the Death Penalty<\/a>, praising New Hampshire for abolishing the death penalty:<\/p>\n NEW HAMPSHIRE ENDS THE DEATH PENALTY Statement by Hannah Cox, National Manager of Conservatives Concerned About the Death Penalty:<\/strong>\u00a0<\/strong><\/p>\n \u201cEnding New Hampshire\u2019s death penalty would not have been possible without significant Republican support. Increasing numbers of GOP state lawmakers believe capital punishment does not align with their conservative values of limited government, fiscal responsibility, and valuing life. The state of New Hampshire will be much better off because of it.\u201d<\/p>\n For more information contact Jon Crane at 203-982-4575 or email joncrane@criticalpr.com<\/a>.<\/p>\n Conservatives Concerned About the Death Penalty is a nationwide group of conservatives questioning whether capital punishment is consistent with conservative principles and values due to the system\u2019s inefficiency, inequity, and inaccuracy. Conservatives Concerned About the Death Penalty is a project of Equal Justice USA, a national, non-partisan, grassroots organization working to transform the justice system by promoting responses to violence that break cycles of trauma. To learn more, go to www.conservativesconcerned.org<\/a>.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n This tickles me, because conservatives have long been the bastion of war on the Church\u2019s call to abolish the death penalty, so I am glad to see some within the conservative fold reject this foolish attachment to barbarism and recognize what the Church has seen for fifty years: that if there is any lesson to be learned from the 20th century, it is that giving the state the power to slaughter its own citizens is a very, very, very bad idea.<\/p>\n The enemies of this obviously sane development in Catholic teaching, for some reason, regard it as a \u201creversal of doctrine\u201d.\u00a0 It is, of course, nothing of the sort.\u00a0 There is not and never has been a \u201cdoctrine\u201d that criminals must be punished with death.\u00a0 Genesis 9:6 is not a command, but a permission, given to Bronze Age people so that some semblance of order may be maintained in an age of slaughter and inability to do much to restrain lawlessness.\u00a0 But the idea that the death penalty is some sort of shining ideal is simply not biblical and neither God, nor the Church, ever treated it as such.\u00a0 If it were somehow morally required, then God sinned by not killing the murderer David.<\/p>\n Likewise, if it were morally required, then the early Church sinned by assigning penances and not death sentences to murderers in the Church.\u00a0 The reality is that the death penalty has never been necessary, it has been tolerated<\/em> by the Church.<\/p>\n Until the 20th century, when the insane mass slaughter by the state compelled a simple and obvious development in the Church\u2019s teaching:\u00a0 Don\u2019t kill people if you don\u2019t have to\u2013even if they have it coming.<\/p>\n This practical outworking of the Church\u2019s guidance is as old as \u201cForgive them, Father, they know not what they do\u201d which begged mercy for the most appalling act of murder in the history of the universe.<\/p>\n There are lots of reasons this is a good idea.<\/p>\n There is the fact that acceptance of the death penalty means, statistically speaking, acceptance of the cold-blooded murder of about 4% of the people we kill, since they are totally innocent of any crime.<\/p>\n There is the fact that killing even the guilty kills something in the executioner and in the population that thirsts for bloody vengeance when it is not needed.<\/p>\n There is the fact that in ours, the largest gulag on planet earth, dwarfing Stalin\u2019s, Communist China\u2019s and North Korea\u2019s, the massively disproportionate percentage of people of color behind bars makes the death penalty a form of race and class war under another name.<\/p>\n And there is the fact that the death penalty makes repentance impossible for the victim and much more difficult for the executioner.\u00a0 Advocates of the death penalty are big on the claim that \u201cnothing so wonderfully concentrates the mind as the prospect of a hanging\u201d and urge that we go ahead and kill people on the theory that the ends justify the means and this will make the bastards repent.\u00a0 Of course, such people do not advocate the state kill them<\/em>\u00a0or their friends as a means of spiritual purification.\u00a0 Only the people they<\/em> want to slaughter.\u00a0 That\u2019s one of the little flaws in their argument for killing people we do not need to kill.<\/p>\n The other and bigger flaw is they they never consider the damage their bloodlust does to themselves.\u00a0 For the truth is, that advocates of the death penalty typically are not really interested in the repentance of the people they want to butcher.\u00a0 Proof: they gloat over the deaths\u00a0<\/a>of\u00a0<\/a>even penitent killers<\/a>:<\/p>\n In the weeks before the execution, Bush says, \u201cA number of protesters came to Austin to demand clemency for Karla Faye Tucker.\u201d \u201cDid you meet with any of them?\u201d I ask. Bush whips around and stares at me. \u201cNo, I didn\u2019t meet with any of them\u201d, he snaps, as though I\u2019ve just asked the dumbest, most offensive question ever posed. \u201cI didn\u2019t meet with Larry King either when he came down for it [the interview]. I watched his interview with Tucker, though. He asked her real difficult questions like, \u2018What would you say to Governor Bush?\u2019\u201d \u201cWhat was her answer?\u201d I wonder. \u201c\u2018Please,\u2019\u201d Bush whimpers, his lips pursed in mock desperation, \u201c\u2018don\u2019t kill me.\u2019\u201d I must look shocked \u2014 ridiculing the pleas of a condemned prisoner who has since been executed seems odd and cruel \u2014 because he immediately stops smirking.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n The problem with the death penalty is, then, basically tripartite:<\/p>\n In addition to this, it makes Catholic death penalty defenders into people willing to make war on the Church in order to become\u00a0people who are eager to kill completely innocent people in order to kill people who do not need to be killed.<\/p>\n And, as Conservatives Concerned about the Death Penalty recognize, it turns people who are theoretically leery of state power into people willing to hand the state the power to kill its citizens, which the 20th century strongly suggests is a very, very, very stupid thing to do.<\/p>\n \u00a0<\/p>\n Anybody who seriously<\/em> fears the power of the state will seriously<\/em> fear giving the state the power to execute its citizens.\u00a0 Conservatives Concerned about the Death Penalty are serious\u2013and therefore consistent.\u00a0 People who say they are prolife out of obedience to God should likewise be consistent and demand protection of human life from conception to natural death.\u00a0 We don\u2019t need to execute people.\u00a0 So don\u2019t.<\/p>\n Bravo Conservatives Concerned About the Death Penalty!<\/p>\n<\/body><\/html>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" I get mysteriously signed up for a lot of spam mail from various orgs who seem to think I am what (I have recently been informed) is known as an \u201csocial media Influencer\u201d.\u00a0 I\u2019m not altogether persuaded that this is a judgment of me that is in contact with Reality, but given the volume of […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":92,"featured_media":112383,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[278],"class_list":["post-112173","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-uncategorized","tag-abolish-the-death-penalty"],"yoast_head":"\n
\n<\/strong>WITH Strong bipartisan SENATE vote<\/strong>\u00a0<\/strong><\/p>\n\n