This post is addressing the hypocrisy of both the extreme liberals and extreme conservatives in American politics when it comes to the issues of abortion and the death penalty. It will not address whether abortion or the death penalty should become public policy, simply the fallacies in both these groups ideology.
Many conservatives, especially the most active, pride themselves on supporting the right to life. Whether they believe life should be protected for religious or legal reasons is irrelevant. Their fundamental belief that all life should be protected is what matters. Now, for the vast majority of conservatives the right to life extends to unborn children. Because of this belief abortion should be illegal so life is ensured, and anyone who does this act is committing murder. However these very same people who believe unborn children have the right to live disregard those values when it comes to the issue of the death penalty.
When conservative activists who support the death penalty were asked the question, “[w]hy do you favor the death penalty for persons convicted of murder, the top answers included punishment fits the crime, they deserve it, and saves tax payers money. Only four percent picked to serve justice. The fact is the death penalty is murder; something most conservatives do not seem to understand. A life is being taken when the act is not necessary. Convicted murders can and are thrown in prison for the rest of their lives each and every day. They are no longer a threat to society behind bars. If one’s belief is that all life is sacred or should be protected by law it should not only be when it suits their best interests. The fact is a life is a life, whether they are convicted of murder or not. This reason is why extreme conservatives are hypocrites.
Conservatives are not the only ones who have contradictions in their beliefs when it comes to pro-choice and the death penalty. Liberals do as well. Most liberals are pro-choice. This does not mean they are for killing unborn children, simply that they believe it is a personal choice. Their hypocrisy exists because a majority of liberals also believe the death penalty is wrong. One of the most profound answers as to why liberals are against it is the death penalty is murder. The fact is they are right. Whether the death penalty is carried out for retribution, justice, or financial reasons, it still is taking a life needlessly. Following this logic neither people nor the government should take a life. Yet, many liberals support the right for individuals to make such a decision every day when they support pro-choice. The fact is life exists prior to birth in the eye of the law. If a pregnant woman who is three month pregnant is murdered by a robber, that person will be charged not with one murder but two, in most states. Ergo, life exists before birth in the eyes of the law. Roe vs. Wade (citation needed) established that life began before birth, although the actual time when it began is still subject to legal interpretation. Politics is not perfect and every belief and decision is not always correct, moral, or legal, but this article shows the inconsistencies in many people’s beliefs when it comes to the issues of abortion and the death penalty.
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6 comments:
ToE,
I believe there is a dichotomy in the law. Some states have asserted that an unborn child/fetus is a life by asserting the termination of that life is murder. However, the constitutionality of that claim, as far as I know, hasn't been challenged and it runs afoul of Roe. I would not make the statement that uniformly it is considered a life. Clearly, at the federal level it is not considered such until viability.
That said, let's be clear I abhore the needless and pointless taking of life. I don't support the Death Penalty, though, on three primary grounds and they are in decending order of importance.
1. There are simply too many mistaken convictions. This nation stacks the deck against defendents in most cases. Sure, there are a few landmark/hallmark cases of abuse of technicality leading to acquital, but those are the vastly rare exception. When 13 of 150 death penalty cases reviewed in Illinois showed that the convicted person was NOT the perpetrator, you have a serious problem. States like Texas which limit exculpatory presentation to 30 days after reading of the sentence, make this risk of error enormous. You can't unring the bell once you execute someone.
2. It is not limited to cases we all might otherwise support (e.g. the cases like Ted Bundy). We execute people for cases which aren't abhorant, mass murders, but rather we execute also for cases where mentally challenged people, or those not in command of their faculties, kill someone (not a host of someone's). Our desires seem not about justice, but rather about a lewd interest in death and suffering and cruelty.
3. As you say, in the end, for a Christian, the taking of life is not my decision. I may, as a soldier, by necessity kill my enemy to deny his army/his nation the ability to fight, but my goal isn't actually to kill the other soldier. Orchestrated killing by the state is no less murder than the original act in the eyes of the law of God.
While I can agree that there is a vast hypocrisy on the right, and by the way you left out the most aggregeious element of that hypocrisy, namely they won't pay for/don't give a damn about the baby after it's born. If it dies 3 days after birth from malnutrition, there is no great cry for support from the right. IN fact the exact opposite is true - they blame the mother for being "stupid" enough to get pregnant and/or for being promiscuous. No condemnation seems to come for the men involved (or damned little), but more, no self-analysis of their own conduct as a youth, or of THEIR ability to have contraception available and most importantly NO analysis of their ability to be more charitable, to not have a nation where the "minimum" wage is so low that no one could live on it, no analysis of their complicity in creating a society of poor, uneducated youth with little hope, and little else to do other than to do what the poor have always done (create babies), EVER crosses their lips.
I will gladly take the accusation of being a hypocrite about abortion IF and WHEN you can confirm I believe the aborted fetus is a life. IF I don't, then I have not been in any way a hypocrite. The federal guidance says it is not a life, and the state laws on the matter seem boot-strapped logic at best. If it were a life, there would be no allowance of abortion.
Penigma brings up an interesting point about the hypocrisy of the right that often talks about saving a live but once the baby is born their care seems to diminish greatly.
This is largely due to their beliefs of limited government and the ability of individuals to blaze their own trail. This is my neo-cons such as George W. Bush called for faith based initiatives to support those traditionally by state and federal governments. However they FAIL to understand that not everyone can support themselves and prosper when they have no boots on in the first place.
Progressives love to use the phrase "you can't pull yourself up from the gutter when you don't have any bootstraps" that is exactly true. The right, especially the religoius right preach about their moral values and religious beliefs but they very seldom live up to them. Perhaps they need to read the Bible again and finally learn that Jesus preached about doing good works and helping those less fortuante than ourselves. Maybe then they would drop this nonsense argument that welfare programs should not be apart of the state. If the religious right feels they must protect the country from the immoral behavhior of abortions than perhaps they should first think about immoral practices of NOT helping the sick, the dying, the poor, and the abused members of our society. But fat chance of that happening.
Penigma:
No one here has suggested that you are a hypocrite for your stance on abortion. In fact, although I did not write this article, I did mention some of your opinions to the author, OmnipotentWarheit, and he agreed with them enough to include them in the article. That said, we will have to agree to disagree on when life begins, as I approach it as an issue of faith, and you approach it as a matter of law.
I agree with your point about the right also caring very little about a child once it is born. There are many of the extreme religious right, unfortunately, (many of them evangelicals), who have a very un-christian attitude about wealth, blaming the poor for being poor while utterly refusing to do anything substantial that would help them to begin the long climb out of abject poverty to anything like a useful and productive life.
I think their actions, in those respect, speak for themselves, but also speak volumes of the true beliefs of their particular branches of Christianity.
Toe & OW,
I didn't take it as a personal slieght. I was attempting to point out that I believe liberals feel they aren't in any way hypocritical because they don't believe that an aborted fetus is a life. Certainly if they did, they'd be the greatest hypocrites in the world.
By contrast, I cannot fathom the stance of the right. While they discuss individual liberty as if they are firm believers in taking charge of their own destiny, they blame the government for all their ills (thus making themselves out as victims). Those who ARE successful seem ignorant of the advantages they may have had, and more importantly of the great good fortune they've likely benefited from. Certainly there are plenty of examples of folks who've worked hard, worked smart, saved and been successful, but on a macro-economic scale, this country has been a model of how to move jobs oversees to the benefit of a few while watching those who work hard, save, educate their kids, do charitable works, etc.. watch their pensions, their retirements, and the future for their children, go down the drain. We may like to feel good about the man who leaves Wall Street and starts a successful ranch in Montana, but that man likely makes 1/10th of what he made before, and for each of those stories there are 10,000 who don't have that chance. While we may want to applaud the former, we must, if we are honest about doing the most good for the most people (as is the responsibility of government) we must deal with the highly inequal way in which our nation (and our government as a tool of our nation) has allowed the economy of that nation to be bastardized back into the Gilded Age by euphamisms about "individual liberty". That individual liberty they've talked about has been about ensuring people can exploit situations to take AS MUCH money as possible for themselves (such as oil futures exploiting), while harming the rest of us. If those on the right are concerned about liberty, where is the concern about the ability of the nation to sustain an environment where the most people possible have the greatest chance possible to move up?
Not to start a whole religious argument up but the people who support the death penalty do not see themselves as hypocritical either. As far as I know the only conservative Christian church that condemns the death penalty is the Catholic church and they still have an exception in the catechism saying if it would endanger others to hold the murderer in prison then the state can use the death penalty to protect its citizens. The person teaching my wife's catechism class a few yrs back said that this would be someone who had managed to kill guards while in prison, repeatedly escape prison to kill again, or had followers outside who killed trying to get him out of prison. Realistically if you limited the death penalty to that in the US we might execute one person every couple of yrs, far less than we are currently doing.
As far as the hypocracy thing no one sees themself as a hypocrite. I will say I have been around Right to Life people for most of my life and I was fairly heavily involved in anti-death penalty movement in Texas for a few yrs. I did find the Right to Life people far more willing to say we should cut back or eliminate the death penalty, while the anti-death penalty movement people would get rabid if you mentioned that abortion might possibly be murder also. And just to clarify it wasn't that they would get upset if you suggested that all abortions should be stopped, they would get upset if you suggested there should be any limits whatsoever placed on abortions up to the 8th month or so.
I think the stance that some conservatives use is, "innocent until proven guilty". Unborn children are innocent and should thus have full protection, as they will (presumably) live happy productive lives someday. A convicted murderer, on the other hand, has done something terrible and since part of repentance is retribution, and since you can't give someone their life back, you have to "give up" something of equal value -- an eye for an eye, basically.
That's not my personal stance, by the way. I think trying to give someone the death penalty instead of locking them up forever 1) is way too expensive given the current legal system, 2) sort of denies them the opportunity to repent and feel contrition for their murder while still alive (because, you know, they're theoretically dying sooner than they otherwise would have died). I'm just explaining how some people see it, because although I don't agree with them I think their stance is pretty reasonable from an "Old Testament" sort of standpoint.
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