After Pope Francis made the disastrous decision to attempt to reverse 2,000 years of Church teaching on the death penalty, certain “Catholic” politicians have rediscovered their Catholicism just in time to applaud the move. You will notice that Catholic Democrats love and respect the Church on, now, two issues: the death penalty and immigration. They loath and reject it on every other issue. But I suppose the advantage of being a moral relativist is that you need not worry about blatant self-contradiction.
The Left across the board, starting with the media, has joined the fake Catholic liberals in celebrating the news. This has given rise to one of the most morbid and sickening spectacles in modern politics: advocates for fetal execution protesting the execution of convicted murderers. It is chilling to contemplate the depravity and moral insanity of a person who sympathizes more with a child killer than a child, yet these sorts of people exist and they walk among us. They are called Democrats.
As a defensive measure, those who hold this deranged view will often accuse the other side of inconsistency. They will say that it is hypocritical to oppose the murder of babies if you do not oppose the execution of serial killers. Now, the discussion about how the pro-life ethic ought to be applied to the death penalty, and how far it should go, and in what direction, is one that pro-lifers may have amongst themselves. If a particular pro-lifer feels that the pro-life position demands that we oppose the death penalty, he can make that case and, even if he is wrong, he is certainly not inconsistent in doing so.
A pro-abortion person, on the other hand, is not entitled to throw the death penalty against abortion opponents. They are the ones who need to answer for a contradiction. If you are going to make an absolute case against the death penalty — as opposed to a circumstantial or situational case — you must do so on the moral ground that human life is intrinsically valuable and possesses in itself an inviolable worth and dignity. This is indeed the grounds upon which the Left makes its argument. But if dignity is inviolable and inherent, and if it cannot even be lost when you commit an atrocity against your fellow man, then obviously babies must also have this dignity. The pro-abortion position depends on the idea that human worth is conditional. The anti-death penalty position depends on the idea that it is not. It is perverse and morally incoherent to exclude the most innocent human lives while including the least innocent. This is the philosophy of a madman or a comic book super villain.
The contradiction does not necessarily run the other way. It is possible to affirm the dignity of all humans, and argue that because of this dignity, those who murder innocent lives must be permanently cast out of human society. It is also possible to argue that a murderer, though he is a being of intrinsic worth and value, he has, by his own choice, put society in a position where it must infringe on his dignity one way or another. Either it must lock him in a cage for the rest of his life, which is not dignified, or it must execute him. You might even argue that the latter is the more dignified option. You don’t have to agree with these arguments, but they are at least coherent and they are certainly in keeping with the idea of human dignity. Abortion is not.
Pro-aborts are fans of choice, so let them finally make a choice here. Either human beings have absolute worth and value or they do not. If they do not, then have all the abortions you want. But please stop with the silly hand-wringing over the death penalty. And if they do have worth and value, then your position on the death penalty has significant weight to it. However, your position on abortion is a moral abomination and you must abandon it at once. Pick one of these options. You cannot have them both.