Actual prolife Catholics listen to the Church and oppose the death penalty and torture

Last updated on: March 19, 2018 at 7:51 am by Mark Shea

Actual prolife Catholics listen to the Church and oppose the death penalty and torture 2018-03-19T07:51:28-07:00 Mark Shea

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Christians agree with the Church that the point is not to ask when we get to kill people. They ask when we have to kill and how we can spare life and treat people humanely.

Christianists say that abortion is the core issue but will devote their actual time and energy to defending Trump’s plan to imitate Duterte and kill dealers. Because Christianists *love* the death penalty and labor to maximize the number of poor and brown people the state can kill. They also love cruelty, which is why they will also rejoice at this typically brutal part of the plan:

“The White House plan will also seek to cut opioid prescriptions by a third over the next three years by promoting practices that reduce overprescription of opioids in federal healthcare programs, officials told a news briefing.”

Here’s the thing: one reason painkillers are over-prescribed is because insurance companies often won’t pay for other forms of pain management (such as adequate, ongoing physical therapy). So what this does is to put people in chronic pain at risk of not getting any pain relief at all. Sadism *and* death: a perfect cocktail of inhumanity to warm the cockles of the Christianist heart.

Christians oppose cruelty. They also oppose torture.

But Christianists orgasmically love torture and have spent the past fifteen years either defending it or patiently waiting for Trump to bring it back as a tool of statecraft. Now that he has appointed Pompeo and Haspel to head State and the CIA, that signal is given and you can bet your bottom dollar that all the lies and rationalizations Catholics spent the last decade offering for torture will be trotted back out–with the most filthy one being “Why do we care about ‘torture'” (the scare quotes are essential) “when the real torture is abortion?” The use of the unborn as human shields to rationalize mortal sin Christianists love is their single most disgusting tactic.

This means that, if appointed, the director of the CIA cannot travel to Europe because she stands a good chance of being arrested as a war criminal for the torture regime she ran.

Torture is a feature, not a bug, for Christianists, who consistently express their passionate support for sadistic cruelty.

Christians, of course, reject cruelty as contrary to the human dignity of both the victim and the victimizer, because their Lord was tortured to death and because the worst human being on earth is still the image and likeness of God.

But Christianists, who worship power and mammon, consistently see the brutalization of human beings as the apex of manly power, adore it, and accuse those who reject it of being “weak” and (a favorite Alt Right term) “effeminate”.

Trump, certainly the most cowardly man who ever occupied the White House is, like Dick Cheney–another coward who defended the torture even of innocents–attracted to brutality because it looks to him like courage and he wishes to be thought brave without the trouble of being brave. This is the mark of grave evil: it always describes mortal sin as an act of courage. Trump–and the moral freak show of the Christianist cultus that surrounds him will cheer for the revival of torture and describe it in terms of brave men not afraid to get their hands dirty just as Himmler did.

And that ethos will not stay abroad. Indeed, it is already here as demonstrated by this all-too-common story of a schizophrenic inmate, tortured to death by being strapped naked to a chair for 46 hours while deputies laughed, shows. Once you embrace the idea that the state can torture foreigners abroad, the state quickly figures out that it can torture citizens at home too. And the state tends to hire the sort of person that enjoys this work.

None of that will slow down Christianist torture lovers who, like their cowardly idol, wish to imagine themselves paragons of courage and tell enemies of torture that they are “cowards” who are “afraid to do what is necessary to keep this country safe”.

But it is they who are cowards, selling their souls to save their skins.

Those who would give up essential Liberty, to purchase a little temporary Safety, deserve neither Liberty nor Safety. – Benjamin Franklin

I tremble for my country when I reflect that God is just; that his justice cannot sleep forever. – Thomas Jefferson

The most appalling thing of all this horror is that it is people claiming to speak and act in the name of Jesus Christ who do not merely approve of torture, they lead the way in championing it and do so in greater percentages than the general population. The more they self-identify as “conservative Christians” (Catholic or Protestant) the more certain they were to passionately defend the use of torture–and claim to be “prolife”.

God’s name is blasphemed among the Gentiles because them.

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