The murderer Brandon Bernard was executed yesterday. The crime he took part in was
“…the brutal June 1999 carjacking, robbery and murder of husband and wife Todd and Stacie Bagley, youth ministers from Iowa who were abducted and later shot while stuffed inside the trunk of their car, which later was set on fire while the woman was still alive” (source; US brief at SCOTUS).
This article is not about the appropriateness of the death penalty. For that, read Despite What You Heard, The Death Penalty Is Legitimate. Feser and Bessette’s “By Man Shall His Blood Be Shed: A Catholic Defense of Capital Punishment”.
You may, for the purposes of this article, even believe capital punishment is inadmissible (a word which does not imply, as all the saints and fathers taught us, illegitimate).
Instead, let’s discuss the once-useful, now dead, term pro-life.
Here’s a prime example. The “Friendly” Atheist said of Bernard’s fate “‘Pro-life’ Christians win again.”
First, Christians should never allow atheists, even friendly ones, to define what counts as Christian. That’s a loser’s game, well known in politics to Republicans, who only know defense and retreat.
Second, ignoring that, Mehta’s scare quotes were to signal the apparent contradiction: how can you be for life when you support the execution of this sadistic man? There are a dozen good, sound, logical, Christian answers to that question, all which are discussed in the article above.
But, it is true, going through them all takes time. More time than is available in most cases. The moment you begin, ears fill with water, and you won’t be heard. Beside all that, explanations, to weak minds, sound like excuses. For example:
Someone please explain how pro-execution is pro-life.
— Ken Olin (@kenolin1) December 11, 2020
Do you think that guy is going to listen to you? Let’s instead listen to this Rothwell:
You can’t be pro-life and pro-death penalty.
— Natasha Rothwell (@natasharothwell) December 10, 2020
Don’t bother trying to defend the term. Instead say, “I’m not pro-life. I’m pro-execution”, or just “I’m pro-capital punishment”, or any of the obvious variants.
Pro-life was a good term in its day. Its meaning was clear to all, with no explanation needed. Everybody knew its definition: against the killing of the lives inside would-be mothers. Against the murder of innocents so that ladies could go shopping. Against the selling of baby parts. And so on.
Some who are sincerely pro-life are squeamish about saying anti-abortion. Sounds harsh. Sounds judgmental. We have been trained not to be either of these things, and certainly never to admit them.
Admit them. Both charges are true. Barring women from killing their children is indeed a restriction, a harsh rule. It is also judgmental. It says to women, and the quacks running at them with expensive vacuums, “What you’re doing is wrong.”
Not only all that, but being anti-abortion is (an attempt) to impose beliefs, just like feminists and soy-boys say. The belief being imposed is that killing innocent lives for the sake of convenience is abhorrent. It says either you believe in the immorality, or you don’t, but either way you will be made to act like it’s true.
Others say that being anti-abortion “is about controlling women.” Do not run from this. For it is so. We are controlling women such that they cannot cram a knife up inside themselves to kill the beings living in there. It is also controlling the men who would wield these knives.
You can now see the real problem is the squeamishness itself. Stop it.
Our enemies are wrong, and we are right. There is no compromise. They are harsh, they are judgmental. They impose their beliefs. They control women and control men. They do all these things, they are masters of all these things, only they claim to do none of them.
The realpolitik solution, until you develop the cojones, is you do them, too, while saying you are not.
The other problem with pro-life is that it’s burdened with excrescences. Being pro-life means you must support the “battle” against “climate change”, it means you must support this or that new tax or regulation, it means you must support anti-lock brakes, it means you must support people using expired coupons at the grocery store, and on and on and on, in what they laughingly call a “seamless garment”.
Go naked instead of wearing this thing.
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Protect the innocent.
Punish the guilty.
It really is that simple.
Amen.
Abortion literally IS murder for convenience. There is no other way to describe it. There are all kinds of justifications and sob stories and misdirection plays and sophistic pretzels one can weave to attempt to use, but when yo get down to it, those who advocate for abortion are advocating that some aspect of their own life is more important than the life itself of an unborn person who has no say in the matter.
So, yes, there’s no need to whitewash it and pretend that those who agitate for it have some kind of moral respectability. The truth is, they start from a moral deficit by virtue of the position they advocate.
The putative pro-life position is pro choice. is not outright proabortion and the pro-life movement doesn’t; think women are reasonable or responsible moral agents/adults.
The late great Zippy Catholic nailed all of the pro-life claptrap to the wall.
https://zippycatholic.wordpress.com/?s=abortion
I think life in prison is a much harsher punishment, besides which from State to State
between five and eight percent of people that have been executed in the past have
ex post facto been conclusively proven to have been innocent. Life in prison without
the possibility of parole gives them everyday to think about what they’ve done, death
is an easy out.
“You can’t be pro-life and pro-death penalty.”
Ok, I accept your terms. Ban abortion and I’ll gladly do away with the death penalty. If keeping murderers in jail for the rest of their lives is the trade-off to save a million innocent lives a year, I’m fine with that.
To be honest, I’m a little anti death penalty myself. I don’t have a problem with the morality of it, killing murderers is justice. But honestly I don’t trust our corrupt system to get it right (or more to the point, not get it wrong) enough of the time so I can live without it.
My Chinese daughter was born 16 years ago. At the time, abortion was free. It would have been more convenient for her birth mother to take that route. Instead, she carried her to term and in the predawn hours, placed her on the steps of the local police station. She has grown into a lovely young woman. When her classmates try to get her to change her view on abortion, she asks if they don’t care whether she exists or not. Instead of answering her question, they trot out the tired “my body, my choice”. Her rejoinder; “my body, my life”.
I have always loved the Oreilly idea ( Bill) hard labor in Alaska for the rest of their lives. I think the taking of a life is God’s Domain. But the hypocrisy of abortionists is they even use this. Its like that in Covid, climate change, where it’s a matter of dictating one’s beliefs on another and then calling the person that resists it, what they are actually doing. It’s a Marxist tactic. The counter is, at least the guy being executed had a chance at life and he did something that demands a response. What has any fetus in the womb ever done to anyone except bring joy to those who love life and have ethical values or angst to those that don’t
”Don’t bother trying to defend the term. Instead say, “I’m not pro-life. I’m pro-execution”, or just “I’m pro-capital punishment”, or any of the obvious variants.”
Good advice. “Pro-life” is compromised. The enemy’s buzzwords — “racism”, “sexism”, et cetera, are trojans. If you are so foolish as to click on one it loads leftist malware into your unprotected wetdrive turning you into a zombie who staggers about spewing infectious diabolicalismo. Terrible fate. There’s no point arguing with an infected zombie, as host said, and you can’t just shoot ‘em, but if you’re smart you can respond — without clicking on the buzzword — in ways that mess with their programming and make it painful to be a zombie.
“Its wrong to eat your baby.”
“I’m not eating my baby!”
“Why not?— you should eat what you kill.”
“Then why don’t you eat that convict you executed?”
“I only like white meat.”
Have fun people.
And at some point, soon I pray, all the, um… Nigerian Princes, who are creating all the tricky bots spreading corruption will need to be stopped.
But, until then, never click on a trick trojan buzzword. Instead
Brava, Miss H!
And bravo, Brian, too!
Bravi!
Some cutting room errata on the floor there, but not such bad stuff.
“Don’t bother trying to defend the term. ”
I’m fine with anti-infanticide.
Abortion is about a woman’s right to bang whatever moves without consequence as they believe men do. What is or not a human being inside them matters not. Either men get pregnant or women get to have abortions. That’s their viewpoint–equality. Both have consequences or neither do.
I’m not so sure abortion is the hill to die on, I can think of others like the one we’re on right
now. Don’t get me wrong I’m ethically and morally opposed but if you look at the Godless
proponents who avail themselves of the procedure who’s to say their progeny will be of any
great loss to the human project? This should be evident in the recent BLM/Antifa movements
manifesting in our sedentary welfare dependent liberal enclaves. There’s an old saying about
not interrupting your enemy when he’s in the process of destroying himself, it’s sounds horrible
and cynical until Realpolitik intrudes.
I’ve been saying for awhile that I’m pro-Justice.
Capital punishment is justice done to the guilty deserving of it, and from a Catholic perspective also expiates their sin on Earth in whole or partially before they stand before the Divine Judge.
Innocent people should not be murdered.
Hence, innocent children, babies in the womb, being killed is an injustice.
I also believe we admit openly that if it was right to hang Nazis at Nuremberg, then a similar charge of crimes against humanity can be laid upon the entire abortion industry, and abortionists, like high ranking Nazis, are also liable for prosecution and the death penalty.
These lefty idiots are all about Justice, right?
Well, I’m here to help!
“who’s to say their progeny will be of any great loss to the human project?”
God, the author of life, who put them there, obviously disagrees.
Every human souls is potential.
While the majority are mediocre, and a sizeable number are evil, the minority of the good alone is enough to justify tolerating the rest.
It’s the same thing in economics and society, as one Dr. Jordan Peterson often takes pain to say, as it turns out a minority of people are the ones who truly do the enormous bulk of the work.
So too for those who’d classify as saints in life. Don’t underestimate their contributions, which outweigh the morons. You never know where these diamonds will turn up. We all need to do our part to at least let those born to the dregs to know that they are not a random by-product of stupid human activity, remind them that the evolutionist scientists are morons, and even if they are unloved by their parents, something far greater put them here and even for His own reasons decided that they should have specifically been born to these, and those reasons are always good, even if they risk exiting the womb in pieces.
No child is an accident, and we have no right to decide they didn’t need to be here, regardless of how they wound up here.
Fredo: “I’m not so sure abortion is the hill to die on…”
You may be right on that but I didn’t take Briggs main point to be aborticide, per se, but rather to beware loaded buzzwords, and to suggest rhetorical strategies that work and those that don’t.
Dean… Briggs’ mind is far too subtle for me to follow I’m but a simple blunt
rhetorical instrument. He’s right though the assault on language and word
meaning is an Orwellian instrument of the Left the Right must learn to wield
with a greater degree of precision.
ABS: ““The putative pro-life position is pro choice. is not outright proabortion and the pro-life movement doesn’t; think women are reasonable or responsible moral agents/adults.”
You may want to rewrite that. -ed
“The late great Zippy Catholic nailed all of the pro-life claptrap to the wall.”
The Late Great Zippy was truly a master with a nail gun.
I’m not so sure abortion is the hill to die on, I can think of others like the one we’re on right
now. Don’t get me wrong I’m ethically and morally opposed but if you look at the Godless
proponents who avail themselves of the procedure who’s to say their progeny will be of any
great loss to the human project?
This is a deeply disturbing and vile thing to say.
All,
The point is this: never use the enemy’s language.
”The point is this: never use the enemy’s language”
But if I never use the enemy’s language, how can I speak? — how can I even think!?
Oh man, someone gimme a glass of kool-aid!
Dean
It can be overwhelming
Are you old enough too remember when someone whose wife shall remain nameless questioned what the word ‘is’ meant?
Look at Mazie Hirono told us all how Sexual Preference was an offensive term and Dictionary dot com literally changed their definition of the word the next day (maybe that night) to reflect just that
Look at what Defund the Police means to those who know the REAL meaning:
https://www.theatlantic.com/ideas/archive/2020/06/what-does-defund-police-really-mean/612904/
Watch Friday’s episode of Dan Bongino
“Pro-life was a good term in its day. Its meaning was clear to all, with no explanation needed. Everybody knew its definition: against the killing of the lives inside would-be mothers. Against the murder of innocents so that ladies could go shopping. ”
“Ladies?” Even the designation ‘women’ is too kind for the greatest mass murderers in human history, by orders of magnitude. Females, by accident of birth (which they were allowed to experience), nothing more. Genuine ladies are something to behold and they are in a completely different universe than the vile creatures who pay hit men to murder their own children.
No Malcom abortion is the thing that is deeply disturbing and vile as are those who engage
in or support it. The fact is abortion is a liberal white agenda item they have morphed
into a right that I wouldn’t presume to deny them. They are the ones who have
made it seamless and on demand especially in communities of color, what might
that say about motivation?
Re: Never use the enemy’s language, the one that bugs me the most is “Democratic Party”. It’s gotten so bad that I will often stop reading an article at the first usage of the term. It’s so easy to substitute “the Democrats” that I take “Democratic Party” as a dog-whistle.
On the very rare occasion that I discuss the abortion issue, I say that I’m “anti-choice”, which invariably leads to a clarification question, to which I respond “if by choice you mean one person choosing whether another person lives or dies, then I’m definitely anti-choice”.
You can most certainly be pro life and for the death penalty. Pro life, at least used to mean simply against abortion. I am not for the death penalty because DNA has been proving people have been incarcerated falsely for years. Only GOD can take revenge with full knowledge of guilt. But, I can see how one could be against killing an innocent child – the future – and for putting to death some accused of an heinous crime.
I may not be 100% in line with conventional “pro-life” OR “anti-abortion” thinking on this. Yes, I believe that all abortion is ABHORRENT……it is a savage and beastly affair. Nonetheless, until the fetus is viable, I will hold both my tongue and my judgment……as difficult as that may be to do. Here, I indeed say to the woman, It’s your body…do what you will.”
However, once the fetus has attained viability, it is another ARGUMENT ENTIRELY……..At that point in fetal development we have two separate entities to consider. It is now the woman’s body AND the body of a nascent human being, and here I believe that society has the right to say “NO!”
I believe that it was Justice Sandra Day O’Connor who recognized that Roe vs. Wade was “On a collision course” with itself, and therein lies the rub. The trimester standard (which has subsequently been somewhat negated by court decisions) is meaningless as medical science steadily pushes back the point of viability. Still, we must be diligent in closely monitoring the medical developments and err in favor of the developing infant when we set the abortion limit.
Beyond the point of viability, abortion is barbarism pure and simple. No civilized culture should allowed it!
I think that we would fare better in the societal argument if we made our stand on the issue of viability, rather than on the broader, fuzzier concept of “life.”
As for post-birth abortion, which is the direction the radical left seems to be heading, I believe that the proper term is MURDER IN THE FIRST DEGREE for which criminal prosecution is necessary!
Now, turning to the issue of the death penalty, I refuse to be drawn into arguing a false dichotomy. Protecting an innocent life can not be compared to taking the life of a miscreant who has so far crossed the lines of decent humanity that he meets the towering threshold required for its implementation. I simply will not countenance that argument. Only a fool would make such an argument and only a bigger fool will give it credence.
Nonetheless, until the fetus is viable, I will hold both my tongue and my judgment……as difficult as that may be to do. Here, I indeed say to the woman, It’s your body…do what you will.”
It’s anecdotal, but it’s more evidence for my theory that pro-choice arguments are worse than just evil: They are abominably bad.
No Malcom abortion is the thing that is deeply disturbing and vile as are those who engage
in or support it.
It isn’t either or. Unlike you I am not okay with permitting the murder of children because I don’t like their parents.
Do people even realize what they’re saying half the time?