Virginia Lawmakers Vote to Abolish Death Penalty
https://www.newsmax.com/newsfront/virginia-death-penalty-capital-punishment-democrats/2021/02/05/id/1008819/

Capital punishment is one of the most clear-cut, legitimate uses of the authority and power of the state that one can fathom. This decision by the State of Virginia is disappointing. Some might wonder how a Catholic conservative could so strongly defend capital punishment. Others might say “but you’re pro-life, aren’t you? How can you be pro-life and pro-death penalty?” Let us start with the article and go from there.

The first thing you notice about the decision in the Virginia legislature is that it was driven by Democrats and will be signed into law by a Democrat governor. The same people who enjoy facilitating the murder of innocent children within their mother’s womb (and after birth as one Democrat governor is famed to have once described on a radio show) also support the abolition of the death penalty. If I am inconsistent for being pro-life and pro-death penalty, then these Democrats are inconsistent in exactly the opposite fashion, no? Neither side is being inconsistent in this case but is rather following their philosophy to its logical endpoint.

Either we are moral beings with free will who can merit reward and punishment for our actions, or we are not. If the former is true, then law and punishment make sense. If the latter is true, then no one merits anything, let alone punishment for their actions. We can disagree about where the line is, for which the death penalty is appropriate, but if you agree that we have free will and can merit punishment then you must necessarily grant that there can be crimes for which the death penalty is the only proportionate punishment. Otherwise, you are left to an incoherent position where, for example, repeat violent offenders who did not kill or rape anyone somehow deserve the exact same punishment as the serial killer who rapes and murders his victims, life in prison. How is that just?

Leftists are being consistent when they seek to abolish the death penalty because their philosophy (or anti-philosophy) and its logical endpoints drive one to a position where human beings do not have inherent dignity and worth, nor do they truly merit proportionate punishment for their actions. Instead, we are all simply cogs in the machine, and if you put the right people in control of the machine, then you can somehow “fix” human nature and forcefully provide the most equitable good for the most identity groups. Why not murder a baby in the womb? It has no dignity. Why would we put to death a serial rapist and murderer? His victims had no dignity or worth and therefore they “merit” no retributive justice.

To be caught in the trap of believing that it is somehow merciful and just to abolish the death penalty is to give up the farm entirely. We cannot allow the left to trick us into accepting their premise that human beings cannot merit proportionate punishment for their actions. If we do, then we are also admitting that they cannot merit rewards and therefore everything the left says about how the government, not the individual or God, should decide their worth, their wages, their purpose, etc. goes with it.