Secular Leftists Support, Christians Oppose The Death Penalty

Actually, one of the things one can laud the Roman Church for is consistency w.r.t. life. Human life is sacred always and everywhere. That means no execution, no abortion, no euthanasia. (They've got huge problems elsewhere, but they are consistent here.) The 'Evangelical Right Wingers' who say 'abortion is murder', but yell for the death penalty really have a serious problem of consistency.

And. IF you take the view that a fertilized egg is a 'human being' with full human rights, then it follows that abortion IS murder. And excommunicating people who publicly advocate murder makes sense.

Personally, of course, I believe the initial premise is false, and so therefore are the conclusions. But, as I say, if you start from those premises, the least you can do is follow through on them. Which the RC church does.
 
The 'Evangelical Right Wingers' who say 'abortion is murder', but yell for the death penalty really have a serious problem of consistency.
Not the way some of them see it. They would call abortion murder because it targets an innocent person, one who has not and can not have done anything wrong, while a convicted mass murderer is not an innocent, and the whole game changes.
 

Teleology

Banned
Any group in power for a long time tends to be more "conservative", wanting to preserve the status quo; and in many societies the death penalty is the status quo.

If socialists are in power and have been for a while, they'll probably be used to the death penalty (if they didn't abolish it upon getting into power and have basically been living with it for a long time, that is) and have supported it to appear tough on crime plenty of times; whereas the Christian reformers not in power have no legislative record to hold a new anti-death-penalty attitude against them.
 
One possible factor: "You're having doubts about capital punishment? What are you, one of those knuckle-dragging biblethumpers?" It pops up as a pro-choice argument in OTL.

A harder left is a possibility: "The proletariat has a right to protect itself from parasites and class enemies!"
 
John Paul II had a chat with Bush re: the Iraq War.

If the RCC had started excommunicating people or putting the U.S. under interdict, wouldn't you consider that un-democratic?

(I remember you said if the RCC had put the U.S. under interdict re: abortion, it would call into question the compatibility of Catholicism and democracy.)

Not talking about the fact that it would be heavy handed overt political meddling that would likely drive many Catholics in the US into Protestantism. The Catholic Church has been slowly moving away from such overt political meddling for the last couple centuries or so for just such reasons.
 
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