A question for religious conservatives.

[PJ]

A question for pro-lifers:

If you are against abortion on moral/religious grounds, wouldn't you also be opposed to the death penalty, euthanasia, and wars in the middle east? So if you are a republican, why does abortion/euthanasia outweigh death penalty/middle east wars. Why doesn't the church give the death penalty as much attention?

[TJ in Oregon]

First, I am against the death penalty and euthanasia.

The Church doesn't emphasize euthanasia in the US particularly much because it isn't legal in most of the country. There have been situations where it has become a political issue and the Church has tried to stop it (most notably Massachusetts). Otherwise it's in the slippery-slope-fear realm of political discourse in most of the US.

I agree the Church hasn't really campaigned much about banning the death penalty and hasn't really done anything at all besides stating that it should be banned. I think this would be a larger issue if we actually used the death penalty within, say, a couple orders of magnitude of the frequency of abortion. Additionally, the Church doesn't actually teach that the death penalty is an intrinsic evil in the same way as abortion or euthanasia, only that prudence dictates we not use it in basically every relevant situation in the US. Regardless given the frequency of its use compared with the frequency of abortion, I can't see it becoming a huge political issue for the Church.

For the Middle East wars, the right answer is that it depends on the war. Some were clearly justified, such as the first Iraq War and the War in Afghanistan. Some, like the Iraq War, were clearly not. Regardless of that, there is a difference between killing an active enemy combatant in war and killing an innocent civilian. While the fact that the Iraq War itself occurred was illicit, but that doesn't mean any American soldier who took part committed a grave sin. Once a war has already been started, to immediately cease and desist isn't always a prudent course of action. A war isn't a few thousand individual instances of killing.

As to why abortion receives more attention, the answer comes down to statistics. We simply have more abortions than anything else.

[Kitteh]

This meme is extremely stupid and inane and people should stop using it to try and sound smart. "If you say you believe abortion is murder then why don't you believe these other things are murder?'...like most facebook argument talking points it sounds really ridiculous if you remove the buzzwords and boil it down to what it's actually saying.

[True Federalist (진정한 연방 주의자)]

A question for pro-lifers:

If you are against abortion on moral/religious grounds, wouldn't you also be opposed to the death penalty, euthanasia, and wars in the middle east? So if you are a republican, why does abortion/euthanasia outweigh death penalty/middle east wars. Why doesn't the church give the death penalty as much attention?

Well, first off, while the commandment is oft translated, "Thou shalt not kill." a more accurate translation would be "Thou halt not murder." (The Hebrew would also include voluntary manslaughter in that category.)  So really the idea that a religious conservative ought to be against the use of the death penalty in all cases whatsoever, is bogus.  To the degree that they might be opposed to it, it would be because of concerns over whether capital defendants are able to obtain a just trial, not because of the irreligiousity of the death penalty itself.

Similarly, war in the context of a just war is allowed. (Romans 13:4 is oft cited to support that just war is permissible.) One can question whether the fighting we are currently engaged in meets the definition of being a just war.  I think the mission in Afghanistan meets the criteria with the only real question being whether the tactic of drone strikes does.

[H. Ross Peron]

I'm a Democrat but I'm firmly against abortion and very sceptical at best about legalized euthanasia [1] so I'll attempt to answer this.

I think this stems from considering murdering human life to be equal to killing human life when those are not the same. Murder is the killing of human life without sufficient reasons or cause (or no reason or cause at all) and therefore would not include certain categories of taking of human life.

In the specific cases of the death penalty and Middle East wars:

I believe the death penalty is morally justified for certain offenses (primarily murder and rape) but I'm opposed to it practically speaking due to the potential of an innocent person being executed, discrimination in death penalties being handed out, and the heavy costs of carrying out the death penalty. I'd only support it in specific cases of multiple murder to ensure guilt but I'm fine with total abolition of the death penalty provided the sentence of life without parole is retained.

I believe certain wars are justified and so I decide whether I support a war or not on a case-by-case basis. For that reason I supported Afghanistan but the War in Iraq.

[1] In cases where patients can actually give consent, things such as the Groningen protocal OTOH can firmly be considered murder.

[DC Al Fine]

A question for pro-lifers:

If you are against abortion on moral/religious grounds, wouldn't you also be opposed to the death penalty, euthanasia, and wars in the middle east? So if you are a republican, why does abortion/euthanasia outweigh death penalty/middle east wars. Why doesn't the church give the death penalty as much attention?

The other posters have answered the first question, so let me look at the other two.

When the media talks about religious conservatism, they typically mean evangelicals. Catholics like TJ or Confessional Protestants like me are left out of the equation. I get the sense that you are doing the same thing when you refer to "the church". It's an important distinction to make because different churches have very different stances.

As for the Republican party, abortion/SSM are the big issues for two reasons.

• The GOP has a large Evangelical contingent
• Abortion is viewed as the greatest tragedy of our era

Since the GOP has such a large contingent of Evangelicals, it won't protest foreign wars/death penalty, especially foreign wars since Evangelicals have a long-standing love affair with Israel and the wars are perceived as defending it. It's simply not practical to push anti death penalty as your main issue with the GOP

There have been roughly 50 million abortions since Roe v Wade, so from a numbers point of view it makes sense to focus on that issue; every other issue you cited doesn't come to abortion's death toll.

As one of my friends put it, "being political and not focusing on abortion is like running against the Nazis and only attacking their tax plan". Abortion is viewed as THE issue among large swathes of the social conservative movement. It is regarded as the great evil of our age, so of course it makes sense that we'll focus our efforts on it.