As someone recently told me, they don’t worry about saving lives, they worry about saving souls.
You need to abide by the quaint rules of the magical sky daddy for that, even if they don’t make sense.
How come people who are against abortion are in favor of the death penalty? Kind of seems like a contradicition/
Submitted 2 months ago by Don_Dickle@lemmy.world to [deleted]
Comments
vzq@lemmy.world 2 months ago
BlameThePeacock@lemmy.ca 2 months ago
Except clearly any aborted fetus would immediately go to heaven based on what’s written in the bible. In fact, heaven should be absolutely completely full of dead babies based on miscarriages, stillbirths, etc. if you believe that they get a soul at the moment of conception.
So that logic doesn’t really make sense either. Which is par for the course.
slickgoat@lemmy.world 2 months ago
Actually, nobody goes to heaven when they die (according to the bible). Everyone must wait until judgement day when all the graves, etc, open and we all face judgement at that point. This surprised me when I first learned it because it goes against all the Christian culture I’ve ever been taught and experienced.
So grandma isn’t currently in heaven no matter how good she was.
vzq@lemmy.world 2 months ago
Uhh no? Non-baptized souls go to limbo according to Christian theology.
Lost_My_Mind@lemmy.world 2 months ago
I was juuuuuuust about to explain how making sense isn’t a requirement to them, until I saw your last sentence. Then I knew you already get it.
cheese_greater@lemmy.world 2 months ago
I dont think it really has anything to do with that. A state recently sued due to abortion and teen pregnancy reduction efforts leading to decreased teenage pregnancy rates arguing something along the lines of our populations are going down and it will cost us in population, political representation, and federal resources.
This is about cheap/free labor, permanent disabled and poverty-stricken underclasses that keep everyone on up in line with the hierarchy
barsquid@lemmy.world 2 months ago
But the Skyfather himself has given us directions to induce a miscarriage with a tabernacle dust smoothie.
Sibbo@sopuli.xyz 2 months ago
Arguably, an unborn baby cannot be guilty of anything. But an adult sentenced to death is often guilty of some horrible crime. So if you accept killing as a punishment, there is no contradiction.
Lost_My_Mind@lemmy.world 2 months ago
Until you realize that our court system is FULL of false arrests, and the courts have some stupid high number like 98% conviction rate.
They say “take the deal, or the court will fuck you”.
2 years vs 30 years.
And then later they run a second trial for something else that has a death penalty as the outcome. The jury is shown this guy, already in prison, for a semi-related charge. Already convicted of the other charge. So his ability to appear innocent is already swayed. And now suddenly there’s no deal. The court goes full hammer. The jury is made to believe he did it 100%.
And he can’t say he didn’t do it, and wasn’t even there, because he ALREADY pleaded guilty to the other charge which would place him there.
So now you got a populace, who wasn’t in either court session, not seeing how this escalated, and not willing to believe our court system may be flawed. Just kill the criminal and move on, right?
theywilleatthestars@lemmy.world 2 months ago
They’re obsessed with punishment. A lot of them see unwanted pregnancy as a just punishment for recreational sex.
EatATaco@lemm.ee 2 months ago
It only sounds like a contradiction if you take “pro-life” literally. In fact, I find this hard to understand at all if you simply just listen to pro-lifers.
Let me be clear, I’m about as firm a supporter of a woman’s right to choose as they come. I’m also adamantly against the death penalty. Do you find this position to be contradictory?
However, the general position of “pro lifers” does not contradict this at all, pretty obviously. They think that a fetus is a child that hasn’t been born yet, and because it hasn’t been born, it’s completely innocent. So you have no right to take it’s life. However, if some person in life has done something in life that removes that innocence, they believe sometimes that rises to such a heinous level that they must be permanently and irrevocably removed from society.
There are other glaring contradictions in their position, like not wanting to provide support to that innocent baby once it has come into the world, but this is clearly not one of them.
Etterra@lemmy.world 1 month ago
I’m pro choice but also anti-death penalty, but only because if someone is horrible enough to deserve it then they don’t deserve death, because death is the easy way out of suffering. They deserve to live long, miserable lives in a 3-meter cell.
angrystego@lemmy.world 2 months ago
I think they just see it as very simple: killing innocent babies - no, killing evil criminals - yes. It sounds perfectly alright if you don’t think aboit it too much.
C126@sh.itjust.works 2 months ago
My understanding is that they consider it ok to kill someone who committed a heinous crime but not ok to kill someone who is completely innocent.
atx_aquarian@lemmy.world 2 months ago
This is exactly how I used to see things when I grew up in a conservative echo chamber.
And now that I recognize a person’s right to choose and tend to think capital punishment should probably* not be legal, I’ll add that it’s not that my underlying beliefs changed, just how I now understand things. Some people do deserve capital punishment. And innocent people should be protected. But personhood doesn’t start at conception, a person conceiving has a right to decide what happens to their body, and the state can never be trusted to administer capital punishment.
*I say “probably” because I also think it might be necessary to allow it in extreme cases. My reasoning is that if people don’t believe the justice system will adequately punish, they have incentive and no ultimate detergent for taking justice into their own hands.
BigDanishGuy@sh.itjust.works 2 months ago
But should we even punish?
I don’t mean to troll, so let me explain. Why do we punish? I think it’s two fold, we punish to deter crimes and we punish to exact revenge. But the fear of punishment doesn’t deter crime nij.ojp.gov/…/five-things-about-deterrence and that leaves revenge as the only both intended and actual outcome of punishment.
Is the current costs of running a complicated criminal justice system really worth it, if all we get from it is revenge? Does revenge make society better? I don’t think so.
I’m not advocating for anarchy either. There should be consequences for criminals. I’m just not sure what the consequences should be, but punishment is ineffective. I get that we have personal responsibility, and free will. And I’m not trying to excuse criminals, I’m just saying that punishment doesn’t work.
fine_sandy_bottom@lemmy.federate.cc 2 months ago
It doesn’t work as a deterrent though. In states that have the death penalty people still do bad things.
sanpedropeddler@sh.itjust.works 2 months ago
Because people receiving the death penalty theoretically did something wrong, and fetuses did not. I’m neither against abortion nor pro death penalty, and I don’t really see a contradiction there.
OccamsRazer@lemmy.world 2 months ago
That wasn’t so hard, was it? People tripping over themselves to find a gotcha and forgetting to use a little common sense.
CosmicTurtle0@lemmy.dbzer0.com 2 months ago
Former Christian here.
This is it. Criminals have (theoretically) been proven guilty. Some crimes are worthy of death.
A fetus (ahem unborn baby) has cast no sin and does not deserve death.
Christians would also say that they would never get out to death because they would never do anything wrong but when you bring up the fact that Jesus himself said you should be willing to suffer even to the point of suffering on a cross, they start changing the subject.
SharkEatingBreakfast@sopuli.xyz 2 months ago
Because they don’t care about “life”.
They care about punishing people.
bamfic@lemmy.world 2 months ago
An unwanted unplanned baby is punishment for having sex outside of marriage.
Death penalty is punishment for being convicted of murder.
It’s perfectly consistent when you look at it all about punishment.
The cruelty is indeed the point
WoahWoah@lemmy.world 2 months ago
The death penalty doesn’t control women.
umt@lemmynsfw.com 2 months ago
It’s a pastime of liberal pundits to point out that the pro-life governor of some flyover state also supports the death penalty and so on and so forth. We get incredulous and infuriated at their blatant hypocrisy. We call them stupid, which really sets them off […] They don’t think of themselves as self-serving hypocrites or idiots who can’t keep their facts straight long enough to form a cogent argument in continuity with the rest of their ideology. We try to describe this as “cognitive dissonance” or other give other armchair diagnosis that doesn’t fully capture what’s going on. I’d like to give them more credit than that. They clearly believe in something, and in that context their words and actions would make sense, but it’s not what they’re self-advertising when you ask what they believe in.
From still the best description of american conservative thought I’ve read: an essay by u/kin7es: wiki.dlma.com/belief-system-of-republicans
kautau@lemmy.world 2 months ago
Everyone has a spot on the big food pyramid of the socio-political hierarchy. Good, smart, and hardworking people of merit make their way to the top. Bad, dumb, and lazy people go to the bottom. For convenience sake, this hierarchy is color-coded. In a zero-sum world, everyone who gets to the top has to knock someone down a rung to make room.
I would argue this is how republican voters think. That they’re in the right because they are voting for the right of the individual. But on the other hand I think Republican policy makers give zero shits about a person’s self worth and actualization but rather they know that they need to feed the machine and we need the poor babies born to do so, and on the other hand they can demonstrate some form of moral high ground by deciding life and death.
There’s no death penalty for defrauding elections, molding the healthcare (or really any corporate) system to work for harm and profit, avoiding taxation through infinite shell companies and offshore bank accounts. Those things are celebrated as “beating the system”
Still to this day everyone that claims “Plandemic” is chasing some invisible elite power structure that somehow only includes democrats, without ever getting mad at the corporations that profited immensely off developing covid vaccines and charging market price for them as a portion of the world was dying.
rozodru@lemmy.world 2 months ago
Because it’s not about saving lives, it never has been. It’s about control.
ragepaw@lemmy.ca 2 months ago
Because it’s never been about anything other than control. The right to choose anything is abhorrent to them. The only rights they want you to have are the right to be dictated to and the right to be like them.
Nemo@slrpnk.net 2 months ago
It’s not all the same people: Roman Catholics, for example, tend to oppose both.
dhork@lemmy.world 2 months ago
Roman Catholic doctrine opposes both, but the bishops don’t go around threatening to withhold religious services for politicians who allow the death penalty like they do with pro-choice politicians…
CosmicTurtle0@lemmy.dbzer0.com 2 months ago
I could have sworn that there was a news story of Peloci being denied the sacrament due to her supporting an abortion bill.
some_guy@lemmy.sdf.org 2 months ago
contradiction
You’ve discovered conservative politics. Party of freedom that wants to restrict women’s access to healthcare, books in schools, reproductive rights, healthcare for children, etc.
Dainterhawk999@lemmy.world 2 months ago
Ain’t Taliban follows the method of Eradicating women empowerment!
ArbitraryValue@sh.itjust.works 2 months ago
There’s no logical contradiction between believing that some people should be killed and believing that other people shouldn’t be killed. You might as well ask why a soldier would shoot at his enemies but not his allies.
linearchaos@lemmy.world 2 months ago
In the end, it’s because they’re told that that’s the way it is.
Abortion makes a an easy political point. Vote for the children.
Being hard on crime and executing people, That’s another easy political point. Vote for the law abiding citizens.
They don’t care that those two things are at odds They don’t care about life or death. They care about their own exact situation, and don’t really give a rat’s ass about anyone else. They believe that the team they’re backing gives them the best advantage, and that’s absolutely all they care about. Beyond that, it’s simply consuming and regurgitating the propaganda, self-perpetuating.
Yeller_king@reddthat.com 2 months ago
They would argue that the “baby” is innocent.
LifeInMultipleChoice@lemmy.world 2 months ago
So was the guy they executed the other day right? So innocence might not be it either
Draconic_NEO@lemmy.world 2 months ago
They don’t actually care about life, they just don’t want women to have control over their bodies.
november@lemmy.vg 2 months ago
Kind of seems like a contradiction
They don’t care. There’s no point in calling conservatives out on hypocrisy. Only a very small number of them will give a shit, and those will be the ones who were already having doubts.
TheBrideWoreCrimson@sopuli.xyz 2 months ago
Precisely this. From a philosophical-logical POV, it doesn’t make sense. From the POV of establishing and maintaining power/ dominance/ oppression/ hegemony, however, it’s the only thing that makes sense.
Bytemeister@lemmy.world 2 months ago
I’m pro-choice, but mostly anti-death penalty, isn’t that a contradiction?
I don’t really think so. A person’s bodily autonomy and the state’s power to execute citizens should not overlap.
Seasoned_Greetings@lemm.ee 2 months ago
I think it’s not necessarily a contradiction to hold your pro-choice and anti-death penalty stance, but it’s still a contradiction to hold the pro-life and pro-death penalty stance if your reasoning behind the pro-life stance is that all life is sacred.
I agree that a person’s body autonomy and the state’s power to execute citizens should not overlap, but I still think that giving the “all life is sacred” line to justify pro-life and then being pro death penalty amounts to hypocrisy.
technocrit@lemmy.dbzer0.com 2 months ago
Forced birthers don’t actually care about “life”. They care about violently controlling women.
Walk_blesseD@lemmy.blahaj.zone 2 months ago
Because with reactionaries, the cruelty is the point.
chalupapocalypse@lemmy.world 2 months ago
Because they are hypocrites, once that baby leaves the womb they give zero fucks.
Don’t get an abortion, also we aren’t paying for that kids lunch
Nosavingthrow@lemmy.world 2 months ago
IS it a contradiction? I don’t agree with the death penalty or anti-abortion position, but I don’t see some essential link between either position. You can hold two different beliefs about two different things is how come.
CileTheSane@lemmy.ca 2 months ago
They literally call themselves pro-life and then express support for the death penalty.
Nosavingthrow@lemmy.world 2 months ago
Sure, but OP didn’t ask, ‘How can people call themselves pro-life but are be for the death penalty?’ I’m not one to hang onto whatever catch phrases or name a movement lands with. I expect the land back movement to, say, lay down on the ground as a for of protest? ‘BUT LAND BACK IS IN THE NAAAAAAAME’. Do we think defund the police want there to be nobody to apprehend, say, right-wing terrorists?
Ixoid@lemm.ee 1 month ago
It’s not about ethics, it never was. It’s about CONTROL.
scarabic@lemmy.world 2 months ago
Liberals in favor of reproductive rights also tend to be against the death penalty. Is that a contradiction? Conservatives love twisting this into “they want to kill babies, not criminals.”
Do you think they’re right about that? Or is it more nuanced of an issue? If it’s more nuanced of an issue, then it’s more nuanced in both directions.
Liberals prioritize the woman’s ability to decide what happens with her body. They don’t like abortions, but they think they must be allowed if that’s what the woman chooses. They also recognize that it’s a medical procedure that’s absolutely necessary sometimes and other times might prevent an unwanted child from being born into bad circumstances. Meanwhile, liberals tend to be against the death penalty because our justice system is very flawed and innocent people have been put to death in the past. Perhaps a woman is allowed to decide what happens to a congregation of cells inside her body, but people shouldn’t decide the life or death of other people when imprisonment is always there as an option.
Conservatives think in terms of essentials and things are very black and white. It’s either a baby or it isn’t. They think life comes from god so it’s his affair and not our place to countermand a new life that he’s just brought into being. Meanwhile if a grown person with a mind chooses to commit crimes, that’s on them. God makes some pretty hard judgments in the Bible so they think great we can too and that will make us like god. Conservatives also tend to believe that some people are essentially good, and others are essentially bad. And in that framework, once a person has shown themselves to be a criminal, you know they are bad so what’s the point of letting them live. Meanwhile you have no idea if a fetus in the womb will be good or bad yet.
Please don’t downvote me for understanding both positions :)
whoisearth@lemmy.ca 2 months ago
I’m pro abortion and against the death penalty! Someone ask me! I promise I’m not a troll. I am honestly pro abortion not just pro choice.
Moobythegoldensock@lemm.ee 2 months ago
What do you mean by that? You’re an anti-natalist?
whoisearth@lemmy.ca 2 months ago
Nope. I actually think life is sacred. The reason I’m pro-abortion is because I think anything that can be done to further impede children being born when we have hundreds of thousands of children in America alone who are orphans. That is a travesty.
My challenge to anyone who is anti-abortion would be are they adopting? Because their shit position is perpetuating a stream of children being born without someone to care for them either physically or emotionally.
In a perfect world, abortion would not exist outside of medical necessity. Unfortunately we do not live in a perfect world and as such many women are having children to be born into a cold and loveless world.
It’s sad. I could not imagine how cruel someone would have to be to be anti-abortion and yet so willing to effectively let a child’s life be aborted once they’re born.
technocrit@lemmy.dbzer0.com 2 months ago
I think they’re pro-edgelord
clay_pidgin@sh.itjust.works 2 months ago
I mean, I think that’s a reasonably common position on the left. Not particularly unusual.
whoisearth@lemmy.ca 2 months ago
Pro-choice yes. Haven’t heard many actually pro-abortion.
cranakis@reddthat.com 2 months ago
I blame religion.
beefbot@lemmy.blahaj.zone 2 months ago
They’re both cruel to anyone “below” them (this is a simplistic argument.) They’re easy to cry wolf about in order to draw people over to your side, people who vote and act emotionally
PunnyName@lemmy.world 2 months ago
Punishment. They aren’t against abortion, they’re pro punishment. They don’t think any laws should be about mitigation or helping, only as a means of punishing.
It’s in how they talk, “she should have kept her legs closed”, “that’s what you get for being a slut”, “if you don’t want to have a baby, don’t have sex”. The pregnancy is a punishment for anyone who wants to have sex, but doesn’t want to have children. And jail or death is the punishment for avoiding that previous punishment.
When taking about gun control, too, “why should I - a law abiding citizen - be punished for the actions of a few criminals?” “ShAlL noT bE INfrInGeD”. They don’t want laws to do anything but punish. Mitigation? Expansion of freedoms of “them”? No
Look at voter ID laws, they’re restrictive to our freedom, but proposed as punishment for “fraud”.
And it often stems from an individualistic and Evangelical ideal. Everyone is “responsible” for their actions. There are no systemic issues in the mind of an evangelical. God is punishing the individual. The laws are punishing individuals. We don’t need to change, because we includes I, and I don’t need to change, because “I’m a good Christian warrior in the fight against evil”.
And evangelicals definitely think there is a spiritual war going on, so punishment of the “wicked” is always an option. Because being wicked is an individual issue.
(Also why they think drug addiction is a moral failing of the individual, not a societal one, and therefore they should be punished).
Right now, evangelicalism and their Christofascist views are moving into political positions of power. They have tons of money coming in, and even if Fuckface 45 (their evangelical God-king warrior) doesn’t get into office, they’ll still continue to influence policy and grab seats of power.
We need to be aware of them, and stop them at every pass.
Shardikprime@lemmy.world 2 months ago
I’ll just say that able minded people, usually adults, are usually responsible of their actions.
CM400@lemmy.world 2 months ago
Just guessing here, but I’d assume it’s because the unborn have potential and the bad guys had their chance. I don’t agree, but that’s what I assume being around some people like that…
humblebun@sh.itjust.works 2 months ago
You are a bad man and you should feel bad about yourself
Rhynoplaz@lemmy.world 2 months ago
Well, I at least thought it was a little funny.
MadhuGururajan@programming.dev 2 months ago
I immediately recognized your username. Maybe take a break from the asshole shtick for sometime… and also from online.