For the Record: The Derp Penalty

Everybody else was out saying you wouldn't even have Christianity without capital punishment, and I appreciate that, but doesn't that imply that it's already served its purpose? If Christians don't need to avoid pork or shellfish or sex with women during their periods because their Redeemer has redeemed them from all that, why would they have to put up with executions, of all things? Ilya Repin, Golgotha, 1869, via Varvara. 

Disappointed that young Monsignor Ross Douthat hasn't come out formally to protest against Pope Francis's announcement that the death penalty is "inadmissible", though he has produced a pretty subtle Twitter thread where he wonders if the Pope has gone even further with this than he did when he suggested it might be OK to let divorced people take Communion sometimes, and how dangerous could that be for the future survival of the Holy Mother Church, though he's pretty sure the death penalty issue is less serious than the divorce one—

But the bottom line is that this is another example of how Pope Francis has consistently exposed the tensions in the post-Vatican II conservative position, and pushed the JPII synthesis into intellectual crisis.

— Ross Douthat (@DouthatNYT) August 2, 2018

—it's one of his technical pieces, written to assure 12 or 13 of his readers that he's really as intellectual as he looks, and he's pretty careful not to have any feelings about it other than your "concerned kitten is concerned" frowny face, and not adjure to anything controversial like having his own beliefs about right and wrong.


(He saves those for the gravest issues, like whether it's legitimate for a US president to decide to deport criminal undocumented immigrants before deporting noncriminal ones, which was the Obama offense that turned poor Ross into a Cato the Censor seeing Obama as a Julius Caesar deliberately destroying our Republic.)

The brethren of the Southern Baptist Convention, on the other hand, have no such hesitation, and Pastor Robert Jeffress has now showed up to tell the Pope how wrong he is, in no uncertain terms, which I thought was too derpy not to respond to, so here, for the record, it is:

You realize old Francis is a professional theologian? And he belongs to a different church than yours? And he's probably read Genesis a couple of times, maybe more? https://t.co/pJmDAStIPI

— Demented Words Of Violence And Death (@Yastreblyansky) August 7, 2018

And what do you say about Genesis 4:15, where God assures the very first murderer that no human is allowed to kill him, and Cain just wanders off and gets a farm someplace? pic.twitter.com/znVm6LqzTx

— Demented Words Of Violence And Death (@Yastreblyansky) August 7, 2018

Catholic teaching always tends to favor mercy--it's good, and literally godly, to give a criminal less than a maximum penalty. So they definitely don't read Genesis 9:6 as saying you MUST execute a murderer. On the contrary, it's godlier to forgive. pic.twitter.com/5ESOaCAPMd

— Demented Words Of Violence And Death (@Yastreblyansky) August 7, 2018

I'm no kind of Christian myself, so I don't really have a dog in this hunt, but I do not see where Jeffress gets off telling Francis what he's required to think about this. Really?

— Demented Words Of Violence And Death (@Yastreblyansky) August 7, 2018