A culture of life?

With the passing of Terri Schiavo -- the most recent focal point for pro-life forces -- and Pope John Paul II -- the world's most prominent pro-life leader of the last quarter century -- the last week has brought much focus to the "culture of life."

Take for example President Bush's recent remarks: "I urge all those who honor Terri Schiavo to continue to work to build a culture of life, where all Americans are welcomed and valued and protected, especially those who live at the mercy of others. The essence of civilization is that the strong have a duty to protect the weak."

One does not need to be a conservative to believe that society has a moral responsibility to protect its weakest members. But is the American right serious about promoting a true culture of life?

Certainly, to many of us on the left, these words have a hollow ring coming from George Bush's lips. This is not just because he chose tax cuts that primarily benefit the wealthiest Americans over, say, providing health care to our nation's 11 million uninsured children. It is not just because his administration rushed to war in Iraq to find nonexistent weapons of mass destruction, killing thousands of Iraqi civilians in the process, all while doing little to nothing to address the ongoing genocide in Darfur.

It is not just because a 1999 law he signed as Texas governor allowed a hospital to remove a life-sustaining breathing tube from a 5-month-old boy over his mother's objections. And it is not just because as governor he signed 152 death warrants, making Texas the state with the most executions since capital punishment was reauthorized by the Supreme Court in 1976.

If not for any of those reasons, then it is difficult to take George Bush's "culture of life" proclamations seriously because of how he described convicted murderer Karla Faye Tucker. Speaking in 1999 to Tucker Carlson, he mocked the pleas for mercy of the woman whose death he authorized. Wrote Carlson in Talk Magazine: "'Please,' Bush whimpers, his lips pursed in mock desperation, 'don't kill me.'"

Capital punishment is perhaps the most serious test for those promoting of a culture of life. First, unlike right-to-die and abortion issues, this controversy is not a question of the state limiting individual rights. Rather the state is the one doing the killing, and when the state kills, the blood is on all of our hands.

Second, it is not difficult to have compassion for an unborn fetus, especially with modern imaging technology that can show the child in the womb. Similarly, it is not difficult to have compassion for Terri Schiavo. Despite the fact that the doctors who actually examined her concluded that she was in a persistent vegetative state, the home videos that were aired nonstop on cable news certainly made many Americans empathize with her parents. By contrast, it is far more difficult for any of us to be merciful toward convicted murderers, a class of people not known for their compassion toward others.

As a result, rather than maintain a principled approach, the most common response to capital punishment has been to make it more acceptable by trying to alleviate the system's most glaring problems. For example, recent Supreme Court decisions have been paring away the most socially objectionable aspects of our capital punishment system: the execution of juvenile offenders and the mentally handicapped, for example. However, the point of these decisions is not to end capital punishment, but to preserve it. Similarly, while greater protections against the execution of the innocent are badly needed, they are not enough.

Such reforms fail to address the fundamental question: Are murderers' lives worth preserving? If life is an intrinsic value, as the pro-life movement argues, then their lives should be preserved no matter what their crime, as long as they can be prevented from further murderous acts by life in prison without parole. In a true culture of life, we would have no death penalty, not a "better" death penalty.

After all, it is worth remembering that His Holiness John Paul II -- in addition to opposing the Iraq war and standing fast against capital punishment -- forgave Mehmet Ali Agca, the would-be assassin who shot and almost killed him in 1981. If so-called pro-life politicians here in America could practice such moral consistency, then just maybe Bush's appeals for a culture of life would be inspiring instead of sadly laughable.Kevin Collins is a junior Political Science major from Milwaukee. ...And Justice For All appears on Tuesdays.

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