The Pope Ups the Pro-Life Ante

There are people who pretend to be pro-life, and then there are the people who really are pro-life. Pope Francis is the real deal:

Pope Francis has declared the death penalty wrong in all cases, a definitive change in church teaching that is likely to challenge Catholic politicians, judges and officials who have argued that their church was not entirely opposed to capital punishment.

Before, church doctrine accepted the death penalty if it was “the only practicable way” to defend lives, an opening that some Catholics took as license to support capital punishment in many cases.

The Catholic Church has a long history and hasn't always been on the side of the righteous, but in the last sixty or seventy years the Church has become more consistent on the sanctity of life. It, of course, opposes abortion, but generally favors reasonable reasonable restrictions on handguns, opposes war in all its forms, and vigorously advocates for the poor, minorities, immigrants and victims of terrorism and government oppression.

I may not agree with the Catholic Church on everything, but it has overcome many of its hypocritical deficiencies and is generally a force for good.

This is definitely not the case with American evangelicals and Republicans. They claim to be pro-life, but they're constantly on the warpath, clamoring for more military spending, more guns on the street, applying the death penalty to more cases, torturing suspects in military internment camps, and constantly attacking minorities and immigrants.

Take the governor of Nebraska, Pete Ricketts. He's supposedly a Catholic, but when the state of Nebraska repealed the death penalty in 2015, the Roman Catholic governor used his family fortune to bankroll a referendum to reinstate it.

American evangelicals and Republicans are all phonies. They claim to be so morally superior to the rest of us, yet they voted in droves for known sexual predators like Donald Trump and Roy Moore.

These are the same people who keep clamoring for more "religious liberty" in the United States, but what they really want to do is insult, ostracize, beat up and eventually drive out all gays and Muslims.

These self-proclaimed moral majoritarians in the White House and Republican statehouses shred the ten commandments every day.

The only reason Republicans oppose abortion is so that they can sucker single-issue Catholics into voting for them. Because people like Donald Trump, Jeff Sessions, Roy Moore and all the other Republican toads embody everything that good Catholics despise.

Back in the day Republicans demanded that the Catholic Church excommunicate Democrats who supported a woman's right to choose (which is not the same as favoring abortion).

Perhaps the Catholic Church should excommunicate all the Republicans who endorse the death penalty, clamor for the torture of suspects, spread the cancer of handguns, and deny the basic human rights of immigrants and minorities.