Despite President Bush's assurance that he will not use a "litmus test" when nominating justices to the Supreme Court, his private beliefs and public remarks have convinced many that he intends to pack the Court with conservatives in hopes of denying a woman's right to choose abortion. The President has defended his opposition to abortion by arguing that every life "is a sacred gift given by our Creator" and ought to be protected, and that abortion "discourages a culture that values life." At the same time, like many conservatives the President is also an adamant supporter of capital punishment. In fact, Bush holds the ignominious distinction of having signed 152 death warrants while governor of Texas, far more than any other governor in modern times.
It seems lost on the President and many of his followers, however, that there is a disturbing moral and logical contradiction in attempting to roll back a landmark Supreme Court decision in hopes of "creating a culture which values life" while also vigorously supporting a practice that is defined as a human rights violation by the rest of the western world.
At least the existence of this contradiction is not entirely lost on the President. In his typically oversimplified way, he pithily explains his pro-life and pro-death penalty stance as knowing "the difference between innocent and guilty." This distinction suggests that Bush believes that when one commits a particularly heinous crime, one's life somehow becomes intrinsically worthless. The further implication is that our actions determine the worth of our existence, and so "the Creator" values the life of a murderer, or even a shoplifter, less than that of a priest. Although many accept this notion, it flies in the face of Bush's claim that every life is "a sacred gift" that must be protected.
Moreover, based on Bush's assertions, one would expect a culture that values life to protect the lives of all its citizens, even the most malicious. And one should certainly expect that if "every life is precious," a culture that values life would take every step possible to ensure that only the "worthless" are executed. The problem, of course, is that like all human systems our justice system is rife with error: the Death Penalty Information Center (DPIC) has compiled a list of 102 people wrongly executed between 1973 and 2000, and the actual number may be as high as 200.
Despite Bush's fight for the lives of the "innocent," the DPIC's list includes the names of several individuals whose executions were authorized by Bush after only a half-hour meeting with his legal counsel. Even more disturbing is the fact that Bush also executed a number of inmates deemed by the state as "mentally unfit to stand trial" because they could not properly understand the difference between right and wrong. Bush explained his refusal to forgive these latter death sentences by simply saying, "I like the law as it is right now." Not exactly the words of someone who values "every life given by the Creator."
For the sake of argument, however, let's forget reality and pretend everyone who is executed is guilty and that their lives are worthless. Now, when Bush says that "only" innocent lives should be protected, he must mean only innocent human lives, since he has done nothing to curb the destruction of lab animals or the slaughter of cattle. And what makes human beings unique? The ability to reason and to feel emotion?traits possessed by the inmates on death row, and perhaps even by chimpanzees, but not by fetuses in their early stages of development. Yet surely Bush does not want to say that the life of a fetus is less valuable than that of a chimp.
Since Bush can't consistently argue that all innocent human life should be protected, perhaps he means to say that we need to protect every innocent potential human life. If he believes this, however, why hasn't he done something to stop the daily genocide of masturbation, or attempted to prevent the death of millions of fetuses that every year fail to implant in the uterus? After all, one can legally commit murder through neglect and if?as Bush seems to believe?abortion is wrong because it is murder, isn't this a huge oversight? Bush of course doesn't care about the loss of sperm or dislodged embryos, yet he cannot respond that abortion is different due to the fact that it's the death of one potentially innocent human life at the hands of another because Bush has no problem terminating the potentially innocent inmates on death row (we won't go into his willingness to bomb Iraqi civilians).
Conservatives might charge that it is equally inconsistent to allow abortions and yet forbid the death penalty. This is not necessarily true, however. For one thing, people who are pro-choice are not necessarily pro-abortion; they merely favor a woman's right to choose and want to avoid dangerous births and back-alley abortions because they, too, value life. Furthermore, if one denies that life begins at conception then one is perfectly consistent in endorsing first- or second-trimester abortions while opposing hundredth-trimester abortions on death row.
The explicit intention of this column is merely to point out that people who are pro-life and pro-capital punishment are inconsistent, not that they are necessarily wrong on both accounts. But as president and as a man attempting to dramatically shape domestic policy, George Bush owes fealty to consistency, and so we should hope that he changes his stance on abortion, the death penalty, or (hopefully) on both.