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.
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 “because some people deserve to die” amounts to hypocrisy.
The death penalty doesn’t control women.
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: https://wiki.dlma.com/belief-system-of-republicans
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.