I expect to be hearing from Americans United about an op-ed piece in the Washington Post from the Episcopal bishops of Washington and Maryland any minute now. It seems that John Chane and Eugene Sutton think that the Maryland state legislature needs to write their particular view of the ethics of Jesus into law:

As the Maryland General Assembly prepares to convene on Wednesday, we hope that legislators will decide against the death penalty in Maryland. Doing so would represent an enormous moral failure for the state and for civil society.

Somebody was clearly asleep at the grammar switch. What they mean is “not doing so.” Anyway…

For decades, many religious groups have voiced strong public opposition to capital punishment, believing that every human being is given life by God and that only God has the right to deny life. Of course, we understand that the state must seek justice and prosecute wrongdoing, but we cannot condone the state pronouncing a sentence of death for wrongdoing — no matter how violent and brutal the crime. There is simply no moral justification for the state to execute a child of God in the name of justice.

Unless, of course, that child is still in the womb, in which case the state should pay for it, and even encourage it through the subsidization of abortion mills such as Planned Parenthood. But I digress. What really needs to be said is that a statement like “there is simply no moral justification for the state to execute” a criminal actually demonstrates a  poverty of moral imagination on the part of the bishops. I can think of at least three serious moral justifications for the death penalty. One can disagree with them, of course, but that doesn’t mean they aren’t real arguments that need to be dealt with, rather than dismissed out of hand.

The Episcopal Church has carefully studied the application of the death penalty in many states. In every case, it has concluded that the death penalty is unjust and ineffective. It is immoral to any who are seriously committed to the ethics of Jesus, who continually forbade violence as a means to solve problems caused by evil.

And here’s the reason for the post’s header. By the logic that people like Chane and Sutton use on religious conservatives without a second thought, what in the name of Clarence Darrow do the ethics of Jesus have to do with legislating in Maryland? It is obvious that Chane and Sutton are seeking a serious breach of the separation of church and state, and trying to impose their particular sectarian view of criminal justice on a population that includes lots of people who have no interest in, or use for, the ethics of Jesus. They go on to say:

Most likely today someone in the nation’s capital and in Maryland will die under violent circumstances. Understandably, we will all be outraged at the senselessness of the carnage, and there will be public cries to kill the perpetrator. But the test of love is not found in doing the loving thing whenever it is easy to do so. Love is doing what is right precisely when it is hard. Jesus taught his followers to go beyond an eye for an eye and a tooth for a tooth, for that would inevitably lead to what Mohandas K. Gandhi and the Rev. Martin Luther King Jr. called “an eyeless and toothless society.”

So the views of those who hold strictly to an Old Testament-based view of punishment, or to the philosophical theory of retribution as the basis for punishment, are to be pushed aside so that some of Jesus’ followers can use the power of the state to get their moral views written into law. I expect to see a sternly worded rebuke to the two bishops to come forth from Americans United, based on its rejection of the Religious Left and its anti-First Amendment agenda.

I also expect swine to swoop down from the heavens any day now.

(Via T19.)

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