death penalty news April 15, 2005
USA: Bush Embrace of Pope Skirted Death Penalty President Bush was the first sitting U.S. president to attend a papal funeral and he praised Pope John Paul as an advocate of life, but the two leaders differed radically when it came to the death penalty. John Paul sternly opposed it and used his papacy as a platform against capital punishment, while Bush supports it and used it to his advantage in his run for the presidency. They subtly clashed over the issue when Bush was governor of Texas and again as president, but the Pope's death allowed the U.S. leader to embrace John Paul's 26-year reign on his own terms and, experts said, score political points. Bush led Texas from 1995 to 2000 when the state executed 152 people, the most under any U.S. governor in modern history. During that time, the Pope was speaking out against the death penalty and rallying the church to fight it. In a 1999 speech in St. Louis, he called the death penalty "both cruel and unnecessary" and said there was "increasing recognition that the dignity of human life must never be taken away, even in the case of someone who has done great evil." At least twice, John Paul appealed to Gov. Bush to stop executions in Texas, most famously in 1998 when he requested clemency for convicted pickaxe murderer and born-again Christian Karla Faye Tucker. Bush, who is proud of his Christianity but also was aware of polls showing two-thirds of Americans support the death penalty, refused. On Feb. 3, 1998, Tucker received a lethal injection. She was the first woman executed in the state since 1863. Three years later, in their first meeting after Bush won the presidency, the Pope chastised him, saying: "A free and virtuous society, which America aspires to be, must reject practices that devalue and violate human life at any stage from conception until natural death." Bush said Thursday that his views were consistent. "I happen to believe that the death penalty, when properly applied, saves lives of others. And so I'm comfortable with my beliefs that there's no contradiction between the two," Bush said in response to a question at a meeting of U.S. newspaper editors. After the Pope's funeral, Bush spoke of John Paul in reverential terms, and emphasized their concordance on "culture of life" issues, while not mentioning the death penalty. WARM TRIBUTES WIN-WIN FOR BUSH Bush's admiration for John Paul may have been real, but his warm tributes to the Pope also reflected a win-win situation politically, said Rice University sociology professor William Martin, author of "With God on Our Side: The Rise of the Religious Right in America." Bush was able to appeal to America's 67 million Catholics, whom the Republicans have been working to attract for years, and praise a pope whose anti-communism and "pro-life" positions won many fans among the Christian conservatives who are Bush's base, he said. A poll last year for Religion & Ethics Newsweekly and U.S. News & World Report found John Paul to be more popular among evangelicals than two of their top leaders, Jerry Falwell and Pat Robertson. "A few decades ago, it would have been considered dangerous for a president to go to a pope's funeral, but those days are gone," Martin said. They are gone, in part, because John Paul was a powerful ally to the religious right in his opposition to the hot-button political issues of abortion, stem-cell research, euthanasia and gay marriage. That enabled evangelicals to overlook a history of antipathy toward the Catholic church. "This was a conservative pope, and evangelicals are conservative on all those social and political issues, so we shared many views," said Rev. Richard Cizik of the National Association of Evangelicals. They did not agree on capital punishment, but with so many other shared values, it did not matter, said Cizik, whose Washington-based organization represents 45,000 churches and 51 religious denominations. "Doing away with the death penalty for someone who commits a heinous crime seems to us to undermine the sanctity of life, but it is not incomprehensible for someone to support that," Cizik said. "I would think even the most hard-bitten, die-hard Southern Baptist would have to conclude that this pope was quite a guy," he said. (source: Reuters)
