And I looked, and behold a pale horse: and his name that sat on him was Death, and Hell followed with him. And power was given unto them over the fourth part of the earth, to kill with sword, and with hunger, and with death, and with the beasts of the earth.
Revelations 6:8
The federal government hasn’t executed anyone in 17 years. Until this week. On Tuesday
the United States killed Daniel Lee for the murder of three members of the same family. This morning, we executed Wesley Purkey for killing a 16-year-old girl. Tomorrow we will kill Dustin Lee Honken. Other than four Supreme Court justices, a superhero nun and some folks
we’ll talk about in a minute, no one paid much attention. Our minds are on other things, like pandemics and elections. But if we had been paying attention, even the death penalty supporters among us might see some causes for concern.
Because there’s something important to see here. The Department of Justice, under trump hatchetman and fixer Bill Barr, claimed it was killing Lee, in part, to bring closure to the family of the victims. Let’s let Sister Helen Prejean tell it.
“Family members of the three people murdered by Lee were resolutely opposed to the planned execution, and had made their wishes clear almost a year before the announced execution,” Sister Helen writes.
And the DOJ, which had argued we must kill Lee because we “owe it to the victims, and to the families left behind,” responded to the victim’s family’s pleas by saying “victims’ families have no right to attend the execution of a person involved in the killing of their loved ones.”
So Barr, who claims his governing philosophy is based on his Catholic religion, lied so he could kill. The people who support this execution, of whatever religion, are often the people who are demanding stricter abortion laws. They will tell you they are pro-life. 
They are lying. Pro-life is a lie. Pro-lifers aren’t against executions, they aren’t for health care and education for everyone. They aren’t for better schools and reduced military expenses. They aren’t for better child care, fairer wages, worker safety or fighting climate change. They are simply against abortion. Once the baby is born, they are done with it. The honest ones, who really oppose abortion are merely pro-birth. The rest are just raising money on the issue, which is why you never see anyone introduce a bill banning abortion.
The Catholic Church, to its credit, is pro-life. It supports all these things. But it doesn’t get the word out to its employees very well, at least not in this country. Leading Catholics, starting with the United States Conference of Bishops, decided in the wake of Roe. v. Wade that abortion was the top issue and anything that conflicted with it should be shunted aside. So Catholics made a deal with the devil. Well, not the devil, but the group we’ve held up as the devil for a long time — evangelical protestants.
So now we have “leaders” like Viganò openly pushing for the re-election of a president who is odious to everything the church teaches. We have Dolan slobbering at the feet of an authoritarian who tear-gassed clergy so he could stage a photo op at a church. We have a priest in Texas extolling the virtues of a rosary made from bullets. We have a priest in Indiana sidelined because he called Black Lives Matter “maggots and parasites” on a church website.
None of this is pro-life. Because the people who claim to be pro-life are lying. They’ve been lying since the beginning. Traditional Catholics jumped in bed with the GOP over abortion and haven’t looked back or looked up Catholic teaching on life. They made a deal with people who have been working to destroy them for centuries and they’ve told themselves it’s different now.
But then this story comes along, from my hometown, a town with at least one church on every corner, only 4 percent of the population is Catholic. My other hometown, slightly smaller, is 29 percent Catholic. I guarantee you the people who did this call themselves pro-life. I guarantee you they vote the same way Bill Barr does. I guarantee you when the left is finally defeated and the the Religious Right takes final power, the first thing they will do is turn on the Jews and Catholics and destroy them. And they will cite the Bible as they do it.
Oran Today 