![\"Destiny](\"http:\/\/consistent-life.org\/blog\/wp-content\/uploads\/2017\/02\/people-Destiny-300x251.jpg\")
<\/p>\nby Destiny Herndon-de La Rosa<\/p>\n
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Not a day\u00a0goes by that I don\u2019t log onto my Facebook, sign into my email, or stream through a thread of tweets declaring one thing loudly: The government is corrupt on almost all levels and something must be done to take away its power.<\/p>\n
This might not be everyone\u2019s experience, but as a lifelong conservative, I\u2019ve collected quite a few Republican friends, from far right-wing Christian activists to those fun-loving log cabin types. We disagree on much of the minutiae, but the one thing that holds our herd together is our leeriness of big government. As Lord Acton so famously put it, \u201cPower tends to corrupt, and absolute power corrupts absolutely.\u201d That\u2019s why I will never understand conservatives\u2019 willingness to give this entity, which they\u2019ve deemed untrustworthy, the ultimate in absolute power: the ability to kill its own citizens.<\/p>\n
A few years ago I took a step back from the Grand Old Party because, as a pro-lifer, I was tired of the inconsistencies. They\u2019re everywhere, on both sides politically, but the ones on the right just happened to turn my stomach first. Here we were, standing out on sidewalks in front of abortion clinics, offering women in crisis help and free medical care, often through state-run programs. Then every election cycle I saw Republicans encouraging others to vote down the very services that allowed these women to choose life.<\/p>\n
We\u2019d talk about loving our neighbor like Christ, then I watched as an angry mob of \u201cgood Christian\u201d conservatives hurled the most vitriolic insults at buses full of immigrant children whose parents were so desperate to get them to safety, they paid coyotes to take them across the border, scared and alone. These children, these human beings, were just looking for a small bit of what we were all \u201cblessed\u201d to inherit by no effort of our own. And because many of us were born into these blessings, our conservative beliefs come quite easily. The death penalty being no exception.<\/p>\n
If you were raised in middle-class America, received a decent education and have the benefit of viewing law enforcement as your protector and not those you need protection from, then I understand why you might think the state should have the right to enforce laws as it sees fit. However, that\u2019s where another inconsistency arises, along with perhaps some common ground.<\/p>\n
Many people of privilege like to sit around Young Republican cocktail parties and decry the atrocities of the federal government, myself included. We talk about the big headline issues: Hillary\u2019s emails, Benghazi, Obama\u2019s most recent vacation. We question where the money is coming from and going to. We question the corruption. However, seldom do we talk about the small headlines; the stuff that actually impacts our own communities \u2014 and the people who weren\u2019t invited to the cocktail party.<\/p>\n
Private prisons have managed to incentivize incarcerations, turning prisoners into profit margins. That\u2019s corrupt. It is highly likely that the state of Texas has executed an innocent man while a \u201cpro-life\u201d governor sat in office. That\u2019s inconsistent. Since 1973, 140 death row inmates nationwide have been exonerated. That\u2019s scary as hell. Since the Supreme Court reinstated the death penalty in 1976, 82 percent of all executions have taken place in the south (37 percent in Texas alone), and according to Amnesty International an overwhelming majority of those who end up on death row were not able to afford an attorney. That removes the very justice we claim to cling to in our justice system. And that is happening in our backyard.<\/p>\n
So why do so many \u201cpro-life\u201d conservatives still support the death penalty in Texas? I imagine it\u2019s because we feel a safe enough distance from this type of government corruption to not worry about it. We don\u2019t have a rap sheet that could be used to incriminate us if there was an accidental house fire that killed three of our children, landing any one of us on a cold metal table with a lethal injection in the arm.<\/p>\n
Our privilege pushes our sentences down to just six months, so as not to deter your bright futures<\/a>. So we turn a blind eye. We go back to tweeting about \u201cObummers Trip to Hawaii,\u201d and decide not to share articles like this on our Facebook, for fear our friends will uninvited us to the monthly Young Republican cocktail party. And right now, that\u2019s really the only consistency in our lives.<\/p>\n Destiny Herndon-De La Rosa is active with <\/em>New Wave Feminists<\/em><\/a>. This column was first published as an editorial in the <\/em>Dallas Morning News, June 15, 2016 <\/em><\/p>\n <\/p>\n =====================================<\/p>\n For more of our blog posts on a conservative look at issues of violence, see:<\/em><\/p>\n Nukes and the Pro-Life Christian<\/a>: <\/span>A Conservative Takes a Second Look at the Morality of Nuclear Weapons.<\/span><\/p>\n Making the Case for Peace to Conservatives<\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" by Destiny Herndon-de La Rosa Not a day\u00a0goes by that I don\u2019t log onto my Facebook, sign into my email, or stream through a thread of tweets declaring one thing loudly: The government is corrupt on almost all levels and something must be done to take away its power. This might not be everyone\u2019s experience,… <\/p>\n![\"New](\"http:\/\/consistent-life.org\/blog\/wp-content\/uploads\/2017\/02\/blog-New-Wave-300x240.jpg\")
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