Protect the innocent. Punish the guilty.

Protect the innocent. Punish the guilty. That is justice.

Sometimes some thing like that needs to be said when face with the 'moral confusion' of a liberal. This came up on a Redstate posting when a 'gotcha' Liberal decided to wheel out the ol' crusty argument that pro-life Christians couldn't be pro-death penalty. Not so. While compassion for all is a Christian virtue, The Bible is decidely okay with the death penalty:

"St. Thomas Aquinas finds all biblical interpretations against executions "frivolous", citing Exodus 22:18, "wrongdoers thou shalt not suffer to live". Unequivocally, he states," The civil rulers execute, justly and sinlessly, pestiferous men in order to protect the peace of the state."(St. Thomas Aquinas, 'Summa Contra Gentiles', Book III, 146.)

In truth, the mindset that ties the killing of innocent preborn life with the state-ordered execution of a hardened criminal is not a Christian mind, but a morally relativistic one, that has decided that judgements are, well, too 'judgemental'. I added: "If one can't detect the difference between how police and society should treat hardened criminals and how a mother should treat her own child, one really needs to buy a clue."

I added the following aside:

God forbid the pro-choicers who come up with this pseudo-theological sophistry actually consider the possibility that killing a pre-born human being is wrong IN ANY DECENT ETHICAL SYSTEM - Christian, Buddhist, Jewish, whatever. And that equally so, as a Jewish philosopher once put it: "To be merciful to the cruel is to be cruel to the innocent."

Those who fail to protect the innocent or fail to punish the guilty are failing to advance justice. We need to both to have justice. The liberal mindset often falls into the trap of moral confusion (and relativism) and consequently fails to acknowledge appropriate punishment as a prerequisite for justice.

Protect the innocent. Punish the guilty. That is justice.