Repackaging Abolition: Targeting Christians, Conservatives
The meaning here is clear—life is sacred—God gives humans life, and no one can take that away. These words ring even more loudly in their political context. Consider that when the Declaration was written, the King of England had already embarked on a terror campaign that left many American, and even British subjects, dead. Hence, this document was a clear repudiation of the king’s killings, and stood for the proposition that the new republic would be free from such tyranny. In his edited volume, The Killing State, Austin Sarat asserts that folks on the right “can say that the most important issue in the debate about capital punishment is one of fairness not one of sympathy for the murderers; they can position themselves as defenders of law itself, as legal conservatives.â€