Does Sen. Brownback support the death penalty? Does he support discretionary aggressive war? If so, he emphatically doesn't believe life is "sacred".

I was going to ask about the sanctity of Iraqi and now possibly also Iranian lives, not to mention the American lives we keep tossing into the meat grinder.

Senator Brownback said "I believe we need to be pro-life and whole life, that we to stand for each and every life as being beautiful, unique, sacred, a child of a loving god, period. And it is sacred because it is. No more, no less. It is. It is human and that's why it's sacred -- made in the image of God."

Of course that doesn't include children born to poor parents you suffer and even die for lack of medical care, or anyone who committed the crime of being born in a country that we feel like bombing, or workers in companies that exploit adult and child labor, or companies that dump deadly pollutants, and so on and so.

I am so sick of Republicans talking about life while serving death.

Brownback: "I believe we need to be pro-life and whole life..." (emphasis mine)

Yet he voted against S-CHIP.

How like value-conservatives. For some reason they care inordinately about you in the womb, once you're out,you're on your own.

Brownback is actually out of the mainstream (and definitely out of the Republican mainstream) on Iraq. He's campaigned with Joe Biden to back proposals for partitioning Iraq but retaining a smaller, decentralized government. Sen. Barbara Boxer (D-CA) also backs this plan.

But he waffles (at best) on the death penalty:

I believe America must establish a culture of life. If use of the death penalty is contrary to promoting a culture of life, we need to have a national dialogue and hear both sides of the issue.

What? Executing a person is most certainly taking a life. And even the notion that it saves other lives doesn't hold because Brownback is against embryonic stem-cell research that could save other lives because it destroys a life. So, to be more specific, Brownback is concerned with protecting innocent life in all of its stages.

And maybe not even that: he's voted to limit appeals for death row inmates. Heaven forbid we should do everything we can to keep from executing an innocent person.

In any event, the chances of Giuliani getting Brownback's endorsement are about as good as Brownback getting pregnant out of wedlock and aborting it to harvest embryonic stem cells.

Was that too much?

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http://brownback.senate.gov/pressapp/record.cfm?id=251041

http://www.ontheissues.org/Domestic/Sam_Brownback_Crime.htm

Brownback's a conundrum--yes, he's fervently pro-life; his devout Catholicism also motivates him to have a much more expansive view of what this means than the evangelical anti-abortion groups do.

At the same time, he's beholden to a socially conservative constituency whose values offer considerably less nuance than that of Catholic social teaching. This is why we get frustratingly equivocal statements about the death penalty. And, as is obvious to anyone familiar with both Catholic social teaching and the evangelical right, the statement quoted in the post is full of carefully coded language that can mean whatever each group wants it to mean--remember how Bush used to always use the phrase "culture of life" on the stump? This was brilliant--to Catholics, it was a direct reference to Pope John Paul II, to his expansive teaching on human dignity. But evangelicals just thought it meant "restrict access to legal abortion."

However frustrating Brownback is on a number of the issues, it's important also to remember that he (and, until recently, Sen. Santorum) were long the face of compassionate conservatism in the Senate. Sure, they're kind of scary sometimes, and faith-based charitable work will never be a substitute for actual systemic justice. But their work on, among other things, global poverty demonstrates that compassionate conservatism actually means something to these Catholics, even if it's just a joke to the president.

Well said.

Just my own addenda: Brownback was raised Methodist, became more evangelical over the past decade (when he discovered a melanoma) and converted to Catholicism in 2002. He joined through an Opus Dei priest but is not himself a member.

Brownback is not a mainstream Catholic but is, rather, part of the growing coalition of super conservative Catholics that work with Evangelicals.

On a related note, I really don't get this Catholic-Evangelical marriage. Evangelicals are all about the direct connection with God and reading the Bible directly, whereas hierarchy and intermediaries are more the Catholic way (in the broadest sense).

mizbinkley:

It's a marriage of convenience, and it represents a lot of cultural assimilation and accommodation. Theological differences don't mean much to most people, and it's been a long time (150 years?) since the evangelicals responded to their anxieties about continental immigration by denouncing the pope and organizing a good convent burning.

At this point, I'd say that Catholic-evangelical cooperation makes a lot more sense than some of the other (bizarre, uber-pragmatic, utterly cynical) partnerships the evangelical religious right has made (e.g., w/ extreme Zionism, free-market fundamentalism, neoconservatism...).

Way beyond the abortion issue, Giuliani is hankering for more war with Iran and, seemingly, anybody else that looks at him cross-eyed.

If Brownback were truly pro-life (and Christian, for that matter) and truly values every human life, he'd be running away from this kind of bellicosity as fast as possible.

Wow, if Giuliani was able to pick up all three of the Brownback supporters he's got to be a shoe-in!

"However frustrating Brownback is on a number of the issues, it's important also to remember that he (and, until recently, Sen. Santorum) were long the face of compassionate conservatism in the Senate"

i'm sorry, but i'm a bit confused; is this an endorsement or condemnation of "compassionate conservatism?"

Are those the only two options?

I'm no Brownback fan, and I think that "compassionate conservatism" is in theory somewhat positive (though inadequate) but in practice usually empty rhetoric. Sen. Brownback is an example of someone who, at least some of the time, takes the idea seriously, for whatever it's worth.

But my point in posting was not to endorse or condemn anyone or anything so much as to point out that the old "you only care about life before it's born!" talking point doesn't apply as neatly to him as it does to the evangelical religious right. It's a good line but a simplistic one.