Via Jesus Politics

At the same time, I also hold them in my prayers (since I am a Christian and must not will the failure and continued evil of the ones who perpetuate that evil). This statement by Scalia (quoted in the linked article by Howard Zinn) is one which sickens me. What is sickening is not that this statement is, on its surface, true, but that it also justifies the visting of death upon OTHERS, which is not the world according to the Kingdom of God.

Howard Zinn | The Scourge of Nationalism | June 2005 issue

A Supreme Court justice, Antonin Scalia, told an audience at the University of Chicago Divinity School, speaking of capital punishment: “For the believing Christian, death is no big deal.”

Zinn, writing on the same theme of that in his classic A People’s History of the United States, warns of the ultimate hubris that is increasing among “patriots” in this radical right administration. I don’t even think this crew deserves a title as lofty as “Right-wing”. They are corrupt, power-hungry, arrogant fools. They think nothing of simply changing the rules when they happen to stand in the way of their agenda.

Our citizenry has been brought up to see our nation as different from others, an exception in the world, uniquely moral, expanding into other lands in order to bring civilization, liberty, democracy.

That self-deception started early. When the first English settlers moved into Indian land in Massachusetts Bay and were resisted, the violence escalated into war with the Pequot Indians. The killing of Indians was seen as approved by God, the taking of land as commanded by the Bible. The Puritans cited one of the Psalms, which says: “Ask of me, and I shall give thee, the heathen for thine inheritance, and the uttermost parts of the Earth for thy possession.”