Instead, according to the Washington Post, Sessions will work on new policies with a veteran federal prosecutor named Steven H. Cook, who is a longtime enthusiast of the kind of severe drug-war penalties that provoked the mass-incarceration crisis in the first place.
Let's re-commit ourselves to peace and no violence by not making excuses for violence whether it is being perpetrated through war, death penalty, abortion, racism, homicides or in our own heads and hearts in the ways that we treat our sisters and brothers on this earth.
We have engaged in so much state-sanctioned violence through our wars, death penalty and other behaviors until we think that it is an acceptable tool.
But most progressive Catholics share a "consistent life ethic" that opposes any devaluation of human life — not only abortion but also nuclear war, the death penalty and the exploitation of society's most vulnerable.
They speak of life's preciousness when railing against abortion but fail to acknowledge how they let other values override that concern when they support war, the death penalty or governments that do nothing for people in perilous need.
The connection between war, the death penalty, and abortion is made in the Catholic "seamless garment" approach to the problem of developing a "consistent ethic of life".
Such a view has been defended most famously by Pope John Paul II, who rejected (or was skeptical toward) all sorts of violence including war, the death penalty, suicide, euthanasia, and abortion.
But he insisted that his policies on the drug war, the death penalty, and the military, which disproportionately affect minorities, do more to help race relations than any of the other candidates' policies.
I find it hard to accept, as do many blue collar Catholics apparently, that the Democratic Party promotes itself as being pro-life on other issues, such a gun safety, the death penalty, war, healthcare, and the environment, yet bills itself so prominently as pro-abortion.
Other people feel it's okay that the dentist killed the lion, because lions are naturally violent creatures that kill their own kind... unlike, say, human multi-billion dollar weapons industry war-obsessed death penalty giant corporations dumping toxic cancer-causing waste freakin' beings.
