ARTICLES
April 2002 ARTICLES
Contents © 2002
by Jim Holman.
All rights reserved.
"I'm Not a Fan of Capital Punishment"
The American Independent party is, of course, not a single-issue party. Along with being pro-life, they support other "conservative" causes, such as the repeal of NAFTA and GATT to protect "American jobs from unfair foreign competition;" the "right of citizens to keep and bear arms;" an end to the "personal income tax and abolition of the IRS;" "consideration of human needs in environmental concerns;" as well as other like issues. (One can read the entire platform at www.aipca.org/.)
On some issues, it seems, the American Independent Party does not hold views entirely consistent with Catholic teaching. For instance, the party supports the "retention of the historic constitutional right of each state and Federal Government to impose capital punishment for aggravated criminal offenses." Though the pope has not condemned the death penalty in principle, he has said it is more in accord with human dignity to spare the lives of the convicted if they can be kept from harming society. Such conditions seem to prevail in the United States. How, then, can a Catholic uphold this plank of the party platform?
Jim King, it seemed, had not thought much on this question. Still, he did not seem closed to further consideration of Pope John Paul II's teaching on the death penalty. "It seems to me -- and I haven't read all those documents," said King, "but he's made a small opening for extreme cases, where capital punishment could still be used by society -- in the most extreme cases where you have, for instance, a mass murderer. I'm certainly not a fan of capital punishment, and it shouldn't be used until you have the most extreme situations."
The party platform reasserts that every man has a right to his life, his liberty and the pursuit of happiness, which last, it says, "the founders defined as pursuit of virtue." Still, the platform seems to call for an excess of liberty as far as business is concerned. The Church has taught that the government has a function in regulating the economic order so that it serves the common good; the American Independent Party platform, though, speaks of a man's "right to engage in business, or participate in his labor union without governmental interference."
Jim King admitted that "government has some right to protect society from selfish business interests," yet, he said, "the government should regulate as little as possible. I would hope to think that is what our platform is saying. Government is regulating too much to the point that it is running businesses, not only out of this state, but out of this country. I believe in a clean environment, but let's have some common sense about this. If [environmental regulation] shuts down an entire plant with many thousands of jobs, in order to save the life of a squirrel or a bird or something, that doesn't make a lot of sense. Everything in life has to have a balance. Government has to stand up for the common good of the people, even with corporations, with businesses. They have to be regulated to a certain degree. I would not accept laissez-faire for a moment, especially as the multi-national corporations operate in their own selfish manner only to serve their bottom line and their own selfish interests. But are we to say that that warrants the high tax rate we have in this country? No, because taxes are way too high, and government is way too big and we have to return the power to the people."
As for immigration: though it would be a stretch to say the popes, at least since John XXIII, have forbidden any regulation of immigration, they have spoken of a right to immigrate. In Pacem in Terris, Pope John XXIII wrote that "among men's personal rights we must include his right to enter a country in which he hopes to be able to provide more fittingly for himself and his dependents." Though governments must promote the common good of their people, this "cannot be divorced from the common good of the entire human family."
The American Independent Party calls for a moratorium on immigration, except for individual hardship cases, until immigration laws "be revised to better protect American workers and taxpayers." "I think where were coming from," said King, "is that there has been such a flood of immigrants coming in -- there's somewhere between a million and a million and a half legal immigrants, and I have seen figures that there are as many as 10-12 million illegal immigrants in this country, today, of which at least two million are in California. I can see stopping immigration until we catch our breath and get these people to assimilate, get them into our culture, get them to where they can speak our language and learn our history and our traditions, our American heroes, and teach them to assimilate to become Americans, not hyphenated-Americans. The immigrants who came in the past kept their culture, but they also became Americans. When people come here and they keep their language and they don't assimilate into the American culture, it doesn't unify us any more. We need to be unified."
King said he differed with the immigration plank "to a minor degree"; immigration, he said, should be limited "to the historic level, which, I believe, was something around 300,000 a year. We should go back and hold it down to that for several years, and we also should do everything we can to limit illegal immigration. If we have to put the military on the border, I wouldn't have any problem with that. If we have that many illegal immigrants, that's causing a big strain on our infrastructure, our social services."