Catholics and evangelicals form the nucleus of Christianity in the United States.

Both Christian entities are extremely pro-life. They preach the theology of protecting the unborn in the name of God’s only begotten son.

It is from these religious ranks, like White Christian Nationalist Marjorie Taylor Green, that promote the outlandish—obscene actually—political mantra that “Democrats are pedophiles.” The Florida politically conservative “war on Disney,” led by its Gov. Ron DeSantis, is based on this belief expressed by a right-wing White Christian Nationalist and conspiracy theorist Candace Owen in a tweet:

“”Child groomers and pedophiles.  They (Disney) have now openly admitted  they have a not so secret agenda with your [Christian] children.  This is the death of Disney.”

But what are the facts?

A recent report issued by the Maryland Attorney General’s Office list more than 150 priests accused of sexually molesting more than 600 children with the near-blessing of the local Catholic Diocese for decades. This latest report is just one of the hundreds of other reports released in the U.S. (and around the world) chronicling the history of sexual abuse of children by Catholic priests.

In 2018, the Washington Post carried a major story about “the epidemic of denial about sexual abuse in the evangelical church.” The author of the article, Joshua Peace, made this observation:

“So many Christian churches in the United States do so much good—nourishing the soul, comforting the sick, providing services, counseling congregants, teaching Jesus’s example, and even working to fight sexual abuse and harassment. But like in any community of faith, there is also sin—often silenced, ignored and denied—and it is much more common than many want to believe. It has often led to failure by evangelicals to report sexual abuse [including that of children], respond appropriately to victims and change the institutional cultures that enabled the abuse in the first place.”

That means, as evidenced by the latest Catholic Church child sex abuse report in Baltimore Maryland, that while literally tens of thousands of standard-bearer Catholic Christians and Evangelical Christians fight and protest for the rights of unborn children, they are simultaneously sexually abusing, and terrorizing, the very children they saved from abortion.

There are more Christian child sexual abusers in the nation’s churches every Sunday than all the “liberal Democratic” Disney executives who may be “grooming” children for pedophilia.

Every country in the world has some kind of prison system—some humane, others not so much.

According to the World Population Review, the United States incarcerates more people than any other nation.

Incarceration begins with policing.

According to WorldAtlas, the United States ranks third in the world, behind the more heavily populated China and India, with the number of police.

The American Bar Association instructs that the purpose of policing in America is: safeguard individual freedoms, preserve life and property, protect the constitutional rights of citizens, maintain respect for the rule of law through its proper enforcement, and preserve the nation’s democratic processes.

Criminal defense attorneys generally recognize that there are three primary purpose of penal incarceration: deterrence, punishment, and rehabilitation.

A donation appeal from The Appeal appeared last month in my email inbox. I’ve never donated to The Appeal, although I have hyperlinked them as a source in some of my writings because I respect some of their work.

Written by Olayemi Olurin, the email opened with this first line:

“Yes, when abolitionists say abolition, we do really mean abolish prisons, policing, and America’s entire criminal justice system.”

I know a thing or two about police, prison, and American justice.

I have been in the “custody” of the Louisiana justice system—one of the most corrupt and racist in America—for more than 57 years. The state’s police tried on several occasions to kill me; its violent prison system tried to destroy me as a human being for more than 40 years; and its corrupt parole system is determined to keep me in its custody until I die.

So by no means am I a champion of police, prison, and traditional justice.

There are, I believe, more bad cops than good ones; mass penal incarceration is a $200 billion industrial complex that is a form of modern day slavery; and the entire nation’s criminal justice system is systemically racist and corrupt, perhaps irreparably so as some like Olayemi Olurin reasonably argue.

However, arguments for the abolition of all these social safety nets are misguided, I believe.

I am not about to disparage the abolitionists. They are well-meaning, good-intention folks trying to bring fairness, reason, decency and transparency in efforts to protect society and preserve the nation’s democratic institutions.

But the harsh reality is that in America today—a nation bitterly divided by systemic racism of every stripe, the increasing development of white supremacy, and the staggering harm caused by inexcusable, profit-driven gun violence—policing and penal incarceration, as well as the larger justice system of which they are components, are necessary to maintain some semblance of law and order.

Nihilistic anarchy and violent fascism lurks at the doorstep of every democracy.

There are roughly 330 million people in America today—20 to 30 million of whom are incorrigibly criminal, dangerously mentally ill, white nationalists bent on civil war, and racists who want to harm all other races.

Within this social mix are ruthless murderers, serial killers, mass shooters, drug cartels, organized gangs, pedophiles, and an endless assortment of rage killers who are psychologically primed to harm anyone at any given moment.

All of our social institutions have been harmed by these dangerous, lawless forces—schools, places of worship, work places, the family unit, the public square, and even in our child foster care and elderly treatment centers.

Group counseling, neighborhood watch groups, diversionary programs, alternatives to incarceration, social policing, and vigilante justice will not protect law-abiding and decent people trying to survive from cradle to grave.

Bottom line: the group must be protected from the self-centered interests of the individual. Abolitionists believe—or so I think—that the individual must be protected from the group.

Believe me; neither the group nor the individual is without sin. The divergent interests of the two have robbed mankind of decency and humanity since the proverbial bite out of the apple.

I once read that mankind will never know peace until the last general is strangled with the entrails of the last priest.

Most probably true.

Worldwide wars and religious strife between groups today have given some individuals in the groups a license to be as criminal, mean, and violent as they please.

Georgetown Law Center’s Associate Professor Allegra M. McLeod coined the phrase “prison abolitionist ethic”—a rooted ideological belief that this ethic will eliminate prison and policing’s “brutality, violence, racial stratification, ideological rigidity, despair, and waste.”

It will not.

Look at history.

The Marxism-Leninism ideology promised mankind economic equality and social fairness free of the privileged class.

Yet as Yuri N. Maltsev wrote in a November 2, 2017 piece for Fee Stories, “Never has there been such an insidious and deadly ideology as Marxism-Leninism.”

This ideological belief system carried out an estimated 28,000 executions a year between 1917 and 1922 to replace the Czarist police, prison, and criminal justice systems.

That was the “justice” it gave to Russia.

Abolition of any stripe born from the belly of anarchy, whether inspired by nihilism or socialism, will always produce mass murder and injustice.

Rudolph Rummel estimated that socialism, and its pledge for social justice, killed roughly 61 million people in the Soviet Union, another 78 million in China, and an estimated 200 million worldwide during the 20^th century—all in the name of “justice” of one kind or another.

That’s why I believe repair is better than abolition.

America’s police, prison, and criminal justice systems can be repaired.

More people than not in this country favor a justice delivery system that is fair, equitable, and humane. This objective can be achieved through the power of the vote—by electing people to public office committed to bringing about such a system.

The one lesson I’ve learned in this life, more than half of which has been spent in penal incarceration, is that protection of the group must always trump the freedom of the self-centered individuals

Humans survive as a group, not as individuals.

When Adolph Hitler assumed power in Germany in 1933, racial segregation in America was enforced through laws or lynch mobs. Anti-Semitism and laws restricting immigration reinforced the perception among most Americans that the ideal American was “white” and “Protestant.”

This social order had its roots in a widely accepted theory in place at the time in Germany (as well as other parts of Europe) called “eugenics science.”

This theory holds that certain human traits are inherited making one race of people superior to all others.

One of our so-called Founding Fathers, Thomas Jefferson, was a subscriber to the eugenics theory.

Of course, proponents of eugenics always come to the conclusion that the Caucasian race (“white folks”) is the racially superior race—that white people are far more emotionally, physically and intellectually developed as a human species than those species of “other folks.”

Hitler’s National Socialist German Workers Party (Nazi) rose to power with insurrectionist attacks on democratic institutions espousing one basic political agenda—that the Fuhrer could create a pure-white Aryan Race through eugenics that would rule the world with absolute power and death.

In what began under today’s “war” language as “territorial disputes,” German military forces killed roughly 11 million people that Nazi ideology deemed “unworthy of life”—Jews, homosexuals, Slavs and Jehovah’s Witnesses—in an effort to establish that eugenics-inspired Aryan race.

Millions of Americans prior to Hitler’s territorial disputes in Austria, Czechoslovakia, and Poland in 1938-39 supported the Nazi ideology of racial superiority.

Even after America joined the worldwide territorial dispute in December 1941, millions of Americans still continued to believe in the eugenics nonsense and the slaughter of untold millions it was producing.

Hitler died in 1945 by a bullet to his head fired by his own hand or a bullet fired from a Russian rifle up his ass. Take your choice.

Yet two decades after what was truly WWII, an American demagogue named George Wallace was espousing the same Nazi-based white racial superiority before crowds of adoring, cheering white folks.

This demagogue pulled in nearly 10 million votes in the 1968 presidential election—or more than 13 percent of the total votes cast.

That means Wallace would draw roughly 42 million votes in a presidential election today.

These are still eugenics people in this country today that want to smash the nation’s democratic institutions through insurrection; and who subject racial minorities, non-Christian religious worshippers (Jews and Muslims primarily), all forms of LBGTQ people, and immigrants of every stripe to social isolation, physical hate attacks, and prejudice in all shapes and sizes.

And they have discovered a new Nazi-like leader to hail as their savior—the recently indicted war criminal, Russian President Vladimir Putin.

Like Hitler did with his European territorial disputes, Putin believes he has a right to embark upon territorial disputes with all former Eastern Soviet-Bloc European nations to bring them back into Russia’s “Motherland.”

And in order to accomplish these disputed territorial annexations, Putin orders, encourages, and/or allows his military forces—much like Stalin and Hitler did in WWII—to rape four-year-old daughters in front of their fathers and wives in front of their husbands; to knowingly target civilian schools, hospitals, places of worship, and high-rise apartment complexes in order to kill as many non-combatants as possible; to put tens of thousands of “convicts” on the front lines as human fodder in an effort to deplete Ukrainian military resources; and to murder any friend or foe who dares to criticize the Ukrainian “territorial dispute.”

It is sad to see so many George Wallace descendants increasingly coming out of the American political woodwork to either support or acquiesce to Putin’s Ukrainian “territorial dispute” effort.

History truly repeats itself.

Arthur Brown, Jr. became the fifth person put to death in the state’s death chamber in 2023 and the 583^rd since 1982—by far the most executions by any state since 1976 when the U.S. Supreme Court effectively reinstated the death penalty nationwide.

Brown was convicted, along with two other men, for killing four people and attempting to kill two others during a drug house rip-off in Houston in 1992. One of the other two men was executed in 2006 while the other is serving a life sentence.

It is often said that the death penalty deters murder. The 12 executions carried out by Texas in 1992 did not deter those four murders in the Houston drug house—or any of the other 2,239 murders committed across the state that year.

Texas does not execute people as a deterrent. It executes people, especially those of color, because it makes the state feel good.

Texas executed its first person—a white man—in 1819 for the crime of piracy—and it executed another 754 people up until 1964 at which time the state joined other states in a moratorium on the death penalty until the green light was given by the Supreme Court in 1976 to gin up the killing machines.

Texas has always preferred to experiment with black people on its new methods of execution.

The state legislature in 1923 put an end to hanging as the state’s method of execution and replaced it with the electric chair. That same year the infamous Huntsville prison was designated as the place where all executions would be carried out.

On February 8, 1924, Texas tested its new electric chair by executing five black men that day. The state did the same thing when it resumed executing people in 1982 by lethal injection with the execution of a black man.

Texas has always had a penchant for executing black men, especially those convicted of raping white women. Between 1819 and 1924 when the state was hanging people, the state hanged 29 black men for raping white women while executing just five white men for raping white women. No man was hanged for raping a black woman.

In fact, in 1919 a black dentist was lynched in Walker County just for associating with a white female work colleague.

Texans actually preferred unlawful lynching to legal hanging during the Civil War and well into and after the post-Civil War era.

In October 1862, the Great Hangings of Gainesville took place.

40 white men—all of whom were Unionist sympathizers or slavery abolitionists—were lynched and two others shot trying to escape in that small Cooke County community. It was the largest act of vigilante justice in America history. 19 of those men had been acquitted in court but were turned over to the lynch mob by the court anyway.

More people were lynched in Texas during the post-Civil War era (493) than were lawfully hanged by the state. The lynchings carried on well into the 20^th century. For example, 9 black people were lynched in a single day in Walker County in 1908 and a decade later six members of a black family were lynched in 1919.

Today, a century later, Texas is still killing people.

The state has another execution scheduled this month and another next month. There are roughly another 183 people on death row awaiting their death date.

Every death penalty case has its own share prosecutorial charging arbitrariness, prosecution/law enforcement misconduct, juries selected exclusively to convict, judicially ignored or prosecution suppression of evidence of innocence, and lengthy post-conviction proceedings that can stretch into decades—all good reasons why the death penalty should be abolished. The  damage the penalty inflicts on the nation’s criminal justice system far outweigh any arguable value it may have in our society.

The Michael Dean Gonzales case is no exception.

An elderly husband/wife couple, 73-year-old Manuel Lugan Aquirre, Sr. and 65 year old Merced Gonzales Aquirre, were stabbed to death in their home in Odessa, Texas on April 21, 1994.

Gonzales, a next door neighbor of the Aquirres, was an immediate suspect in their killings because of a history of conflict between the neighbors.

Two weeks later, May 7, 1994, Gonzales was arrested and capital murder under Texas’s death penalty statute, Tex. Penal Code § 19.03. The statute authorizes the death penalty for 10 different crimes of murder. Gonzales was indicted under two of the statute’s subsections: (a)(2) that he killed Merced Aquirre during the commission of a burglary; and (a)(7) that he killed both individuals in the same transaction.

Gonzales was tried, convicted, and sentenced to death on December 8, 1994. That started what has become nearly a three decade post-conviction process, as outlined below:

1. On June 3, 1998 conviction and death sentence upheld on direct appeal by the Texas Court of Criminal Appeals (CCA). One of the 18 issues raised on direct appeal was that the State failed to prove during the punishment phase of his trial that he killed the Aquirres as part of the same criminal transaction thereby rendering the death penalty illegal. The CCA rejected that issue. In an unusual move, the court designated that its decision not be published.
2. On October 13, 1998, Gonzales filed his first post-conviction habeas corpus application in the Ector County court raising 7 issues for relief. The application was denied and that decision was upheld by the CCA on March 10, 1999.
3. Gonzales initiated federal habeas corpus in the U.S. District Court for the Western District of Texas. That Court in 2003 upheld Gonzales’ conviction but reversed his death sentence. Three years later the Fifth Circuit Court of Appeals upheld that ruling, effectively sending Gonzales’ case back to the state trial court for a new punishment trial.
4. The new punishment trial was conducted on May 7, 2009 and Gonzales was again sentenced to death. The CCA upheld the second death sentence on September 28, 2011.
5. Gonzales initiated a second round of habeas pleadings. The trial court denied relief and the CCA upheld that decision in 2015, finding that Gonzales had abused the habeas process. The federal district court denied habeas relief in 2018 and the Fifth Circuit refused to hear the case in 2019.

In 2020, Gonzales filed a series of motions, one for DNA testing permissible under the provisions set forth in Chapter 64 of the Texas Code of Criminal Procedure, and another to have the Texas Attorney General’s Office removed from the post-conviction process. The trial court denied the “new evidence” issues and in a 24-page decision handed down on March 3, 2022, the CCA rejected Gonzales’ attempts for DNA discovery to show that he did not kill the Aquirres in the same transaction.

While those pleadings were pending, a March 8, 2022 execution date was set for Gonzales by the Ector County criminal court.

 Faced with an impending execution date Gonzales’ Houston criminal defense attorney Richard Burr, one of the most respected death penalty attorneys in the nation, filed a 169-page habeas application essentially arguing that the state had engaged in serious prosecutorial misconduct, that new evidence would support Gonzales’ exoneration, and that Gonzales was too intellectually disabled to be executed.

In response to Burr’s emergency habeas petition, the CCA issued a stay order of the March 8 execution on February 28, 2022.

The CCA’s decision-making is both inexplicable and convoluted. Why grant a stay based on possible new exonerating evidence on February 28 only to rule three days later that there was no basis for a new evidence discovery process?

Richard Burr’s latest habeas petition is a chronicle of a law enforcement investigation process and the actual handling of the prosecution of Michael Dean Gonzales that involves unethical fabrications and the suppression of significant exonerating evidence.

And it stands as an indictment that as the Gonzales case meandered through the state and federal post-conviction process for roughly 28 years, these issues went either unnoticed or ignored. In a case penalty case, one never really knows.

Whether Michael Dean Gonzales is completely innocent of the Aquirres murders, or had some lesser degree of involvement in them, or is now too intellectual disabled to be executed are issues yet to be determined.

But what can be reasonably stated, and decided, is this case points to a need to abolish the death penalty in the state of Texas.