Who Would Jesus Execute? Richard Viguerie is a law-and-order conservative. He’s also a Catholic. And he believes it’s time to rethink the death penalty. Richard Viguerie is as responsible as anyone for the success of the conservative movement in this country. A pioneer in political direct mail, Viguerie has been involved from the radical edges of the Right in every Republican campaign from Goldwater to Romney; he’s been called the “funding father of the conservative movement.” He helped start hundreds of entities from Conservative Digest to Gun Owners of America, from the National Conservative Political Action Committee to the Moral Majority—spanning the political spectrum from Right to Far Right. His latest book is titled Conservatives Betrayed: How George W. Bush and Other Big Government Republicans Hijacked the Conservative Cause. A month before the 2012 election, he launched MyOwnSuperPAC because of “frustration at how weak and ineffective the Romney campaign’s ads have been with its soft approach to Barack Obama.” In short, Viguerie’s conservative bona fides are unlikely to be called into question.
And yet Viguerie’s Catholic faith has led
him to a surprising position on the issues of capital punishment and prison reform. The editor-in-chief Jim Wallis in September about why he thinks an expected left-right Richard Viguerie
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alliance might turn the tide against the death penalty.
Pat Sullivan/AP
conservative icon talked with Sojourners’
The gurney used to restrain condemned prisoners during the lethal injection process in the Texas death house in Huntsville. january 2013 sojourners 17