Down yonder, a reader writes:
I’m a protestant, so half of you probably don’t think im really a christian, but what seems to be missing in this whole debate is the entire rest of the issues. If it’s a sin to vote for a pro-choicer over a pro-lifer, why isn’t it a sin to vote for someone who won’t care for the poor, or who is for capital punishment or any number of other issues. Much less on how well they will actually help the country be a better place for everyone…And until you get bishops running for office, no one will ever follow strictly the Catholic Church’s guidelines/demands. Just my two cents.
First, thanks for posting. I hope you’ll visit again (in fact, regularly).
Second, the Catholic Church teaches that, as a Protestant, you are a Christian. That’s settled Catholic teaching and has been for centuries, so you should not be concerned on that point. Anyone who disagrees is disagreeing with the Church’s teaching.
Third, the issues you name are not all the same. Some involve issues that can be supported in some circumstances (like the death penalty) while some can never be supported in any circumstances (like abortion). There is a qualitative difference between the issues.
Fourth, there is also a quantitative difference between the issues. A handful of people may get executed in the U.S. each year, but 1.4 MILLION babies are killed by abortion (and that number may jump dramatically if embryonic stem cell research and cloning for research purposes get off the ground).
As a result of the fact that it kills more individuals than anything else (not the death penalty, not poverty, not the War on Terror, not anything) and the fact that it is intrinsically evil and can never be permitted, abortion superdominates the political landscape. It is the BIG EVIL that has to be taken down as soon as humanly possible. Work on ending lesser evils can proceed as long as they don’t interfere with taking down abortion.
I may have to suffer from a less-than-optimal environment while waiting for abortion to stop, but I can live with that. As long as millions babies are being slaughtered, I cannot ignore their plight at voting time in order to better my or others’ conditions in matters that are not proportionate to 1.4 million deaths a year.
Is it a sin to assume that someone doesn’t care for the poor and to publicly label him/her as someone who doesn’t care for the poor just because you don’t agree with his economic policies?
And by the way, who are these politicians who “don’t care about the poor”? If caring about the poor means supporting government welfare programs, then which politician is opposed to them?
There’s a strange lack of parallelism here. I vote Republican because I believe that, on the whole, their economic policies have the greatest likelihood of alleviating poverty. It is routine for a Democrat to then accuse me of ‘neglecting the poor’, as though Democrat-conceived statist solutions to poverty are the only ones possible.
Yet, while I disagree with Democratic solutions to poverty, and in fact believe that they will only increase poverty, erode self-esteem, and foster a permanent underclass, I readily grant that my Democratic friends sincerely wish to alleviate this problem. They’re just going about it in the wrong way, I believe.
So, I’m willing to give my political adversaries the benefit of the doubt in this regard and credit them with good intentions. But I rarely ever (more like never) receive that same benefit in return from them.
Why is this? This is not just my personal experience . . . I think that many Catholics who vote Republican are accustomed to this lack of parallelism (in assuming good intentions) from Democrat-voting Catholics (or Protestants, for that matter).
Adding to the stats tally, there are also supposed to be more than 10 million (I once read 14 million) abortions per year resulting from the use of contraceptives, e.g., the Pill, IUD, and the morning after Pill come to mind.
I also read this excellent point someplace: a public policy-maker that consistently supports abortion, for example, shows a seriously flawed view of human life. Without a basic respect for human life and the right to life, what can such a politician be expected to stand for?
Finally, the original post mentioned an important issue: just how accountable is the Catholic politician to the Church, when he/she is not a member of the clergy? I’d say very accountable. The rules in the Roman Catholic Church applies to all its members, clergy and laity. They can dissent, sure, but they do so at their peril. They can get the full treatment: denied the Eucharist and lobbied by their Catholic constituents. It’s not a matter of a club censuring one if its members. This is *the* universal Church, as far as Catholics are concerned. Hence, being at odds with it is serious business.
Dissidents will disagree, of course.
Quote: “I’m a protestant, so half of you probably don’t think im really a christian”
Bigotry against the Baptism of Protestants seems rare among Catholics, even when they are rather distressed about other issues Protestants disagree on.
Conditional Baptism of a former Protestant is only used when there may be a question that the convert was baptized only in the name of Jesus.
Peace,
Whimsy
Jimmy, there is a missing step in your argument. You have established that, in the current situation, no political objective is more important than ending abortion. But, it does not follow that one must therefore use all available political means to achieve that objective REGARDLESS OF THEIR COSTS. If a adopting a particular means would contribute extremely little towards achieving the objective, but carry a very high cost, then one could reasonably conclude that adopting that means would actually do more harm than good and therefore decide not to use it.
Applied to voting, if voting for a particular pro-life candidate would actually do nothing to stop abortion but voting for the opponent would actually do a great deal to achieve some lesser objective, then it would be licit to achieve the good that is achievable rather than sacrificing that good in a futile effort to achieve something even better.
My point is simply that if you only weigh objectives, you haven’t completed the analysis. You also have to assess what impact your vote will have on achieving those objectives. As a test case, imagine two candidates for county treasurer, one of whom is pro-life and thoroughly corrupt (such people do exist) and one of whom is pro-abortion, but is completely trustworthy (such people also exist). Don’t you have to take into account how much harm the corrupt treasurer might do in office and whether electing him would actually do anything to stop abortion in order to determine which candidate you should vote for?
It’s always been my experience that Catholics are more apt to consider Protestants fellow Christians, with the exception of Feeneyists of course, than vice versa.
Thank you for your input, its interesting to read. As a not, my cases of bad pro-life candidates were not an attack on the republican party, (my dad is actually thinking of running for a seat in the house as a republican in 06) they were just a circumstance where I was trying to put forth a terrible politician in all respects except for abortion, versus a wonderful one who is pro-choice. Another question I have is: is abortion still wrong, even if it were certain that the mother-to-be would die if she delivered the baby? Then one dies and one lives either way.
And to the person who grouped the pill and condoms under ‘abortions’ (or anyone else who can answer) I don’t see how that is immoral/a sin if two married people don’t want to have any more children, and prevent the life from happening, it seems to bean ounce of prevention, not the “pound of cure” which i also agree is wrong. A single sperm is not alive, nor is it life. If it were, then having sex would be terrible immoral, whenever, because while possibly 1 life might be created, the other hundreds of thousands (or millions?) are ‘killed.’ Talk about a true holocaust there…
The problem is not that sperm are alive and that contraception kills them. Sperm are indeed alive (that’s why they wiggle toward the ovum), but they are not human beings and so killing them is not murder.
What is a problem is that some methods of “contraception” actually cause early-term abortions by making it hard for the unborn baby (*after* the union of sperm and ovum) to implant in the mother’s womb. The IUD and, to some degree, the Pill both do this.
For me, knowing that a politician is pro-abortion tells me one of two things: that they are incapable of thinking logically based on evidence, or that they are willing to set aside personal convictions for political gain.
Either disqualifies them from serious consideration.
Tim,
Two questions:
1) Does this “disqualification” extend to politicians who are partly pro-abortion or imperfectly pro-life (e.g. who support legalizing abortion in certain circumstances)? From what you’ve said, it would seem that such an opinion would reveal the same flaws that you say disqualify the pro-abortion politician.
2) Since the entirety of the natural law is deducible by thinking logically based on evidence, does this disqualification extend to politicians who support legalizing other practices that are contrary to the natural law? That contraception and divorce are evil is likewise evident by thinking logically based on evidence. Your analysis would seem to say that politicians who support legalizing contraceptive use or allowing divorce are also “disqualified” for the same reasons as politicians who support legal abortion.
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