This may have been covered. I am running way late to this thread, but I thought bearing false witness was a sin as well.
Or does that only apply to trials?
What we truly have is a “Constitutional Democratic Republic.” The will of the majority doesn’t always rule.
If you propose that we should have a pure “majority rules under all circumstances” democracy, perhaps that’s something to discuss. But we don’t. The established legal precedents clearly say so. You wish to dismantle all those established legal precedents and institute something else.
Since it’s Bricker you’re talking about … $10 says he wishes no such thing and has not said so.
This (the general question of voting based on religious convictions) is one of those issues that does not have a clear-cut answer. If you proposed the following two questions:
(1) Quakers are pacifists. Is it ethically correct for them to vote for a pacifist candidate, or vote against (say) war appropriations?
(2) Hindus don’t eat beef. Is it ethicaly correct for them to vote to make beef-eating illegal?
A large majority of Americans would answer yes to (1) and no to (2).
So what’s the difference? As others have suggested, I think it comes down to a question of whether you’re trying to force other people to abide by your moral code, whether you define that as “rights” or not. But still, there are sticky areas that are unclean. If you vote against the death penalty, whose rights are you infringing, if any? What about abortion? Does the fetus have rights? etc…
(And I reject any claim that it comes down to rights enumerated in the constitution. If it was ethically correct for a member of a racist church to vote to ban miscegenation in 1840, it was still ethically correct in 1870, and vice versa.
My point is, it’s not a cut and dried issue. (Although I really think it takes some seriously tortured logic to view gay marriage as being primarily an issue of anything other than civil rights…)
Bricker, a question: if the Catholic church is such a moral authority, how to you reconcile its strong opposition to the Iraq war with your support of that war? (Or has this been covered elsewhere?)
Well y’all will be happy to know that I done got me one of them internets and I been readin’ up on my Federalist Papers so’s I can get more educated and may can make enough money to pay my poll tax.
Now I don’t cotton much to that book-learnin’, seein’ as how my natural predilection is to repeatedly indulge in sinful acts without fear of responsibility or consequence, that is when I’m not thinkin’ up new ways to hypocritically impose my will onto others. But I reckon that James Madison feller had some pretty good ideas.
That got me wonderin’, what’s a faction?
Ah! A majority of the whole, like the Catholic Church! Or a minority of the whole, like them homo-sexuals.
Now I admit this bit got me a might confused. Where is all this talk about “personal liberty” and “private faith” and “justice and rights of the minor party” comin’ from? It’s those factions that are the problem. Factions just like all those homo-sexuals makin’ up rights for themselves, actin’ out of their own self-interest, changin’ the laws just to suit them. Right-thinking Christians who know that doin’ it up the butt is a sin (don’t get me wrong, some of my best friends are gay, I don’t hate them, just their behavior) can’t be a “faction” or an “overbearing majority.” They’re just the will of the people.
I don’t know what that’s all about. We’ve got an enlightened statesman at the helm right now.
What that ought to do it. That should shut up the homos. They’ll bitch and moan and convulse the society, but they can’t really do nothing about it, because they’ll always lose the popular vote.
Thanks for showing me those papers, fellas. I understand the republic now and… what? What do you mean, there’s more to it than that?
Hang on now, Jimmy. So you’re saying that the principle of the republic is to keep a majority faction, like say Catholicism or Christianity in general, from oppressing the rights of other citizens? That ain’t democracy or public good. If the majority of people are voting strictly according to their own moral or religious motives, isn’t that enough to guarantee that everybody’s taken care of?
Oh. Well ain’t that a bitch. Sucks to be a weaker party or an obnoxious individual, but then I guess they can always toughen up and be less obnoxious. I hope you’ve got a better solution.
That sounds pretty good. Seems to make a whole lot more sense to make sure that people keeping track of all the issues and all factions, both large and small, are the ones making the decisions to benefit everyone. Instead of doing something downright stupid like leaving decisions on the rights of marriage for a minority of citizens up to a popular vote.
Ah. So then you’d get weird cases like San Fag-cisco, where the community is in support of one thing, but the state as a whole overwhelms them and their fruity “lesser interests.”
Yikes. It’s a damn good thing that Madison is 100% sure that the republic will completely address all the potential problems, with absolutely no chance of that happening across the whole country – we’d end up with only two political parties, and big masses of congruent red states and blue states. That sounds scary.
So thank God we can just assume that a representative democracy itself takes care of all the potential pitfalls of government and warring factions. We can completely ignore all the principles that the republic was designed to foster, like religious groups overwhelming the rights of minorities, or situations where might makes right and numbers win out over personal liberites, and just vote completely according to our own religious or moral beliefs with absolutely no thought to a rational basis for that vote. The republic fixes everything.
And it’s a good thing, too, because I’m plumb tuckered out from all that reading and quoting. I’d hate to have to think about personal responsibility as a voter, or whether they considered a judiciary and checks and balances or something.
Polycarp
Just think if Polycarp was gay he would be both gravely deficient and objectively disordered.
Sol, you’re better off, when constructing a logical argument, to not put your logical error near the very beginning where it derails all the rest of your work:
There is simply no way that you can pretend that in the U.S. the Catholic Church is anything resembling a “majority of the whole.”
You may be able to get to the same point following a different path, but this path has a large bridge missing over that chasm of error.
Oh no, not again :smack:
And I had you pegged as one of the good guys, Sol. 
I think you have no idea what I think about Gay Marriage, for one thing.
Sorry, that’s about all it’s worth.
Make it “Christian Church” then, tom~, and I think his point stands.
As usual most of you are overeacting, (except those happy few like scottplaid that just hate the RCC and would never consider that th Church can do anything that is not evil), Benedict XVI was JP II right hand since 1981. He isn’t more conservative taht our last Pope but the fact is that his job was to punish the heretics, (in that way he was the bad cop and JPII the good one).-
Most of you have also a pretty curious notion of Catholics teaching. The church forbids premarital sex, oral sex, etc, it doesn’t mean that a catholic doens’t have sex before marrige or that he doesn’t go down.-
The fact is that the principal teaching of the RCC is that we are all sinners. The problem with you is that if a catholic girls is great in oral sex you all conclude that she is a hypocrite, (Diogenes said something like that to bricker: I hope your wife doesn’t perform oral sex on you), for the church she is simply a sinner.-
Catholicism doesn’t require it’s adherents to be super human or demigods. Christianity is an ideal that can’t always be applied in this imperfect planet. A catholic is simply required to try to be a better christian and to repent his or her sins.
Besides sex, when it’s forbidden, it’s even more fun so join our Church 
::Scott starts to make a point about the psychological harm of a sin-bound world, as opposed to many atheist’s, “There are no bad people, just bad actions” or judaism’s “Sin is what happens when you miss the mark”, but he just decides to get the hell away from the cult member urging him to join, instead::
No, it does not.
Okay, rephrase for Estilicon:
The Church forbids oral sex as an end in itself. Although that does, indeed, make the supposed sting at Bricker somewhat irrelevant.
NO, I’m happy with what we have: two-thirds of each house of Congress, and three-fourths of the state legislatures, may amend the Constitution. That’s a supermajority, I grant you, but it does rule, completely. If we can muster a two-thirds of of Congress and three-fourths of the state legislatures to pass an amendment that restricts the vote to those between 21 and 65 years of age, then that will be the law. Period. The will of the (super)majority DOES always rule, because the Constitution is the supreme law of the land, and it may be amended by super-majority.
Before the war, I believed what the President believed - that we had information about an imminent threat. This information was not available to the Vatican, and so their judgement of whether the conflict met the criteria for a just war was not based on full information.
Of course, as it happened, the information we had was not correct. Knowing what we know now, I would not have supported the start of the war. But based on our best knowledge at the time, I believed it was the correct thing to do.
Can you provide any cite that indicates the Church forbids oral sex?
No. It does not.
The president didn’t believe Iraq was a threat any more than I did.
Is oral sex open to conception?
The RCC does not forbid oral sex as foreplay but you’re supposed to follow it up with intercourse…or to put it more crudely, you’re not supposed to come in her mouth…at least not on purpose.