Now you’re the one “palming cards”; I only said I thought your post suggested it, not said, and that it suggested that good reasoning cannot redeem a sinful act “in some cases”. Though I tend to think it was a misstatement on your part rather than purposeful.
As to where I think your post* suggested* it, it was in that your example of the first Obama supporter who does appear to have good reasoning behind their choice, yet it is your opinion that they have comitted a sinful act, and a grave one at that. If I am incorrect and there is good reasoning that would redeem the sinful act of voting for legalized abortion (by proxy of a President), then i’m perfectly willing to stand corrected.
Sure there is. We’ve even heard some of it on this board. A person might say: “The reality is that even with a pro-life President – Reagan, Bush 41, and Bush 43 prove the case – abortion will continue. Since no President will end abortion, I will select Obama, even though he’s pro-choice, because I believe his social policies will lead to less need for abortion and fewer overall abortions.”
bolding mine. Wait a minute. You are against abortion, but you can’t bring yourself to call the unborn “people”. Hmm. Somebody’s a half-assed pro-lifer.
Thank you for putting what I said earlier more succinctly. From what I’ve read, making abortion won’t significantly reduce the number of abortions performed, but may increase the number of women who are killed by illegal abortions and, in general increase human suffering and misery. On the other hand, finding a way to ensure that free pre-natal healthcare is available to all women, even if it is provided by the much-maligned Planned Parenthood, and arranging for women to have paid maternity leave might do something to reduce the number of abortions performed in this country. I think we should also work to make adoption a more viable alternative, of course, but we’re going to need to work on society’s attitude for that one.
The RCC, my church, is not consistent in this regard, but I believe the difference would be that exercising free speech to your own detriment is one thing, a personal choice, whereas abortion is not, in that it affects the right of another person, an innocent one.
I believe this should be the RCC’s position on SSM, for example. We can believe to our hearts content that it’s sinful, but why would we install as law something that prevents people from making a choice that affects no other innocent person against the person’s wishes? Preach, encourage, do whatever you like–but personal decisions, that which materially affect only ourselves (or other willing adults) are purely religious concerns (to the extent the RCC might have an interest in them). In other words, they are outside the boundaries of religious issues that might legitimately overlap with law.
I’m not talking about exercising free speech to my detriment. I’m talking about exercising free speech to the detriment of others (what the church would consider “detriment,” anyway). Having the right to sell my God-hating, despairing, heretical wares to all comers. To teach, to lecture, to lure, to harangue, leading the faithful astray, and corrupting their souls. This used to be a big deal for the church. People were put on trial for it, burned, tortured, otherwise killed. Physical bodies don’t rank up there with souls.
And yet I have a right to do that in the United States, and the church doesn’t say boo about it.
You can sell whatever you want, doesn’t force anyone to buy. An abortion is quite another matter–the act itself necessarily creates an evil outcome that affects another person.
And I’ve already acknowledged that my church has been less than consistent in their policy on such matters. Leave it to you to nitpick about a little thing like torturing a few heretics.
Good idea not looking for one, because you’d waste your time. The doctrine of papal infallibility only applies when he speaks ex cathedra on a matter of faith or morals. There are precisely two confirmed* practices of this: pronouncing Mary to have been conceived immaculately, and pronouncing her to have been taken up into heaven bodily. Of the others theorized to fall under this category by theologians, none of which has been confirmed, none of them has anything to do with abortion, and all of them are purely theological, hierarchical, or doctrinal concerns.
*as in, the Vatican says the Pope indeed fulfilled the five criteria for speaking infallibly.
Well, exactly. Just as I can support a law keeping abortion legal, but that doesn’t force anyone to have an abortion. That’s the point. The church punishes those who vote for abortion to be legal even if those people don’t want to have an abortion. In the abortion arena, pro-choice people are held guilty for what other people do.
And I would like to add, if we are just as guilty for allowing bad things to happen, God has a lot of ‘splainin’ to do.
To me what’s onerous about this is not its internal logic. Religious leaders decide what is sinful, and there is a plausible argument that they genuinely believe it is sinful to support a pro-choice politician. I get that. If you believe abortion is a contemporary holocaust, it stands to reason that people who knowingly enable that holocaust are bad people. So there’s no part of the internal logic that makes this more problematic than the belief itself (that abortion is a great evil).
What is troubling is the extreme under-inclusiveness. Obama is no worse in this regard than the rest of the vast majority of federal politicians who are pro-choice. Not to mention the myriad other sinful things politicians support or engage in. I suppose one could argue that abortion is worse than everything else, and that Obama has more power than anyone else–so support for him is uniquely wrong. But the President has relatively little power over abortion laws. State governors and legislators probably have more affect on the issue than the President. And why is abortion worse than stem cell research, in Catholic dogma? Or torture causing death? Or euthanasia?
The focus on Obama suggests to me that this isn’t about abortion. It is about Obama.
One needs to actively promote abortion before “the church,” (usually a bishop dealing with a public figure), will “punish” anyone. For example, no legislator has been sanctioned by his or her own bishop for voting for expropriation bills that happened to include abortion funding and no executive has been sanctioned for failing to veto them. There have been a couple of occasions when a bishop in a totally different diocese has muttered about denying such persons communion, but I am unaware of any bishop who has done it to one of his own. (The Szoka/Mansour affair comes close, although there were also extenuating circumstances in that case.)
There have been a couple of cases in which members of different groups have been sanctioned for actively promoting abortion, usually when they demand changes in church law rather than civil law, but simply voting does not incur actual punishment from the church.
POTUS appoints Supreme Court Justices. His influence in this arena is enormous. Additionally, Obama has stated the first thing he’d do as president is sign the Freedom of Choice Act, a chilling eventuality for pro-lifers. He has a 100% rating from Planned Parenthood. I’m not trying to convert you here, just commenting that if you’re pro-life, Obama is not your guy on this issue, and his influence will be significant.
FWIW, I’ve been taught as a Catholic that euthanasia is also evil, as is stem cell research. “Torture causing death” I don’t recall specifically, but I’ll bet we think it’s bad.
