Given that the oldest justices on the court are liberal, his influence in this area is likely to be jack shit. Maintaining the status quo is not exactly an enormous influence.
Not necessarily. As I said before, you could believe that abortion would continue under McCain or Obama, but Obama’s support of various childcare policies would make abortions less common, as women felt that they would get help with their babies.
The church considers it a sin to allow abortion. Not to commit abortion, but to allow it.
tomndebb was talking about the church actively leveling a punishment. jsgoddess rejoins with a claim of what the church considers a sin. The church considers plenty of things sinful but does not impose a punishment for them (other than penance in the course of confession).
George Bush did meet JPII in 2004, but it appeared to be part of a Presidential tour of Europe.
Where did you “hear” this interpretation of Bush’s papal audience? It’s a pretty standard thing for visiting heads of state.
John Kerry is still a lawmaker. This year:
(Let’s remember that this thread is the result of the actions of one priest. A priest who likes publicity!)
They are the worst kind. Whether they be conservative or liberal, as far as I can see priests who take these kinds of stands for a cause have started to think more about themselves, and less about God or their congregations.
Saying that someone is going to hell, or saying they’re a bad Catholic, or threatening them with various things qualifies, in my opinion.
But fine. The punishment from the church isn’t important to my argument. I’ll repeat it:
The church says that allowing abortion is a sin even though that means you are being held responsible for someone else’s actions. The church doesn’t hold you responsible for someone else’s heresy or someone else’s despair. The church doesn’t even hold itself responsible for a priest’s child molestation, despite facilitating that to a much greater degree than voting for a politician. The church seems to say that in this case and this case only, you are responsible for what other people do with their free will. God can’t be held responsible for what people do with their free will, but you can.
So he doesn’t speak up until after the election is over to save on taxes? Isn’t that pretty close to not opposing what he considers a sin? All in the name of saving money on taxes? How isn’t that the same as money changers in the temple?
How about all those parishioners who disagree withholding money from the church, or going to a different parish or diocese, or donating directly to charity cutting out the assholes.
It’s not allowing it so much as actively helping in the effort, either directly by driving someone to the clinic, etc., or indirectly by advocating for abortion rights.
There’s a difference.
You’re not being held responsible for someone else’s decision. You’re being held responsible only for your own action: facilitating the commission of abortion, which the church views as the destruction of an innocent human life.
Now, you say, “Wait – people can legally advocate for apostasy or heresy. People can get on national TV and urge listeners to denounce God… but the politician that votes for laws permitting these actions is not held responsible.”
Answer: who says?
If a politician voted for continuing such laws with the intention of permitting such actions, he’d absolutely be considered responsible. The problem with that calculus is that it’s unclear, from a simple review, what someone’s intention is. The more likely interpretation of such a vote is that he favors the open and unfettered general discourse that is the hallmark of a free society, and accepts, as an unintended secondary consequence, that those laws regarding free speech will be used for sinful purposes.
But with abortion, there’s no such saving grace. What good primary goal exists for keeping abortion legal?
Actually, I can think of one: perhaps such a politician honestly believes, after careful and prudential consideration with a fully-informed conscience, that if abortions are illegal, the same number of them will occur, with perhaps the mothers suffering illness or death as well from black-market abortionists with no oversight of their medical qualifications.
And under such circumstances, that politician’s vote is not sinful.
It’s always about intent.
How is “advocating for abortion rights” any different than “allowing people to have abortions”?
Again, I’m not committing a sin, according to the RCC, if I support freedom of religion. But I’m committing a sin, according to the RCC, if I support freedom to have an abortion.
I’m held responsible in part if you have the right to have an abortion. I’m not held responsible in any part if you have the right to be an apostate heretic who worships Idols and Jimmy Buffett.
And freedom of religion facilitates the commission of heresy, which the church views as worse than mere death.
Not just free speech, freedom of religion.
And I think this is rather a bullshit argument. What does a free society have to do with righteousness? What does the church care for someone’s religious freedom?
And our “free society” has decided that bodily freedom is important. If the church is going to go along with the standards of our free society, why don’t they shut the hell up about abortion?
There are several reasons the church supports religious freedom – one of them them is practical; when Catholics were a despised and persecuted minority in this country, the secular guarantees of religious freedom were obviously important. And there’s no “innocent victim” when the issue is free speech; you may hear calls to apostasy but not be forced to follow them. Free will exists for the listener as well as the speaker.
There’s no such trade-off in the issue of abortion. There’s always a dead victim. This is why there’s no useful analogy with free speech; the consequences of heresy are severe, but they cannot possibly be imposed on an unwilling victim.
So the survival of the church is more important than the dogma? What’s the church for if it will knuckle under to political pressure? Doesn’t that strike anyone else as incredibly cowardly? “Oh, we’ll make a big fuss about X and act like we’re going to throw you out of our club, but when it comes to Y, when it comes to the very basis of our religion, well, no biggie! You do what you want!”
And, again, if you don’t have an abortion, you didn’t impose anything on an unwilling victim. The only guilty party is the one who did something, not the one who allowed something. Making or keeping something a right has nothing to do with agreeing with it.
You keep focusing, somewhat myopically, on every issue but the one that separates abortion from each of these other sins: the presence of an innocent victim. Surely you can see the push to stop a parctice that has, as a “victim” someone who is complicit in the sin is not nearly as strong as the push to stop a sin that results in the death of a completely innocent victim.
Lots of things have innocent victims (how about child molestation?). Hell, what doesn’t have innocent victims? This idea that abortion is somehow unusual in that is weird. (And if only the innocent matter, the church needs to pack it in.)
What I keep focusing on is the one thing that’s supposed to separate the church from some random advocacy organization: The religion itself.
That religion says the salvation of the soul is the big kahuna. It’s better to save souls than lives because lives are temporary and souls are eternal. The first, the biggest, commandment is “Love God with all you’ve got.”
And yet the church says nah. It’s okay if people don’t love God. It’s okay if they blaspheme and take the Lord’s name in vain and worship idols and desecrate the Sabbath and commit adultery and all that. It’s only souls, after all. Can’t interfere with a free exchange in a free society! Unless it’s about fetuses. Fetuses or gays. Them too.
You can argue that they don’t really think it’s okay, but the silence is pretty damned deafening.
Since the church will sell out their highest calling, what will it take to make them give up on the gay marriage thing? I’ve got a shiny nickel.
Jsgoddess, you’re ignoring the fact that the Catholic Church tried doing everything it could t oppose heresy and it didn’t work terribly well. OTOH, I suspect there are more Catholics worldwide now than there were before they decided to accept religious pluralism. It could very well be that the Church made the same calculation WRT to religious freedom as Bricker suggested could be made for abortion: that the goal (in this case saving souls, in that one preventing abortions) is better accomplished by promoting legal freedom than by restricting it. Of course, the RCC is very consistently non-consequentialist in their ethics. If every soul in creation could be saved by murdering one innocent baby, Catholic moral teaching is that it would be wrong to do so. (Of course, if the baby allows itself to be sacrificed, that’s a little different; it was wrong for the soldiers to crucify Jesus but it was good that it happened.) So it could also be that the Church concluded that humans have a right to religious freedom that trumps any soul-saving that could be accomplished without it. There is no corresponding right (in Catholic thinking) that pertains to having an abortion.
(If I understand Catholic teaching on religious freedom, it is a little of each. There is a fundamental human freedom not to be coerced in matters of belief, and as a practical matter it is unlikely that laws against blasphemy, heresy, etc. can work without trampling that fundamental right. But IANAC or even a Christian, so I could be wrong.)
I’m not ignoring that at all. I said that if they’ve decided that a free society is more important than their religion, that’s fine, only this same “free society” rejects their abortion teachings yet they don’t stuff it.
Oh, and no. I don’t believe the RCC thinks we have a right to religious freedom that trumps any soul-saving that could be accomplished without it.
Well, heresy doesn’t have innocent victims in quite the same way that either abortion or child molestation does.
So, ok, let’s talk about child molestation.
It’s the position of the church that child molestation is a sin. If a politician were to advocate for laws permitting child molestation, with the intent of allowing child molestation, then that person would be committing a sin. And undoubtedly there would be calls to withhold the sacraments from that person.
" But wait!" I hear you cry. What about all the child molesting priests?
OK. What about them?
What they did was despicable, a grave sin from the very blackest depths of what we mean by “sin.”
And what the bishops often did in response was stupid. When stupidity crosses the line into sinfulness, I cannot say. But during the time when the worst of the “send the priest to therapy and prayer retreat, and then send him into a new parish with a clean slate” business happened… it happened because those bishops believed, truly albeit foolishly, that this was enough to “cure” predator pedophiles.
Everything I’ve written above about intent being necessary for serious sin applies here as well. No priest would have been reassigned if he had said, “I intend to keep molesting children,” and certainly no priest would have been reassigned if he had said “I intend to work for and support laws that make it possible to molest children legally.”
This, then, is the distinction between support of abortion laws and priest molestation. In one case, the malefactors were professing sorrow, asking forgiveness, and promising not to repeat the sin. Whether they should have been believed or not, the fact is that’s what they were doing. No one would so much as whisper a suggestion of withholding Communion from a politician who said, “I have voted for abortion laws in the past, but I’m sorry now that I did so, and I won’t do it again.”
You and I have such radically different perceptions of reality that this conversation is doomed.
You really believe what you just typed and I… well, let’s just say that I don’t believe it.
You seriously think there was a bishop out there who said to himself, “I know this priest is gonna keep abusing kids, but frankly I couldn’t care less.”