If standing by one’s principles, and doing what one believes God is telling them to do is nothing but a bumpersticker to you, then I sincerely feel sorry for you.
Amen.
This applies in Catholicism, and I assume also
to the non-progressive Christian denominations:
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“This may come as a revelation to political pragmatists, but Catholics may not choose any evil. None — period.
There is a principle in Moral Theology — the principle of double effect — which, under certain clearly defined conditions, permits us to perform an act that has both a good and an evil effect, but there is no allowance whatsoever in the Catholic system for directly choosing an evil.
*snip*
We are speaking of politics. Like economics, politics was classically part of the science of ethics. The Greeks approached it this way, and their tradition was continued by the Scholastic thinkers.
Politics is the art and science of governing a society. It is a “normative” science inasmuch as it seeks to govern society well and rightly . Normative sciences, such as logic and aesthetics, seek to establish the right way of doing things.1 We can contrast these with the “descriptive sciences,” which study the way things actually are.
An illustration will help:
The normative science of ethics tells us how people ought to act, while the descriptive sciences of behavioral psychology or criminology study how people do act — and that is often badly!
Since politics is a subdivision of ethics, its principles must fit coherently with the entirety of right behavior.
All this established, we can answer our above questions very simply: It is a moral evil to support a candidate whose platform runs contrary to the natural law.
Conversely, it is a moral good to support one who works to uphold the natural law. For Catholics, to do the latter is, in part, to advance the social reign of Our Lord.”
Rest
http://catholicism.org/lesser-of-two-evils.html