On a new point you make, “it’s ok to vote for a pro-choice candidate”...with your carefully chosen justification (familiar sounding...like the b.s. that ‘it’s ok to have abortion if you have the right reasons’) - do you teach it’s ok to vote for pro-choice candidates in your RCIA class? I can’t disagree with you more that it’s ok to vote for a pro-choice candidate. Did you vote for a pro choice candidate and are justifying that with your careful analysis of the pro life candidate you voted against? You are channeling for the liberals there. Theoretically, there isn’t a conceivable conservative philosophy worse than liberal abortion. Your ‘theoretical’ point supporting a reason to vote pro-choice is far worse liberal polution than anything I’ve said.
I received excellent historic facts that really helped me answer my questions by several very intellectual Freepers.
We will all be judged for our actions and our beliefs. At the end of the day, do unto others and “Listen with the ear of your heart.”
It's o.k. to vote for a pro choice candidate only if -- in your judgment guided by a correctly formed conscience -- the other candidate supports something much worse. Satanic human sacrifice? Lynching? Nuclear holocaust? Dunno. But it would have to be bad, almost unimaginably bad. Which is why MD put in that word "theoretically".
Perhaps you're reading the letter from your bishop wrong.
But that's all beside the way and really a rabbit trail that hasn't very much to do with the main points under discussion.
Which are - I think, I may have lost track - are the ideas set forward by this disobedient and about-to-be-excommunicated priest (1) consistent with the teachings of the Church; or, secondarily, (2) good or bad in themselves? And, finally, can somebody support this priest's ideas and the related constellation of liberal positions and remain a faithful Catholic?
with your carefully chosen justification
Are you arguing that it's better to be careless?
do you teach it’s ok to vote for pro-choice candidates in your RCIA class?
I teach what the Church and teaches.
Did you vote for a pro choice candidate ...?
Are you kidding? HECK no! It was all I could do to vote for McLame. I had one of the "McCain, I guess, If I have to" bumperstickers. There's no way I would have voted for the Dear Leader Elect, Obummer, the Most Merciful.
(So it follows that my statement is not a justification for such a vote.)
there isn’t a conceivable conservative philosophy worse than liberal abortion.
Some time I'd like to hear your thoughts, if any, on the merits of reading what someone actually writes then responding to that compared with wildly spewing in all directions.
conceivable conservative philosophy? Who said anything at all about "conservative"? Not me. In some alternate universe where the other candidate was advocating killing all Jews and Blacks, born and unborn, it would be licit to vote for a pro-abortion candidate. But it would still be a grave wrong if one voted for him BECAUSE he was pro-choice. In the universe which I inhabit, that was not the case and I think a vote for Obummer was unjustified and at the very least stupid, probably culpably so. A vote for him BECAUSE he was pro-choice would be IMHO in any case a mortal sin.
I see that you disapprove of being careful, and that probably explains your off-the-wall response to what I said. What I actually said was (with emphasis added):
It is, theoretically, okay to vote for a candidate who is pro-abortion if your carefully derived opinion is that the other candidate would do something even worse. It is NOT okay to vote for a pro-abortion candidate BECAUSE s/he's pro-abortion.This was in response to your posting:
I do not see the word "conservative" in either what I wrote or what you wrote. I find what you actually wrote incomprehensible. Make WHAT a political platform? the whole platform? A "plank" in it? It makes no sense! But if you read your bishop's letter as carefully as you read my post, maybe that's not in fact what the letter said, anymore than I was making the argument you attributed to me.
In the actual case of the past election, the Dear Leader elect made mostly vague utopian bloviations and promises that several things would be the first thing he would do. One of the things he said he would do first was sign FOCA. With no balancing substantive good in his side AND without any justifying horrendously grave evil threatened by McLame's campaign, I cannot see how a reasonable person, especially a reasonable and intelligent Catholic could possibly vote for Obummer.
But I can see how, as I say, in some alternate universe, things would be so incredibly terrible that a pro-choice candidate would be better than, say the offspring of a satanic union of Hitler and Stalin.
Further, I can, if I try really hard, imagine some airy-fairy Catholic who once heard a leftist try to tell him what was mandated by Rerum Novarum and Centessimus Annus and who innocently and stupidly thought that socialism was the teaching of the Church and therefore somehow talked himself into thinking that McLame was worse than Obummer and that the nightmare of starving and dying hordes in the streets all across America would come to pass if McLame were elected. Then this intellectual prince of fools might grit the toothies and think that IN SPITE of FOCA and the rest there was a duty to vote for the All Merciful Messiah Obummer.
I don't think that clearly would be a mortal sin. There IS such a thing a "felony stupid" in Law Enforcement and Combat, but I don't think it's one of the Church's moral categories.