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To: JohnnyZ
Officials are supposed to apply the law

What about laws that are intrinsically evil?

Did we learn anything from the Nuremburg trials?

149 posted on 11/12/2004 10:51:55 AM PST by Aquinasfan (Isaiah 22:22, Rev 3:7, Mat 16:19)
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To: Aquinasfan
What about laws that are intrinsically evil?

Not all vices are to be repressed by law. A law decriminalizing prostitution is intrinsically evil. But St. Thomas Aquinas himself agrees with St. Augustine that a state could do just that.

Summa, Pt. I-II, Q. 96, Art. 2
http://www.newadvent.org/summa/209602.htm

"Now human law is framed for a number of human beings, the majority of whom are not perfect in virtue. Wherefore human laws do not forbid all vices, from which the virtuous abstain, but only the more grievous vices, from which it is possible for the majority to abstain; and chiefly those that are to the hurt of others, without the prohibition of which human society could not be maintained: thus human law prohibits murder, theft and such like."

The problem with Roe vs. Wade is that it has overrun laws settled by the majority to govern the behavior of the minority who cannot restrain themselves from murdering their unborn children. Roe vs. Wade is also a judicial assertion that the people do now know how to govern themselves as far as the destraint of vice by the law. This, more than anything else, makes it the antithesis of Catholic legal-politcal-moral theory.

An truly intrinsically evil law is one that uses the power of the state to compel vices - vis. the Chinese forced abortion/one child laws.

Did we learn anything from the Nuremburg trials?

Like what? Don't hold ex post facto show trials with Communists?

167 posted on 11/12/2004 11:04:28 AM PST by Hermann the Cherusker
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