The Invaluable Zippy Observes:

“Prudential judgement is to right-liberals what primacy of conscience is to left-liberals.”

Very true. The Thing That Used to be Conservatism spends endless oceans of electrons making itself stupid pretending it is impossible to know what torture is or whether it is evil while the Thing that Used to be Liberalism does exactly the same thing pretending its impossible to know if a baby full of human DNA is human and whether it is evil to murder it.

So much fake confusion could be avoided if people just applied a bit of common sense and listened to the Church.  It’s like this: if you obeyed the Church and sought to treat your prisoner humanely instead of seeking to get as close to torture as you can possibly get, you would not torture him and all your BS about “prudential judgment” would not even be necessary.  Likewise, if you aren’t sure when human life begins, then how’s about you not prattle about “primacy of conscience” while being utterly uncertain of whether you are committing murder or not.  If the Church says human life is sacred from conception and you aren’t sure, then defer to the Church and you won’t accident murder somebody.  This isn’t even complicated.

One of the marks of evil is that the devil loves to introduce fake complexity into divine simplicity and over-simplify what God warns is complex.  Ideology is the simplifying part of the lie.  The excuses ideologues come up with for rationalizing evil is the complexificating part of the lie.  The key word here is “lie.”