There are a number of causal claims being made quite flippantly.\u00a0 On the flip side, there are things being alleged not to be causal that indeed are causal.<\/p>\n
It has been alleged that if you refuse to express a preference when one candidate has a clearly evil\u00a0policy objective that you are not therefore choosing that evil.\u00a0 Facially this is ridiculous.\u00a0 If you see a small and incompetent\u00a0child playing on the edge of a cliff, decide it isn\u2019t your business, and that child falls to his death, you most assuredly bear some responsibility for that child\u2019s death.\u00a0 Any situation where the obligation is manifest,\u00a0your ability to act is unimpeded, and you fail\u00a0to act is clearly a sinful act.<\/p>\n
Now we can take that same situation above and adjust it.\u00a0 If the child is playing near the cliff in plain site of who you believe to be his parent, the obligation is no longer clear.\u00a0 Or to put it another way, the parent clearly has a more particular obligation, and prudence would allow you to assume the parent would be steadfast in observing it.\u00a0 Likewise, if we were to live under a military dictatorship, the obligation to improve the commonweal and offer counsel to those who would do so would be expressed differently than under our republican form of government.<\/p>\n
With elections however, more often we are faced with ambiguity over what will be the ultimate manifestation of our vote if our chosen candidate indeed succeeds.\u00a0 Like experimental surgery, no one is obligated to do something when they believe the consequences of failure and attached likelihood\u00a0will be as great as the consequences of success and attached likelihood.\u00a0 If on election day one arrives at the conclusion that the election of either candidate has the likelihood of advancing approximately similar evils, no one would surely fault that person for declining to express a preference.\u00a0 That some people want to assign that person the property of \u2018wise\u2019 or \u2018thoughtful\u2019 confounds me, but none the less I can\u2019t fault them for the act arising from their premises.<\/p>\n
Like then Cardinal Ratzinger has said and as he has reiterated as Pope Benedict, I agree that it is reasonable to infer a man\u2019s intentions from\u00a0his actions.\u00a0 Hence, those who consistently support laws supporting the right of abortion can rightly be said to support the product of that right: abortion.\u00a0 The reasonableness of such a proposition though is dependent upon prudence.\u00a0 If one were to make the construction that a person\u00a0who always votes for Democrats therefore\u00a0supports abortion, he should be mercilessly ridiculed.\u00a0 One can vote for Democrats for any number of reasons, and I dare say for many who do so, the Democratic Party position\u00a0on abortion is not a significant consideration.\u00a0 One could quickly retort that abortion should be a top consideration, and such is not an unreasonable position and one our bishops agree upon.\u00a0 If however the outcome of such consideration is that the cause of reducing and eliminating abortion is not significantly furthered by choosing one candidate over the other, one can hardly fault that person for giving greater consideration to other grave evils where there is greater divergence in the projected outcomes.\u00a0 To construct a strawman, no one would quarrel with voting on the basis of tax policy in a mayoral race where one candidate supported raising taxes 50% and the other proposes lowering them 10%, with\u00a0one candidate stating we should \u201cnuke Mecca,\u201d as repulsive as such a sentiment would be.\u00a0 As applied to the present election,\u00a0people are rightly condemning McCain\u2019s support of ESCR,\u00a0and are rightly\u00a0not\u00a0seeing it as a cause to support Obama, since they both support this repulsive policy.\u00a0\u00a0 And many people conclude that any gains on the abortion front with the election of McCain are outweighed by the costs of imperial ambition and the \u00a0continued deterioration of our broader social policy.<\/p>\n<\/body><\/html>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
There are a number of causal claims being made quite flippantly.\u00a0 On the flip side, there are things being alleged not to be causal that indeed are causal. It has been alleged that if you refuse to express a preference when one candidate has a clearly evil\u00a0policy objective that you are not therefore choosing that […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2948,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-3599","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-uncategorized"],"yoast_head":"\n