For the Undecided Catholic Voter
Perhaps you say the two Parties are too similar to make any vote between them make a difference. Perhaps in other areas, this may or may not be so. But turn your eyes to those issues where you may have to answer on Judgment Day before the Great White Throne for your words and deeds. Christ will likely not question you about tax policy or stump speech gaffes.
Democratic Party Platform on Abortion (source http://www.issues2000.org/Celeb/Democratic_Party_Abortion.htm)
The Democratic Party strongly and unequivocally supports Roe v. Wade and a woman’s right to make decisions regarding her pregnancy, including a safe and legal abortion, regardless of ability to pay. We oppose any and all efforts to weaken or undermine that right.
The Republican Party Platform on Abortion (http://www.ontheissues.org/celeb/Republican_Party_Abortion.htm)
Faithful to the “self-evident” truths enshrined in the Declaration of Independence, we assert the sanctity of human life and affirm that the unborn child has a fundamental individual right to life which cannot be infringed. We support a human life amendment to the Constitution and endorse legislation to make clear that the Fourteenth Amendment’s protections apply to unborn children. We oppose using public revenues to promote or perform abortion or fund organizations which perform or advocate it and will not fund or subsidize health care which includes abortion coverage.
The Catechism of the Catholic Church on Abortion (http://www.vatican.va/archive/ccc_css/archive/catechism/p3s2c2a5.htm)
2270 Human life must be respected and protected absolutely from the moment of conception. From the first moment of his existence, a human being must be recognized as having the rights of a person – among which is the inviolable right of every innocent being to life.
2271 Since the first century the Church has affirmed the moral evil of every procured abortion. This teaching has not changed and remains unchangeable. Direct abortion, that is to say, abortion willed either as an end or a means, is gravely contrary to the moral law:
2272 Formal cooperation in an abortion constitutes a grave offense. The Church attaches the canonical penalty of excommunication to this crime against human life.
The Republican Party Platform on Same Sex Marriage (source: http://www.gop.com/)
The institution of marriage is the foundation of civil society. Its success as an institution will determine our success as a nation. It has been proven by both experience and endless social science studies that traditional marriage is best for children [… ]we believe that marriage, the union of one man and one woman must be upheld as the national standard
The Democrat Party Platform on Same Sex Marriage (source: http://www.ontheissues.org/Celeb/Democratic_Party_Civil_Rights.htm inexplicably yet unselfconsciously placed under the topic ‘Civil Rights’.)
We support marriage equality and support the movement to secure equal treatment under law for same-sex couples. We also support the freedom of churches and religious entities to decide how to administer marriage as a religious sacrament without government interference.
United States Council on Catholic Bishops on Same Sex Marriage (source http://old.usccb.org/laity/marriage/samesexstmt.shtml)
The Roman Catholic Church believes that marriage is a faithful, exclusive, and lifelong union between one man and one woman, joined as husband and wife in an intimate partnership of life and love. This union was established by God with its own proper laws. By reason of its very nature, therefore, marriage exists for the mutual love and support of the spouses and for the procreation and education of children. These two purposes, the unitive and the procreative, are equal and inseparable.
The Catechism of the Catholic Church on the Sacrament of Matrimony (http://www.scborromeo.org/ccc/p2s2c3a7.htm)
1601 The matrimonial covenant, by which a man and a woman establish between themselves a partnership of the whole of life, is by its nature ordered toward the good of the spouses and the procreation and education of offspring; this covenant between baptized persons has been raised by Christ the Lord to the dignity of a sacrament.
My comment: Which stances of the two parties, Democrat or Republican are compatible with faithful Church teaching and natural reason, and which are directly opposed to faith and reason?
On the smaller issue of the two, please note that same sex marriage is a contradiction in terms as well as a contravention of the timeless truths taught by the Church.
Sexual union by definition means a mating or union of opposite sexes, and marriage by definition means a ritual or sign signifying or celebrating that union. Sodomy is not the mating act, and ergo a civil union of sodomites, no matter how great their erotic affection for each other, cannot logically be signified by a mating ritual. The attempt to do so robs the signifier of significance, that is, destroys marriage.
In the same way inflation destroys the value of currency while leaving the physical banknotes in your billfold intact, changing the definition of marriage to equate it to antimarriage destroys the meaning of your marriage certificate, while leaving only the physical piece of paper intact.
At that point, in the eyes of the law, the couple is no longer man and wife, merely two persons who cohabitate, bound by a contract severable at will by either party, who enjoy certain survivorship benefits and tax breaks.
Now, if this is what the Democrat party, in its gapingly profound shallowness, thinks all marriage is to begin with, then they adopt a seriously unchristian and anticatholic view of the sacrament.
When the Democrats ask in eye-popping astonishment and contempt in what way abolishing marriage harms marriage, they are not just being stupid and evil. They are being stupid and evil, of course, but there is a thin veneer of honest surprise behind their dumb question and their theatrical mock astonishment.
They actually do not get it. They are utterly worldly, utterly crass materialists. They are so crass, in fact, that they believe themselves to be more spiritual than the grasping Republicans, and more enlightened than the benighted Christians.
They do not see any spiritual or logical or rational or legal point to marriage. To them marriage is merely an emotional thing, a mechanism to sate an appetite.
They cannot see anything but the physical piece of paper and the physical attraction of the (in this case, disordered) sex drive. To them it is the piece of paper. Marriage is the social approval of the act of indulging the sexual appetite, and nothing more. It is for this reason they do not erupt into gales of laughter when they call marriage a ‘civil right.’ They actually think the sacrament is a civil right, and nothing more.
Why insist that the Department of Motor Vehicles give you a driver’s license for your bicycle? A bicycle has no motor and is not a motor vehicle. Why call giving driver’s licenses to bicyclists who cannot drive a civil right? For the same reason giving a mating license to two gays who cannot mate (at least, not with each other). It is a matter of prestige, of honor. They want reality to come into compliance to their sex drive, and not to have their sex drive come into compliance with reality, and, frankly, function as designed, and drive them toward the sex act and not away from it.
They cannot even see that the sex drive in this case is disordered, because they are blind to the concept of order, which requires some minimal sense of logical reasoning to comprehend, or minimal education.
The Democrats here are blind men deluded that they see clearly. Is it any wonder they fall into a ditch? Is it any wonder they are shocked and screaming and astonished and outraged and frustrated and frightened at all times?
The ditch is not just unexpected: to them it is impossible. What must it be like to be a person whose false-to-facts theories never, never, never work, but whose axioms is so constructed that he cannot question, nor, in a real sense, cannot ever be aware of, the theory guiding him?
So much for same sex marriage. As I say, it is a smaller issue, and not worthy of being dwelt upon further.
On the larger issue, speaking of abortion, pulling the lever for a Democrat candidate in the voting booth is the same as pulling the lever on the trapdoor of your own gallows. It is self-excommunication.
Saying that the living offspring of a human being is not a human being is a contradiction in terms. Species do not reproduce themselves as things not themselves. Geese do not lay acorns, but goose eggs. Oak trees do not drop goslings, but acorns. You can say a gosling in the egg is not a goose in the same was you can say an adolescent is not a man: biologically speaking, the statement is nonsense. Since nothing happens for no cause, nothing comes from nothing. Men do not come from nothing but from parents of their same species, nor is membership in the species Homo Sapiens something that is granted by change of location or change of dependency, nor of stage of development, nor granted by the mother, nor granted by the state.
Reality is what it is, and you don’t get a vote.
You cannot decree a baby not to be human any more than you can decree an oaktree to be a frog. All that happens is that your words become meaningless, and your thoughts, if you take such meaningless words seriously, become disconnected from reality.
There are no-pro-abortion Catholics for the same reason there are no pro-Satanist Catholics. Again, it is a logical contradiction in terms.
You must pick one or the other, and choose you this day whom ye will serve.
Or do you think the Lord welcomes into eternal life those unrepentant souls who visit death on innocent, unborn, unbaptized infants, or aid or applaud or abet or fund or fortify those who do, or call it a Constitutional right?
If you are one of those Catholics who says the teachings of the Church and the commands of Christ, His vicar and apostles, the patristic writings, the priests, and the findings of the Ecumenical Councils and Synods are not binding on your conscience, then you have adopted the primary defining stance of Protestantism, which says that in religious matters each man should do what seems good to himself in his own eyes.
That is a perfectly respectable mainstream theological opinion to hold. Heretical and erroneous, this opinion may be, it is not dishonorable nor illogical. But a Catholic may not hold such an opinion, not and honor to his vow to honor and obey all the Church founded by Christ teaches. To be a Protestant Catholic is a contradiction in terms.
About John C Wright
John C. Wright is a practicing philosopher, a retired attorney, newspaperman, and newspaper editor, and a published author of science fiction. Once a Houyhnhnm, he was expelled from the august ranks of purely rational beings when he fell in love; but retains an honorary title.
