so long as we are cherry picking what do you have to say about the prohibition?
It needn’t be clear cut to everyone; only to those Catholics who follow the teachings of the Church. There isn’t a whole lot in this world that’s clear cut to “everyone”. That’s the difference between claims, at least, of truths defined by the Church as objective versus the subjective belief systems to which so much of our present world adheres.
Name-calling and rash judgments of people about which one knows nothing, are not only unpersuasive, but incline the hearer to indefinitely ignore everything else the person has to say.
The last six are not mentioned because they would conflict with the prevailing ultra conservative agenda.
There is nothing wrong with cherry-picking to disprove an assertion. I will not be dragged into an irrelevant discussion on prohibition.
What??? Universal principles are always defineable in terms of hypotheticals. The fact that they can apply to hypotheticals is what makes them universal. If you have a “moral principle” that can only be described in terms of things that happen to be in the news today, you don’t have a universal principle. Dismissing my point because it involves hypothetical situations is a cheap shot.
It was a question that called for a yes or no. You gave neither.
The laws about homosexual marriage do not explicitly reference anything about sexual relationships. So don’t say that their sexual relationship has been codified into law. It has not. Similarly, my hypothetical “bad tax policy” did not stipulate a sexual relationship. I just said two men who share a home. The question was whether a law that gives a tax break to such a couple is an immoral law, or just a stupid law. And if it is against a moral law, is it an instance of the “gay marriage” issue on the list, making it of supreme importance?
Speculation on the purpose and intent of a law, especially a stupid law, is still just speculation.
That is not being disputed - at least not by me.
mmm how dem cherries tasting
Do you know what “cherry-picking” is? It is not the use of an analogy. If you think the analogy does not apply, then it would need to be quantified as to why without the name-calling.
The problem with using hypotheticals is that they almost always lack some element necessary to resolution of a real situation, which leads to endless honing and modification. You know this.
Your “last six” are:
As long as you are bashing the use of hypotheticals, what do you say to the inclusion of human cloning as one of the five non-negotiables? It is very much a hypothetical, and maybe even a physical impossibility for humans, Dolly not withstanding.
Homosexual marriage, as a legal status, is clearly not about sexual relations, even if most actual homosexual pairings are. That is clear from the fact the sexual relations between homosexuals was already legal. Homosexual marriage did nothing to change that or enhance that. In fact owning a home together was also legal long before gay marriage passed. The most you could say is that legal gay marriage “sends a message” implying that sex between members of the same gender was OK. That is admittedly a bad message. But that message was already being sent when the anti-sodomy laws were repealed and gay bars were permitted, etc. I am as appalled at homosexuality as you are. So let’s back up. The only reason I mentioned this was to show that issues very close to gay marriage (like forms of civil unions) are not clear cut, contrary to your assertion that they were. I am in no way advocating support for or tolerance of gay marriage. Perhaps allowing a gay bar to stay in business is also a clear-cut non-negotiable, right?
It is impossible to read the case without realizing the majority is talking about a more “enlightened” view of homosexual sexual relations. They go through the history of the legal approaches to “homosexual acts”, from illegality to approval, then jump from that to enshrining the value of such “intimacy” in homosexual relationships, worthy to be included within the traditional view of the sanctity of marriage. The warp and woof are clumsily woven, but the fabric as a whole is that homosexual acts are part of the “sanctity” with which marriage ought to be regarded. Scandalous almost beyond measure.
Why are conservatives always on the defensive these days. lol This is a bad time to be on the far Right that is for sure. Our own gov Snyder is hearing the steps in the hall after standing by while children were poisoned. The Republican Presidential campaign has been turned into a circus by a master showman who wants to ban Muslims. The second runner up wants to carpet Bomb Iraq, and Syria.
You can’t make this stuff up. Most know it now as the party that makes fun of the war on poverty and wants desperately to get rid of Social Security. They are seen as even worse when they tell people they must vote for Republicans because they will end abortion. They are not going to get Roe v wade over turned and the best they can hope for is to make life hard for Planned parent hood. Worthy past time that.I wish they would stick to it and quite beating up on the poor and the workers.Things like “taking care of the poor” and “only engaging in just wars” are subjective: what might seem just to one person will seem unjust to another, and while one person might claim that the homeless shelter doesn’t have enough food another might claim that it has plenty.
You may not wish to continue the discussion, but there is more to it than we have covered. Oddly enough, there is a sense in which it can be said that we are both right. First, the changes Fr. Grondin referred to were not made to remove the possibility of defection from the church, but to regularize the effect of such actions on those who marry. In BXVI’s motu proprio the point was made that: “…the faithful who have left the Church “by a formal act” are not bound by the ecclesiastical laws regarding the canonical form of marriage.” *(Omnium in Mentem, 2009)*So, even the document that removed the comment about formal defection recognized that formal defection - leaving the church - could still occur.
This is a position I strongly disagree with. You may well believe that a person’s policies will have disastrous effects, but that does not make them immoral. The morality of an act is not determined by its outcome. Given that the results do not change the morality of our acts, and if those acts are not themselves intrinsically evil, then the only way such acts can be considered immoral is if the intent of the person committing them is immoral.
Do you find playing with the meaning of words useful? The sense of “negotiable” as it is used in the list is that the moral question involved in the issue is settled; that is, it is not up for debate - it is not negotiable. This refers solely to question of whether the pro and anti sides of the issue are morally equivalent. The use of negotiable in your example is entirely different; it asks how to determine which of two morally equivalent issues is more important. That in fact may well be a negotiable matter, but it has nothing whatever to do with how the word is used with regard to the nature of the issues themselves. We already know that not all moral issues have the same significance.*Not all moral issues have the same moral weight as abortion and euthanasia. *(Cardinal Ratzinger)
Again you play with the meaning of words. The list contains those issues that leave no room for debate about which position is morally valid. There is therefore no place on the list for prudential issues; those are automatically excluded by the very definition of what the list is. The decision about which moral issues should make the list is indeed prudential, but it has an entirely different meaning in that context. If we have decided to plant an apple orchard it is appropriate to debate which varieties of apples to plant, but it is inappropriate to discuss whether we should plant pears or peaches.
Because we all know that as long as we achieve our goal it doesn’t matter how we did it.
The basis of Roe (right to privacy) was abandoned in Casey. Kennedy, however did side with the majority in its new finding (based on rights of liberty).
Kennedy was appointed by Reagan.
Actually, it shows something very different. Kennedy was Reagan’s third nominee for the position; his first was Robert Bork, who was prevented from serving by Senate Democrats. Had Bork been confirmed there is no doubt whatever that he would have voted with the minority in Casey (making it the majority), and Roe would have been reversed. The outcome would not have been to make abortion constitutionally illegal; it would have returned the issue to the states. This shows, however, how tenuous is the position that abortion is a constitutionally protected right.
Thomas (and Scalia) had already ruled on Roe, so their comments in Gonzales were justifiable. Roberts (and Alito) had taken no position on Roe or the question of the constitutionality of abortion, therefore it would have been inappropriate for them to have essentially issued a ruling on a case not presented to them. Nothing whatever can be assumed from their position in Gonzales about how they will rule on whether abortion is a constitutionally protected right.
In the context of the voting guide, the use of the word negotiable is applied in the second sense you mentioned, not the first sense. No one is seriously arguing that perhaps abortion or same-sex marriage or euthanasia or human cloning or ESC research are not so bad. No one is “negotiating” that point - at least no one who has written in this thread.
But not all such issues. According to you, it contains only the issues that are politically relevant. It is** that** decision that I say is prudential.
That torture is an intrinsic evil is not a prudential judgment. It is listed in the catechism as an intrinsic evil. There is no room for debate about whether the circumstances can ever justify it. The only reason it is not on the list, again according to you, is that in the opinion of those who compiled the list, torture is not politically relevant because no politician today is championing torture. If that is a valid reason to leave something off the list, why isn’t human cloning removed from the list? There are no politicians who are calling for human cloning.
You will have to be a little more clear with your analogy. It sounds like you are saying that torture can be omitted from the list because people can have varying opinions on what constitutes torture, but they cannot have varying opinions on what constitutes abortion. But that distinction doesn’t hold either. ABC is considered by some to be a form of abortion because it can lead to the failure to implant a viable embryo. Civil unions (conferring some, but not all of the legal benefits of marriage) are considered by some to be morally equivalent to same-sex marriage. Some may consider experiments on cloning primates to be for the purposes of developing human cloning. Every one of the five issues mentioned can have some instances where people can agree or disagree about whether the thing in front of us is indeed an instance of that forbidden thing. But there are also clear-cut cases of abortion, etc., where no reasonable person would disagree that it is an instance of that thing. Same with torture. And there are some people who believe that under the right circumstances, any amount of torture can be justified, even to the point of it being a clear cut case. So just because there may be some debatable instances of torture, that does not mean that the general issue of torture is not an intrinsic evil, and would be supported by some politicians, and should therefore be on the list.