Abortion and Nuremburg

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mymamamary said:
**To answer the OP’s question I would give the abortionist butchers (these people aren’t doctors) life in a working camp prison. I would have them working from sun up to sun down, chipping rock and swinging a pickax or I would make them do maintenance work under police/military supervision. I wouldn’t have a death penalty, just working camps. I would ensure that they are fed and have time and a place to sleep and bathe, however it wouldn’t be a posh prison. It wouldn’t be inhumane to the point of a nazi working camp, however the labor would be intensive and forced. **
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Our very own Lord of the Flies. :rolleyes:
 
devoutchristian said:
A Catholic republic or technocracy.
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In a nation of over 300 million there are 80 million Catholics. What of the 220 million+ who aren’t Catholic and don’t subscribe to the Church’s teachings?

May I ask, how old are you?
 
Timothysis said:
And what would YOU replace it with? Reading through the options in your poll tells me that you would create a fascist regime as soon as possible.
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You realize that I only chose one of the poll options, not that any of them are fascist.
 
Timothysis said:
And what would YOU replace it with? Reading through the options in your poll tells me that you would create a fascist regime as soon as possible.
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While I despise fascism, I also despise Liberalism, so I wouldn’t establish a liberal regime either.
 
devoutchristian said:
The rule was that people who were actively involved in or ordering murders were prosecuted. So the American equivalent of that would be abortionists and their political enablers. Women who had abortions couldn’t be prosecuted because of the sheer logistical mess that that would be.
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And that’s one of my big issues with the pro life movement. It assumes women are stupid and gives them no credit for the choices they make. Abortion is not the fault of doctors or politicians. It is the fault of the woman/couple that makes the choice, but of course spewing the hate and anger towards them isn’t politically popular, but it is at least honest.

If I found out tomorrow that I was pregnant I would seek to quickly get an abortion. If I couldn’t find a doctor here I would find one elsewhere, and travel a great distance if necessary. The fact that I would make this choice is no one’s fault but mine.

When someone cheats on their spouse we don’t blame the government for not making adultery illegal, when someone dies from smoking we don’t say that the government killed them by not outlawing cigarettes, when someone dies from obesity it isn’t the fault of politicians for not banning McDonald’s. We hold all of these people responsible for their own actions and choices. But when a woman gets an abortion it isn’t her fault. It’s Obama’s, Pelosi’s, or the Supreme Court’s fault. Women aren’t stupid. They know what choice they are making, and if you try to remove that choice it is them, not politicians or abortion doctors, who will find another way to do it.
 
BlueEyedLady said:
And that’s one of my big issues with the pro life movement. It assumes women are stupid and gives them no credit for the choices they make. Abortion is not the fault of doctors or politicians. It is the fault of the woman/couple that makes the choice, but of course spewing the hate and anger towards them isn’t politically popular, but it is at least honest.

If I found out tomorrow that I was pregnant I would seek to quickly get an abortion. If I couldn’t find a doctor here I would find one elsewhere, and travel a great distance if necessary. The fact that I would make this choice is no one’s fault but mine.

When someone cheats on their spouse we don’t blame the government for not making adultery illegal, when someone dies from smoking we don’t say that the government killed them by not outlawing cigarettes, when someone dies from obesity it isn’t the fault of politicians for not banning McDonald’s. We hold all of these people responsible for their own actions and choices. But when a woman gets an abortion it isn’t her fault. It’s Obama’s, Pelosi’s, or the Supreme Court’s fault. Women aren’t stupid. They know what choice they are making, and if you try to remove that choice it is them, not politicians or abortion doctors, who will find another way to do it.
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I didn’t deny that women are responsible for their abortions. My point was simply that there would be too many to go after if the Nuremberg precedent were applied to them. Nevertheless, it remains an established principle that states which tolerate murder are guilty of murder. Many Axis leaders faced a noose based on that principle.
 
Timothysis said:
And that’s what is truly frightening. It is a puzzlement to think that some who are supposedly so “devoted” to the Church would create a society that would eat itself.
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I don’t think that’s his point. Rather, I think his point is that, if tomorrow there were some coup of the USA’s government and it were replaced with a pro-life government, that government would throw out the current Constitution or significantly modify it, because it is significantly short-sighted and is incapable of responding to current challenges. Or perhaps that is an extension of his argument.
Timothysis said:
And you would replace it with what? Do you already have your Catholic king waiting in the corner?
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Something? The current situation is bad but not bad enough to realize governmental deficiency isn’t at least as large a contributor to the killing machine as any other factor? We can just hope it away without also radically changing all structures of our society? Lol. It is not just that “this” or “that” part of our society is bad, it is that most of it, on a fundamental ideological level, is flawed beyond repair, which means that to fix “this” or “that” part of it, we will have to replace not just this or that part, but we will have to treat the whole organism. Changing not just what people think and do, but how they think, necessarily means that all parts of their lives, and so society as a whole, will be changed.

So, I think people see that abortion is wrong, but I don’t think people see, even many good Catholic people, that the underlying ideology is wrong, not because they are incapable of it, but because they don’t see that ideology, or they don’t understand the connection between what people think and what people do on a practical level. If I can change the way you think, I can make you do whatever I want.
 
YoungTradCath said:
I don’t think that’s his point. Rather, I think his point is that, if tomorrow there were some coup of the USA’s government and it were replaced with a pro-life government, that government would throw out the current Constitution or significantly modify it, because it is significantly short-sighted and is incapable of responding to current challenges. Or perhaps that is an extension of his argument.

Something? The current situation is bad but not bad enough to realize governmental deficiency isn’t at least as large a contributor to the killing machine as any other factor? We can just hope it away without also radically changing all structures of our society? Lol. It is not just that “this” or “that” part of our society is bad, it is that most of it, on a fundamental ideological level, is flawed beyond repair, which means that to fix “this” or “that” part of it, we will have to replace not just this or that part, but we will have to treat the whole organism. Changing not just what people think and do, but how they think, necessarily means that all parts of their lives, and so society as a whole, will be changed.

So, I think people see that abortion is wrong, but I don’t think people see, even many good Catholic people, that the underlying ideology is wrong, not because they are incapable of it, but because they don’t see that ideology, or they don’t understand the connection between what people think and what people do on a practical level. If I can change the way you think, I can make you do whatever I want.
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You hit the nail on the head. As long as our society thinks in terms of enlightenment-style liberty, the unborn will never be protected to the same degree as other people.
 
devoutchristian said:
You hit the nail on the head. As long as our society thinks in terms of enlightenment-style liberty, the unborn will never be protected to the same degree as other people.
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Correct. Even if by chance the most radically pro-life President and Congress were elected in 2016 and they somehow illegalized abortion and this or that other thing, it would be just as apt to be re-legalized a few years or decades later.

To change this permanently, or for as long as possible, we have to start changing things at a much higher level than, “Abortion is bad, let’s end abortion.” Catholics here on CAF implicitly show some level of realization of this when they argue against the very end results of this whacked-out mode of thinking–abortion, SS"M", divorce, whatever–when they talk about “converting the world to Christ,” or some variant of that idea.

That’s wonderful! That thinking is both elementary and supremely sublime at the same time. It is elementary inasmuch as that is not the only part of the story. It is the first chapter, no, the first page, still no, the first sentence. What do we do, on a practical level, to make that happen? Not only in our parishes, but in our society at large? That thinking–still meaning converting the world to Christ–is sublime inasmuch as it is the reference to which we must constantly compare things to, and it is as much the last sentence of the story (reality) as it is the first (theory).

I can think of so many image-metaphors to illustrate this. Two:

In a cave we have a stalactite. That stalactite is bad because it constantly drips on our heads. We want to get rid of it, so we cut off the first inch of it. But does that solve the problem? No, because it will eventually grow back (let’s hypothetically assume they grow at the rate of an inch a year!). The better thing to do is to cut off the whole thing, or better yet, to move out of the cave.

There is a tree in an apple orchard, an orchard that produces much fruit for us. That three has a few leaves that show clear signs of a very bad disease that spreads rapidly and is devastating to apple trees. We want to stop it, so we cut off the leaves. Is that going to work? Probably not. So, the better thing to do is to chop the whole thing down, which is probably infected in whole anyway, and perhaps burn the stump, and treat the rest of the trees with a chemical that protects them.
Perhaps these metaphors are a bit infantile. I grant that. However, I am trying to get people to see that we can’t just stop “the bad stuff.” The bad stuff goes further than abortion. The bad stuff is inextricably and permanently bound up with other things, namely the ideology that produced that stuff. Yes, that ideology also produced some good things. But it is better to get rid of the whole thing and know it is gone than trying to sit around for centuries trying to pick through it all and only discarding “the bad stuff;” we are humanly incapable of doing that. We are not that good.
 
YoungTradCath said:
Correct. Even if by chance the most radically pro-life President and Congress were elected in 2016 and they somehow illegalized abortion and this or that other thing, it would be just as apt to be re-legalized a few years or decades later.

To change this permanently, or for as long as possible, we have to start changing things at a much higher level than, “Abortion is bad, let’s end abortion.” Catholics here on CAF implicitly show some level of realization of this when they argue against the very end results of this whacked-out mode of thinking–abortion, SS"M", divorce, whatever–when they talk about “converting the world to Christ,” or some variant of that idea.

That’s wonderful! That thinking is both elementary and supremely sublime at the same time. It is elementary inasmuch as that is not the only part of the story. It is the first chapter, no, the first page, still no, the first sentence. What do we do, on a practical level, to make that happen? Not only in our parishes, but in our society at large? That thinking–still meaning converting the world to Christ–is sublime inasmuch as it is the reference to which we must constantly compare things to, and it is as much the last sentence of the story (reality) as it is the first (theory).
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I’m in complete agreement with most you. I’m glad to finally talk with someone who doesn’t have a subconscious idea something along the lines of “America was an absolute beacon of Christian virtue until the 1960’s, when some ‘militant’ secularists started ruining it. And all we need to do is get rid of abortion, gay marriage and a few other things and we’ll be fine.”
YoungTradCath said:
But it is better to get rid of the whole thing and know it is gone than trying to sit around for centuries trying to pick through it all and only discarding “the bad stuff;” we are humanly incapable of doing that. We are not that good.
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Exactly. Plus, any good effects that have resulted from liberalism can be replicated by the proper application of Catholic principles.
 
devoutchristian said:
The precedent that certain crimes can be punished even if they were legal at the time commited was set at Nuremberg.
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For war crimes and crimes against humanity, yes. Before condemning practitioners of abortion, it would be necessary to legally identify abortion as a crime against humanity.
 
devoutchristian said:
I’m in complete agreement with most you. I’m glad to finally talk with someone who doesn’t have a subconscious idea something along the lines of “America was an absolute beacon of Christian virtue until the 1960’s, when some ‘militant’ secularists started ruining it. And all we need to do is get rid of abortion, gay marriage and a few other things and we’ll be fine.”

Exactly. Plus, any good effects that have resulted from liberalism can be replicated by the proper application of Catholic principles.
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I do not mythologize pre-1960s America. I have as much patriotism and good feelings towards my country as is psychologically and religiously healthy, but try to have no more. The idea of “America” has severe limitations and positively, logically-necessary evil conclusions. The difficulty is with trying to get people to connect the premise of America to the modern problems of America. Our social problems are not the result of totally random happenings. They are part of the design of our country to some degree.

I’m not saying Jefferson or [insert even earlier European thinker] sat around thinking, “Hmm, let’s make sure that 200 years from now the Supreme Court legalizes abortion!” Nor am I saying that the founders of this country, or their ideological forefathers, should have or even should have been able to predict the kinds of whacked-out things their ideas would directly cause when their arguments become over-extended and not properly balanced. I am kind of angry that they didn’t at least try to give it a better thought and build in more safeguards, however. On the other hand, they probably never even thought that these sorts of things could have ever happened; it was too absurd. “Of course they won’t do that,” Jefferson probably thought, “that is ridiculous!”
 
gracepoole said:
For war crimes and crimes against humanity, yes. Before condemning practitioners of abortion, it would be necessary to legally identify abortion as a crime against humanity.
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Uhhh… isn’t that basically what we’re trying to do here?
 
YoungTradCath said:
Uhhh… isn’t that basically what we’re trying to do here?
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Uhhh… is that explicitly stated in the poll or the scenario presented?

Even with a pro-life government at the helm, legally identifying abortion as a crime against humanity would be a task unto itself. The point of Nuremberg (or at least the one being referenced here) is that law may be corrupted and no one is exempt when operating under a corrupt law. A community may not simply rewrite law, then, to suit specific political and social agendas. A pro-life government would have to demonstrate that this is not what it’s doing when rewriting abortion as a crime against humanity.
 
gracepoole said:
Uhhh… is that explicitly stated in the poll or the scenario presented?

Even with a pro-life government at the helm, legally identifying abortion as a crime against humanity would be a task unto itself. The point of Nuremberg (or at least the one being referenced here) is that law may be corrupted and no one is exempt when operating under a corrupt law. A community may not simply rewrite law, then, to suit specific political and social agendas. A pro-life government would have to demonstrate that this is not what it’s doing when rewriting abortion as a crime against humanity.
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Okay. I’m not quite following your line of thinking. Who would a pro-life government have to demonstrate anything to? Remember, I am examining this from a Catholic thinking point of view. I would say that in principle the Church does not have to “prove” abortion is bad to anyone–even prodeath people–in order for a (hypothetical) Catholic/Catholic-friendly/Catholic-cooperating government to illegalize abortion. Nor does the (hypothetical) Catholic government have to respect the fantasy “rights,” beliefs, or privileges of opinion of prodeath people, relating specifically to babyslaughter. That is to say, if a ELCA woman wanted to have an abortion while this hypothetical Catholic government hypothetically illegalized abortion, who cares what she wants? The moral validity of that law exists whether people believe it or not, and Catholics would be bound to support it.

Now, if your post is about the practical exigencies relating to the success of an anti-abortion law, I agree. It would be politically and socially expedient for the Church to preach the immorality of abortion from the rooftops while the Catholic government is at the same time making babyslaughter illegal, putting abortodocs on trial ex-post-facto, and preventing people from having abortions.
 
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