Can Catholics Vote Democrat?

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I never claimed that Catholics could not vote for him, just that he could in no way be considered pro-life.
Then why did Massachussets Pro-Life, other Pro-life organizations and Catholic Vote endorse him?

Why did Planned Parenthood spend $4 million dollars in ads against Romney saying he would threaten a woman’s right to choose?

en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_Mitt_Romney_presidential_campaign_endorsements,_2012#Organizations

This is all already covered in this thread, Romney is not perfect but he probably would have defunded the nation’s largest abortion provider, Planned Parenthood.
 
Certainly there are proclaimed pro-life Dems, but when they get to DC and confront the party elders, they usually change their minds particularly when they are threatened with withholding of party funds for reelection. And the Dem platform supports a pro-abortion agenda.
It’s quite possible that if any of these individuals voted for the Affordable Care Act, one could question as to whether they are truly pro-life.
 
None the less, the question of whether or not Catholics can vote for Democrats should be considered answered. Of course they can. There is no barrier to voting for a Democrat that is opposed to abortion. One can vote for the person and not the party.
And of course, their voting record would need to demonstrate this as well. If they voted for the Affordable Care Act, I’d be interested to see as to whether they could still be called “pro-life”. There are organizations who probably keep a record of such voting and give it a grade.
 
I could not locate anything in the article that referenced your above post. 🤷
What is important is what the authority of the Church teaches.

Jesus Christ walked the earth, oh dear, He wasn’t so popular with His own people was he?
 
Then why did Massachussets Pro-Life, other Pro-life organizations and Catholic Vote endorse him?

This is all already covered in this thread, Romney is not perfect but he probably would have defunded the nation’s largest abortion provider, Planned Parenthood.
And of course, their voting record would need to demonstrate this as well. If they voted for the Affordable Care Act, I’d be interested to see as to whether they could still be called “pro-life”. There are organizations who probably keep a record of such voting and give it a grade.
What ever standards one uses for a label or a rating, it should not apply one way to Democrats and another way to Republicans. I have seen more double standards when it comes to politics at CAF than I can count.

So yes, a Catholic can be Republican, Democrat or neither. This is the position of the Catholic Church. What no one will ever produce here is any authoritative position from the Church on political parties. Yet the pretense that there is one will continue as long as this site exists.

Look to the Church, not your fellow Catholics for what is moral.
 
So out of 535 congressional seats there are exactly 7 pro-life democrats? That comes out to 1.3%
That’s because Republicans gerrymandered to keep Democratic seats extremely liberal (to utilize the most Democratic voters per Democratic district). A quarter to a third of House Democrats in 2010 were pro-life.

You’re also not doing statistics right. It’s not 7/535; it’s 7/199 (the number of Democrats in the House), which comes out to about 3.6-3.7%. Which is fairly high given the high detail of work Republicans did in 2011 to ensure they were guaranteed the House no matter how the country felt about them.
 
Why should we accept your personal interpretation of Scripture over the Teachigs of the Church?
You shouldn’t. But reading the Bible is helpful to a Christian. 🙂

More to your point in citing the CDF memo from 2000, as I have said before, the issue I have is not with doctrine, but with a prudential disagreement with those who believe that voting for one party will actually bring about an end to abortion and an expansion of the Kingdom of God throughout the world. I think that the pro-life political strategy has been destructive of the Church, allowing those who believe in that particular political strategy to demonize everyone else and label them as “not real Catholics,” “cafeteria Catholics,” etc.

My fundamental point is that if you confine the solution set to an electoral problem, you risk ceding the culture to the the dark forces. I am saying that without cultural change, electoral strategies are not effective.

Pope Francis’ apostolic exortation, Evangilii Gaudium speaks to the kind of political logic I am suggesting:
  1. A constant tension exists between fullness and limitation. Fullness evokes the desire for complete possession, while limitation is a wall set before us. Broadly speaking, “time” has to do with fullness as an expression of the horizon which constantly opens before us, while each individual moment has to do with limitation as an expression of enclosure. People live poised between each individual moment and the greater, brighter horizon of the utopian future as the final cause which draws us to itself. Here we see a first principle for progress in building a people: time is greater than space.
  1. This principle enables us to work slowly but surely, without being obsessed with immediate results. It helps us patiently to endure difficult and adverse situations, or inevitable changes in our plans. It invites us to accept the tension between fullness and limitation, and to give a priority to time.** One of the faults which we occasionally observe in sociopolitical activity is that spaces and power are preferred to time and processes. Giving priority to space means madly attempting to keep everything together in the present, trying to possess all the spaces of power and of self-assertion; it is to crystallize processes and presume to hold them back.** Giving priority to time means being concerned about initiating processes rather than possessing spaces. Time governs spaces, illumines them and makes them links in a constantly expanding chain, with no possibility of return. **What we need, then, is to give priority to actions which generate new processes in society and engage other persons and groups who can develop them to the point where they bear fruit in significant historical events. **Without anxiety, but with clear convictions and tenacity.
  1. Sometimes I wonder if there are people in today’s world who are really concerned about generating processes of people-building, as opposed to obtaining immediate results which yield easy, quick short-term political gains, but do not enhance human fullness. History will perhaps judge the latter with the criterion set forth by Romano Guardini: “The only measure for properly evaluating an age is to ask to what extent it fosters the development and attainment of a full and authentically meaningful human existence, in accordance with the peculiar character and the capacities of that age”.[182]
  1. This criterion also applies to evangelization, which calls for attention to the bigger picture, openness to suitable processes and concern for the long run. The Lord himself, during his earthly life, often warned his disciples that there were things they could not yet understand and that they would have to await the Holy Spirit (cf. Jn 16:12-13). The parable of the weeds among the wheat (cf. Mt 13:24-30) graphically illustrates an important aspect of evangelization: the enemy can intrude upon the kingdom and sow harm, but ultimately he is defeated by the goodness of the wheat.
This political theology is inherently different from that espoused by many on the self-identified “right.” While as Catholics, we all want the same things, how we propose getting there can differ considerably.
 
That’s because Republicans gerrymandered to keep Democratic seats extremely liberal (to utilize the most Democratic voters per Democratic district). A quarter to a third of House Democrats in 2010 were pro-life.

You’re also not doing statistics right. It’s not 7/535; it’s 7/199 (the number of Democrats in the House), which comes out to about 3.6-3.7%. Which is fairly high given the high detail of work Republicans did in 2011 to ensure they were guaranteed the House no matter how the country felt about them.
Ah, gerrymandering. You think the Dems don’t gerrymander too?

Also, we should go back to the state legislatures picking the senators. That was one of the biggest mistakes this country has made. That, and the income tax.
 
You shouldn’t. But reading the Bible is helpful to a Christian. 🙂

More to your point in citing the CDF memo from 2000, as I have said before, the issue I have is not with doctrine, but with a prudential disagreement with those who believe that voting for one party will actually bring about an end to abortion and an expansion of the Kingdom of God throughout the world. I think that the pro-life political strategy has been destructive of the Church, allowing those who believe in that particular political strategy to demonize everyone else and label them as “not real Catholics,” “cafeteria Catholics,” etc.

My fundamental point is that if you confine the solution set to an electoral problem, you risk ceding the culture to the the dark forces. I am saying that without cultural change, electoral strategies are not effective.

Pope Francis’ apostolic exortation, Evangilii Gaudium speaks to the kind of political logic I am suggesting:

This political theology is inherently different from that espoused by many on the self-identified “right.” While as Catholics, we all want the same things, how we propose getting there can differ considerably.
It is imperative nonetheless to vote because what people don’t understand is that the US Federal Government bankrolls the biggest player in the abortion industry, $542 million dollars just in the year 2011. Then of all things, Planned Parenthood runs ads at least against the pro-life candidates out there if not for candidates they favor.

Our tax dollars should get nowhere near Planned Parenthood and a number of states have defunded them.
 
That’s because Republicans gerrymandered to keep Democratic seats extremely liberal (to utilize the most Democratic voters per Democratic district). A quarter to a third of House Democrats in 2010 were pro-life.

You’re also not doing statistics right. It’s not 7/535; it’s 7/199 (the number of Democrats in the House), which comes out to about 3.6-3.7%. Which is fairly high given the high detail of work Republicans did in 2011 to ensure they were guaranteed the House no matter how the country felt about them.
.:rotfl: Stupak and the others didn’t lose their seats due to gerrymandering. They lost because they betrayed the people who put them in office.
 
It is imperative nonetheless to vote because what people don’t understand is that the US Federal Government bankrolls the biggest player in the abortion industry, $542 million dollars just in the year 2011. Then of all things, Planned Parenthood runs ads at least against the pro-life candidates out there if not for candidates they favor.

Our tax dollars should get nowhere near Planned Parenthood and a number of states have defunded them.
Here is where we get into content. The notion that Planned Parenthood and Federal funding is a major player in abortion is one that may be true, but is an ephemeral truth. I would contend that if you look at the papers on abortion from before 1940 (it’s easy to search on scholar.google.com and find them), you will see the same statistical phenomenon that you see in CDC statistics for the U.S. today. That is, women getting abortions do so because they feel that they lack the resources, family, and psychosocial support to have the child. It didn’t take me long to find estimates on annual abortion incidence in excess of 500,000, at times up to 1,000,000. Of course, many of these cases were actually miscarriages, but “illegal abortion” was in the hundreds of thousands, at least according to the estimates presented therein.

There is, of course, a bias in favor of inflating abortion estimates in countries where abortion is illegal. Chilean epidemilogist Elard Koch and colleagues have published a series of papers critiquing the Guttmacher Institute’s methods for estimating abortion incidence in current year in their global models. It’s entirely possible that the numbers I cited from before 1940 were inflated as well, but that early, the estimates were prior to the Arden House conference in 1955 in which the pre-Roe v. Wade abortion “science” was produced. Still, the estimates cannot be denied. Every year, there were hundreds of thousands of illegal abortions in the United States before 1940 and if you account for population differences, the abortion incidence rates between now and then were not that different.

So while Planned Parenthood may be the largest provider of abortion services, that doesn’t mean much. Medical abortion (e.g., with drugs, not surgery) is now the most common type, and these can take place in many locations.

What I’m suggesting is that if we want to end abortion, we have to think about how we’d end it if we lived in 1930 or 1940, when the rate was still pretty high but it was already illegal.
 
Ah, gerrymandering. You think the Dems don’t gerrymander too?
The vast majority of the House is gerrymandered in favor of the GOP. Just because IL and MD are gerrymandered in favor of the Democrats does not invalidate the overall bias.
Also, we should go back to the state legislatures picking the senators. That was one of the biggest mistakes this country has made. That, and the income tax.
So gerrymandering could give a political party complete control over both chambers, regardless of what voters want? Sounds exactly like a Catholic government…not.
 
What ever standards one uses for a label or a rating, it should not apply one way to Democrats and another way to Republicans. I have seen more double standards when it comes to politics at CAF than I can count.

So yes, a Catholic can be Republican, Democrat or neither. This is the position of the Catholic Church. What no one will ever produce here is any authoritative position from the Church on political parties. Yet the pretense that there is one will continue as long as this site exists.

Look to the Church, not your fellow Catholics for what is moral.
That’s exactly what I’m doing, looking at the Church, looking at the non-negotiables, same-sex marriage, abortion and so on. I think many of us have made it clear we vote on the issues not the party. That part is your own projection.
 
That’s because Republicans gerrymandered to keep Democratic seats extremely liberal (to utilize the most Democratic voters per Democratic district). A quarter to a third of House Democrats in 2010 were pro-life.

You’re also not doing statistics right. It’s not 7/535; it’s 7/199 (the number of Democrats in the House), which comes out to about 3.6-3.7%. Which is fairly high given the high detail of work Republicans did in 2011 to ensure they were guaranteed the House no matter how the country felt about them.
Always excuses, SMGS. The Democrats aren’t pro-life: “its the Republican’s fault.” So-called pro-life Democrats lose: “its the Republican’s fault”

I truly wonder when the Democrat catholics will at long last hold their own party accountable for its own actions instead of blaming others falsely.

The Democrat leadership, the platform, the party - is morally bankrupt. They do not deserve any Catholic votes. The unborn deserve better than empty excuses, SMGS. At long last, why not entertain the truth?

Ishii
 
What ever standards one uses for a label or a rating, it should not apply one way to Democrats and another way to Republicans. I have seen more double standards when it comes to politics at CAF than I can count.

So yes, a Catholic can be Republican, Democrat or neither. This is the position of the Catholic Church. What no one will ever produce here is any authoritative position from the Church on political parties. Yet the pretense that there is one will continue as long as this site exists.

Look to the Church, not your fellow Catholics for what is moral.
CAF folks: reject mushy, self-righteous over-simplifications. The Democrat party is morally bankrupt. It doesn’t deserve any votes from Catholics until it changes its ways and quits attacking the values that Catholics (and Christians) hold.

No one has ever said that a Catholic cannot be a Democrat or a Republican. What those who are aware of Catholic teaching are saying is that Catholics ought not to vote for candidates who belong to a party which is at its heart, anti-Catholic. Until it changes, I don’t see how it can be morally permissible to vote Democrat - at least at the national level and perhaps at the local level as well, considering that the local level is the training ground for national candidates - remember that Obama was once a member of the state legislature. I also recall a state senator that portrayed himself as middle of the road, moderate Democrat guy - the kind of candidate that I’m sure many Democrat catholics would proudly hold up as “proof” that its okay to vote for good Democrats at the local level. Well, he used his local success as a platform for the congress. Now he’s in the House and got there with the help of the abortion lobby. The whole party is morally corrupt.

Ishii
 
None the less, the question of whether or not Catholics can vote for Democrats should be considered answered. Of course they can. There is no barrier to voting for a Democrat that is opposed to abortion. One can vote for the person and not the party.
Vote for the person, and you vote for the party - when it comes to the nature of the Democrat party and its allegiance to the abortion lobby. To not understand that is to not be in touch with political reality.

I dare say that if we were talking about a party that was 95% racist, we wouldn’t have people here saying, “I vote for the individual in the party, not the party.” No, the entire party would be called racist, and rightly so. Unfortunately some Catholics seem to get racism and hate it, but lose their ability to reason when it comes to life issues.

Ishii
 
Here is where we get into content. The notion that Planned Parenthood and Federal funding is a major player in abortion is one that may be true, but is an ephemeral truth. I would contend that if you look at the papers on abortion from before 1940 (it’s easy to search on scholar.google.com and find them), you will see the same statistical phenomenon that you see in CDC statistics for the U.S. today. That is, women getting abortions do so because they feel that they lack the resources, family, and psychosocial support to have the child. It didn’t take me long to find estimates on annual abortion incidence in excess of 500,000, at times up to 1,000,000. Of course, many of these cases were actually miscarriages, but “illegal abortion” was in the hundreds of thousands, at least according to the estimates presented therein.

There is, of course, a bias in favor of inflating abortion estimates in countries where abortion is illegal. Chilean epidemilogist Elard Koch and colleagues have published a series of papers critiquing the Guttmacher Institute’s methods for estimating abortion incidence in current year in their global models. It’s entirely possible that the numbers I cited from before 1940 were inflated as well, but that early, the estimates were prior to the Arden House conference in 1955 in which the pre-Roe v. Wade abortion “science” was produced. Still, the estimates cannot be denied. Every year, there were hundreds of thousands of illegal abortions in the United States before 1940 and if you account for population differences, the abortion incidence rates between now and then were not that different.

So while Planned Parenthood may be the largest provider of abortion services, that doesn’t mean much. Medical abortion (e.g., with drugs, not surgery) is now the most common type, and these can take place in many locations.

What I’m suggesting is that if we want to end abortion, we have to think about how we’d end it if we lived in 1930 or 1940, when the rate was still pretty high but it was already illegal.
Likewise, your cited facts don’t mean much. You don’t source them. This page from NCBI on Mexico hardly seems to prove any of your assertions.

If you can find abortion estimates, please post them.

I did find the numbers of abortions:

1931: 48
1932: 71
1940: 71

No estimates given though they have a column for that, estimates start in the 1970s.

Even the numbers for miscarriages and fetal deaths are nowhere near 500,000-1,000,000.

johnstonsarchive.net/policy/abortion/ab-unitedstates.html

If you wish to post where these educated guesses you came up with are from, then good. Otherwise, these figures are meaningless.

And please, Planned Parenthood is a racket, they sell abortions, they probably urge those they council to get abortions.

Nonetheless, interesting opinions.
 
Likewise, your cited facts don’t mean much. You don’t source them. This page from NCBI on Mexico hardly seems to prove any of your assertions.
The NCBI article on Mexico is about how poor the estimates are from the Guttmacher Institute for estimating abortion. I didn’t cite any of the rest. I did suggest scholar.google.com, but I will provide some of the references I could quickly access now.
If you can find abortion estimates, please post them.
ajog.org/article/S0002-9378%2831%2990756-4/abstract
Taussig, F.J. (1931) Abortion in relation to fetal and maternal welfare. American Journal of Obstetrics & Gynecology. Volume 22, Issue 6, Pages 868–878.
Code:
1.1. *An estimate of 700,000 abortions annually in the United States is certainly no exaggeration of the actual condition.* There is every reason to believe that an increase in this number is taking place with each decade similar to the experiences of other civilized countries.
2.2. This increase is the result partly of the decreased infant mortality, partly arises from the changed social and economic status of woman, and partly is the outcome of economic conditions resulting from the World War.
3.3. The increase is noticed primarily among married women who have three or more children.
4.4. All efforts to control the incidence of criminal abortion by legislation have resulted in failure.
5.5. Birth control may prove a factor in the reduction of criminal abortions, especially if more reliable contraceptive measures are discovered.
6.6. The maternal death loss from abortion in the United States has been estimated as 15,000 annually. Deaths from puerperal sepsis following abortions are relatively seven times as frequent as those from puerperal sepsis after childbirth.
7.7. The Russian experiment with legalized abortion indicates a definitely lower maternal mortality with operations done openly in hospitals than with secret, illegal operations as formerly.
8.8. A decrease in maternal mortality can be expected from improving the training of medical students and physicians in the proper management of abortion cases and from an increased knowledge concerning the prevention and treatment of septic infection.
9.9. The abortion problem, so vital to the human race, demands more careful and more open study, free from the trammels of political or religious dogma. Women should be taught to respect their duties, as mothers, to the social state, and the state in turn should be made to feel its obligations to motherhood, granting such relief, financial and otherwise, especially to those with many children, as will to the greatest degree avoid economic distress and promote the physical wellbeing of the mother.
10.10. The women of this country should be told that interference with pregnancy, even in its earliest stages, is not the harmless procedure they generally seem to consider it to be, but is a procedure inevitably associated with considerable risk to life and especially to future health.
ajog.org/article/S0002-9378%2839%2990065-7/abstract
Simons, J.H. (1939) Statistical analysis of one thousand abortions. American Journal of Obstetrics & Gynecology, Volume 37, Issue 5, Pages 840–849.
*
1.1. One thousand cases of abortion are reported.
2.2. There is evidence of increasing number of abortions, principally in the self-induced group.
3.3. Religion does not seem to be a deterrent to induction of abortion.
4.4. As Taussig states, “abortion is a problem concerned with the married woman,” both induced and criminal, and it is in this group that the high death rate is contained.
5.5. Most spontaneous and induced abortions occur under three months and most often under 30 years of age, increasing again in incidence after 35. The criminal abortions occur in greatest percentage in single women and early married life.
6.6. The total abortion incidence is 1 abortion to 2.7 pregnancies and 1 abortion to 1.6 confinements. This is according to the histories of our abortion cases. The relation of hospital abortion to hospital confinements is as 1:5.3 and stillbirths to abortions as 1:5.2.
7.7. Hemorrhage is a factor in lowering the resistance of the patient but not in the mortality.
8.8. Missed abortions were of 0.3 per cent incidence; therapeutic abortions 0.5 per cent.
9.9. The mortality rate was 1.9 per cent with the most frequent complications septicemia, peritonitis, pneumonia, phlebitis, and distant infarcts.
10.10. Operative incidence 51 per cent.
11.11. We have followed the conservative treatment established, here by Adair and Litzenberg, that is, in septic cases, we use expectant treatment unless complicated by hemorrhage; incision of abscesses if properly located, later evacuation if necessary when there is approximately normal leucocyte count and temperature for a period of at least five days. The sedimentation time does not seem to be of much value here. Nonseptic cases are evacuated, almost routinely, to conserve blood and shorten hospitalization. Repeated transfusions are of particular value in infected cases, and of course those with hemorrhage. Nearly all cases with a hemoglobin of 60 per cent or less received one or more transfusions. Sulfanilamide seems to give promise of potent therapy.
12.12. Invalidism, more or less permanent, and the high maternal mortality of abortion may hopefully be combated through improvement in moral and economic standards, education in family limitation, and early prenatal care. Endocrine and vitamin therapy may eliminate many of the spontaneous abortions.*
 
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