Catholic and Democrat?

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boppaid said:
Just to clarify, because I don’t know of the man…Since he believes God when he says “Thou Shalt Not Kill”, that means he is publicly against war and the dealth penalty, correct? If so, then he would be a wonderful, moral politician, and I wish there were more like him.
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Surely you are not suggsting that our Church puts opposing War and the Death Penatly on the same moral plain with Abortion? Our Church clearly states that support for politcians who support the former is fine, support for those who support the latter is not.
 
Bob,
What if both candidates for both parties are pro-abortion? Then what?
 
josephdavid said:
Bob,
What if both candidates for both parties are pro-abortion? Then what?
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The Church says you can vote for the one who would do the least harm. Say one supports taxpayer funded abortions up until the moment the childs heads exits the womb(the Democrat party Position) and the other supports abortions in only the first tri-mester. The Church says it is then licit to vote for the latter. You do not, BTW, have the option of voting for the former EVEN if you think they are better on other issues(that is if you want to follow Church teachings)

Personally I wouldnt voe for either. I wrote in a name last time Kay Bailey Hutchison ran for re-election. She is, in most issues, a very hard working reliable conservative BUT she is wobbly on Life issues. I could not in good conscience vote for her REGARDLESS of how much I support her other views. Since she was runniing against the typical radical Democrat abortion supporter the Church teachings say it would have been licit to vote for her.
 
bob,
Ever thought about lobbying these people? For instance people like myself who are Pro-Life Democrats actively lobby their party members against the evils of abortion.

That is why you see a huge increase of “outed” pro-life Democrats running for congress.
 
Respectfully, I understand why people have problem with the repub party, yet I just cannot fathom why any faithful Catholic would be a democrat.
 
josephdavid said:
bob,
Ever thought about lobbying these people? For instance people like myself who are Pro-Life Democrats actively lobby their party members against the evils of abortion.

That is why you see a huge increase of “outed” pro-life Democrats running for congress.
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I do. The problem is that even if a Democrat is pro-life the way congress works is if the Democrats control congress each and every comittee in congress will be heded by a pro-abortion Democrat. such a scenario is a disaster for Life issues. So unless the Pro-life democrat is going to vote for Republican control they are as harmfull to the cause as a pro-abortion democrat.
 
Tom317 said:
Respectfully, I understand why people have problem with the repub party, yet I just cannot fathom why any faithful Catholic would be a democrat.
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My feelings exactly. The best thing that could happen for both Parties would be for Roe V Wade overturned.
 
estesbob,

Exactly. It seems to me we have horrible choices to make, yet we do nothing to improve the field…robotic voters.
 
Tom317 said:
Respectfully, I understand why people have problem with the repub party, yet I just cannot fathom why any faithful Catholic would be a democrat.
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To be anything other than Independent is unfathomable to me. Party line voting imo is a form of brainwashing. No one group has all the answers.
 
Both major parties have good points, and yet they also have some very bad points. The repub is not really pro-life, it is just slightly more so then the dems. It makes for hard decisions on election day. It seem we Christians constantly compormise and yet I wonder of Jesus would do that.
 
*On the campaign trail, President Bush professed to be “pro-life,” but with exceptions – he believes abortion to be justified in cases of rape and incest. The New York Times reported, “It was the same tempered language that George W. Bush typically uses to discuss abortion, which he opposes except in cases of rape, incest or risk to a pregnant woman’s life.” *~ from Joseph Kellard, “George W. Bush’s Contradictory Stand on Abortion”, Capitalism Magazine, 9-22-99 and “Bush Tempers Abortion Remarks,” New York Times, 10-1-00 and

President Clinton’s request that an exemption be added to the bill in cases of serious health risks to the woman. He would of singed the bill in 1998. from: religioustolerance.org/abo_pba1.htm ; rtl.org/html/hot_topics_html/partial_birth_abortion.html

Supports GOP abortion plank but disagrees on exceptions
McCAIN [to Bush]: Do you believe in the exemption, in the case of abortion, for rape, incest, and life of the mother?
BUSH: Yeah, I do.
McCain: [But you] support the pro-life plank [in the Republican Party platform]?
BUSH: I do.
McCAIN: So, in other words, your position is that you believe there’s an exemption for rape, incest and the life of the mother, but you want the platform that you’re supposed to be leading to have no exemption. Help me out there, will you?
BUSH: I will. The platform doesn’t talk about what specifically should be in the constitutional amendment. The platform speaks about a constitutional amendment. It doesn’t refer to how that constitutional amendment ought to be defined.
McCAIN: If you read the platform, it has no exceptions.
BUSH: John, I think we need to keep the platform the way it is. This is a pro-life party.
McCAIN: Then you are contradicting your platform.
Source: GOP Debate on the Larry King Show Feb 15, 2000
 
mlchance said:
Correct. But the Church has consistently said one may not support a pro-abortion candidate in the absence of genuinely proportional reasons, which means the other candidate must be pro- things that would cause more harm than abortion.

Since the Democratic Party is stridently pro-abortion, since there is nothing in the U.S. right now that kills 3000 babies a day other than abortion, and since almost every single Democratic candidate for anything out there adheres to his party’s platform, it follows that there are very few Democrats worthy of a Catholic’s vote.

– Mark L. Chance.
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I don’t think any party is pro-abortion
 
Deus_Vult said:
I pay 6% on my gross income as do ALL AMERICANS not part of my income as you insinuated.
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The social security tax applies only to earned income, and only the first $80,000 of that as well. Therefore, not all Americans pay 6%. Indeed the richest third will pay considerably less than 6% since large portions of their income will either exceed the $80,000 threshold or will come from Capital Gaines which are exempt (And if they are long term Captial Gaines are taxed at a considerably lower rate than regular income taxes).

–
Bill
 
boppaid said:
Just to clarify, because I don’t know of the man…Since he believes God when he says “Thou Shalt Not Kill”, that means he is publicly against war and the dealth penalty, correct? If so, then he would be a wonderful, moral politician, and I wish there were more like him.
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Jim Ryan ran in Illinois’ last governor’s race against Rod Blagojevich – and lost.

Everything in that article about Rod B. – I call him Blago – was correct. He is as liberal a democrat as they come, and completely against life. He has even taken taxpayer money, through untaouchable executive order, and given millions of dollars to experiment on fetuses, harvesting their cells. He also managed to alienate and tick-off many in his own party the first couple years he was in office.

Now in 2006, the best the republicans could do for a challenger is Judy Barr-Topinka, a liberal herself who supports abortion rights. I really hate politics in this state.

In hindsight, I am really disappointed Glen Poshard, a democrat, lost his candidacy against George Ryan. Poshard was the real, but rare, pro-life democrat, and seemed a much more honest and forthright man than Ryan. Well, Ryan is now preparing for prison time and the pro-lifers here have never recovered from the subsequent demise of the republican party here, which, although repleat with its own troubles, was MUCH more wililng to support life than the Chicago democrats who virtually run the state.

Sorry for the rant. I’m just feeling ill…

Peace,
javelin
 
javelin said:
Jim Ryan ran in Illinois’ last governor’s race against Rod Blagojevich – and lost.

Everything in that article about Rod B. – I call him Blago – was correct. He is as liberal a democrat as they come, and completely against life. He has even taken taxpayer money, through untaouchable executive order, and given millions of dollars to experiment on fetuses, harvesting their cells. He also managed to alienate and tick-off many in his own party the first couple years he was in office.

Now in 2006, the best the republicans could do for a challenger is Judy Barr-Topinka, a liberal herself who supports abortion rights. I really hate politics in this state.

In hindsight, I am really disappointed Glen Poshard, a democrat, lost his candidacy against George Ryan. Poshard was the real, but rare, pro-life democrat, and seemed a much more honest and forthright man than Ryan. Well, Ryan is now preparing for prison time and the pro-lifers here have never recovered from the subsequent demise of the republican party here, which, although repleat with its own troubles, was MUCH more wililng to support life than the Chicago democrats who virtually run the state.

Sorry for the rant. I’m just feeling ill…

Peace,
javelin
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But, and I think this is important in politics, there is a concept called the mean voter. The idea is you can’t run someone who is more extreme either way than the majority of your likely voters. Poshard was pro-life but he was also perceived as anti-gay. Unlike virtually all other IL pols, he chose not to either march in OR send a rep to the gay pride parade. This was probably enough to alienate an awful lot of Chicago and Cook County burb voters, not all of whom are gay but all of whom understand how coalitions work. Also, there was not a lot to dislike in George Ryan (no relation to either Jack or Jim Ryan) as he was pro-business but not otherwise dogmatic on social issues. So because Poshard lost a lot of “his” own party voters and he didn’t make up enough in independent or GOP voters to prevail, he lost. That brought George Ryan into the gov-ship. To be honest, I don’t remember a lot of awfulness in his term. All of the corruption he was convicted of was during his time as Sec’t of State, not while Gov. He put a moratorium on the death penalty being enforced due to a string of 13 innocent people being found on Death Row. He then looked over the cases and found a lot of discrepancies. Cases where equal partners in a crime got disparate treatment (one getting death one getting life); where official misconduct was suspected (like Birge cases); where proper authorities (e.g. Embassies) were not informed; where virtually the same crime was treated differently by different Counties and decided to just declare a mass commutation. He did that in the last days of his term.

So you get to last Gov. election with Jim Ryan and Blagojevich. Jim Ryan was a social conservative and he was painted as such. It probably helped him lose, though to be honest the George Ryan case probably hurt him worse than that as he had been the Atty Gen. during Ryan’s time at Sec of State.

And then you get to the 2004 election for Senator. The nominee for the GOP? One Jack Ryan an all around good guy, Catholic, left a lucrative job in Securities to teach inner city kids at a Catholic School. Only, his divorce records become fodder for the media and it turns out he was into public sex at clubs. In this case, his own polls showed his own GOP voters were repulsed so he dropped out.

Leading to… Alan Keyes! Remember what I mentioned about the mean voter. In this case, Alan was so extreme (it’s one thing to hold socially conservative values–it’s another to use every available minute to flog your audience over the head with them) he only got 29% of the vote and probably turned off a lot of moderately social conservatives. Anyway, I honestly think he galvanized the non-religious right GOPers to go out and vote for Judy having realized that social conservatism is not a winning strategy in IL. Plus Oberweis (who seems to just like to run) and Brady split the conservative vote in the primary.

Social Conservatives still have a majority among IL GOP primary voters, but they do not have a majority among IL general election voters. That’s one of the reasons the GOP is so ineffective in IL right now. Another reason is demographics. The southern half of the state is more conservative, but it’s also shrinking in population, meaning it has less sway electorally than it used to. Meanwhile, Chicago and its burbs are gaining in population and that population tends to be more socially liberal. Even in true red DuPage, the demos are changing at least to a more purple-ish hue; and the Cook County burbs which used to be a place the GOP could pick up some votes to counter Chicago has gone about as blue as the city. One of these reasons is that the GOP is seen as intolerant and way too religious.
 
mchale said:
The social security tax applies only to earned income, and only the first $80,000 of that as well. Therefore, not all Americans pay 6%. Indeed the richest third will pay considerably less than 6% since large portions of their income will either exceed the $80,000 threshold or will come from Capital Gaines which are exempt (And if they are long term Captial Gaines are taxed at a considerably lower rate than regular income taxes).

–
Bill
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Pretty close but not exactly…

The first thing to understand about Social Security is that there is no crisis, no need to do much of anything at all. On one hand, the economic assumptions used to promote a crisis in social security are just too pessimistic.

Beyond the regular numbers, the general idea of crisis was always based on the idea of the population getting old and there not being enough workers to continue paying into the system.

But if any solution is needed, the simplest is the fairest. Currently, while a minimum wage worker pays 6.2% of his income into the social security trust fund $12.4% if you include the matching employers portion. A CEO who makes $1 million dollars pays only 6.2% on the first 87,000 of his salary into the system.

This all stems from the fact that wage income above a certain level $87,000 per year in 2003 is completely untaxed by social security. Eliminating this so-called cap would raise plenty of income to help out the system. Only 83% of all wages paid are subject to social security taxes, so this would increase annual social security revenues 20%, or roughly $100 billion per year, plenty
This is hardly a radical idea the cap used to apply to the payroll taxes funding Medicare, but the 1993 tax bill removed the cap and now every dollar of wage income is taxed to help fund the Medicare system. There’s no reason not to do the same for social security.

Sounds like a pretty good idea…not very conservative of me?

In fact I don’t have a problem with this concept at all but with one stipulation…the same would have to go for taxes. A flat tax for all Americans. If it is the right thing to do for Social Security and Medicare than is is only fair thing to do for Federal Income Tax as well.

I look forward to hearing from the Social Democrats…
 
To answer the original question, I am a Democrat primarily because of the issue of the environment. I believe that the Republicans are destroying the planet. You want to talk about the death of innocents? How about the entire population of the planet, with no possibility for regeneration?

I believe that Church leaders are absolutely right in their moral discernment, of course. However, I don’t think they can possibly have accurate information about the environment. You may say that no one knows exactly when or whether the planet will be unable to sustain life, while abortions happen every day. However, I think it’s perfectly clear to anyone who doesn’t have his head in the sand (and/or who has bad information) that we’re destroying the planet, and that the Republicans are hurrying this process along.

It would be interesting to know how the Church would respond to the question of whether it’s worse to have abortion today or to destroy all human life, and the planet God entrusted to us for our stewardship, in the not-too-distant future.
 
Deus Vult, thanks for the corrections to my figures. Always better to have the facts right. Regarding the concept of a flat tax. In theory it sounds good, but in practice I am not so sure. Most proposals for flat taxes basically assume that a certain amount of income is going to be exempted from taxation. In essence they are still a progressive tax, but they only have two tax brackets. That being said, I would be willing to consider such a proposal provided that all income was taxed equally from surplus income. Surplus income being that amount income not needed to provide for the necessities of life. In other words, I believe it is immoral for the state to tax one from the basic means that a person or their family needs to survive.

–
Bill
 
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