Catholic Answers' Voter's Guide Is Incomplete

[Fone_Bone_2001]

The Catholic Answers’ Voter’s Guide still contains the same five “non-negotiable” issues:

1. Abortion
2. Euthanasia
3. Embryonic Stem-Cell Research
4. Human Cloning
5. Homosexual “Marriage”

I checked the criteria for inclusion in the guide:

To be listed in the guide, an issue had to meet two basic criteria:
Catholic Answers Voter's Guide FAQ:

* The issue has to involve something intrinsically evil and thus never permitted under any circumstances.

  Without meeting this criterion, the issue would not be non-negotiable. Instead, it would be a debatable matter on which Catholics could in good conscience disagree.

 * The issue has to be something that is currently debated in U.S. politics.

  The Voter’s Guide would be ineffective if it called attention to issues which are not being debated politically and which Catholic voters do not presently have the ability to affect.

Issues that did not meet these criteria were not included in the guide.

Why, then, was the issue of torture excluded from the list? The Catechism of the Catholic Church states:

Torture which uses physical or moral violence to extract confessions, punish the guilty, frighten opponents, or satisfy hatred is contrary to respect for the person and for human dignity.

Torture is not like war or the death penalty; it is not in the category of those things which are not intrinsically immoral but potentially permissible; rather, it is intrinsically immoral just like abortion is. Of course abortion is worse - I’m not trying to imply that they’re morally equal - but torture is still intrinsically immoral.

In short, it meets both of the criteria for inclusion in the Guide as a “non-negotiable” issue and therefore should have been.

I foresee two objections to this position.

Objection One: The Voter’s Guide doesn’t just deal with the presidential race. As one can see from reading it, it also is meant to help Catholics deal with any election in which they must choose between or among candidates, no matter how local the election. Torture is simply not relevant or debated in most state or local elections in the U.S.

True. Nonetheless, it is relevant on a national level. The Voter’s Guide is supposed to cover presidential politics, too, and though I readily concede that no remaining presidential candidate supports torture (Thank God!), the fact that it was an issue in the primaries is enough to justify its inclusion.

Objection Two: Torture is NOT a currently debated issue in U.S. politics. No major presidential candidate remaining supports it, and even the occurrences of torture in the last few years have been isolated incidents - exceptions to the rule - that were dealt with appropriately.

Whether or not the current administration ever intended to permit torture is simply not relevant. The fact is that torture was an issue in the primaries, and could easily have remained so in the general election if someone supporting it had succeeded in earning the nomination of a major party. Some candidates (more than one) supported the use of torture.

See, for example, the “Issues” page from the following organization which opposed a prominent presidential candidate throughout last year’s primary process:

Click Here for Page

I guess I’m done now. My question remains: why on earth was torture not added to the list of non-negotiable issues in the Catholic Answers Voter’s Guide?