Church v. Trump on Women

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Looking ahead to 2020- every candidate that has been mentioned for the Democratic Party nomination is solidly anti-life. Biden, Clinton, Warren, Booker, Kamala, Sanders.

Should the Democrats be looking to recruit a pro-life candidate to provide a challenge to the President’s Pro Life stance which is standing alone? Can the Democrats recruit John Kasich or some other pro-lifer to switch parties in time for 2020?
 
We are blessed in the US that our Bishops have provided clear guidance, I would recommend reading the entire document, here is a small bit (bold mine):

  1. Catholics often face difficult choices about how to vote. This is why it is so important
    to vote according to a well-formed conscience that perceives the proper relationship among
    moral goods. A Catholic cannot vote for a candidate who favors a policy promoting an
    intrinsically evil act, such as abortion, euthanasia, assisted suicide, deliberately subjecting
    workers or the poor to subhuman living conditions, redefining marriage in ways that violate its
    essential meaning, or racist behavior, if the voter’s intent is to support that position. In such
    cases, a Catholic would be guilty of formal cooperation in grave evil. At the same time, a voter
    should not use a candidate’s opposition to an intrinsic evil to justify indifference or
    inattentiveness to other important moral issues involving human life and dignity.
  2. There may be times when a Catholic who rejects a candidate’s unacceptable position
    even on policies promoting an intrinsically evil act may reasonably decide to vote for that
    candidate for other morally grave reasons.     Voting in this way would be permissible only for truly
    grave moral reasons, not to advance narrow interests or partisan preferences or to ignore a
    fundamental moral evil.
  3. When all candidates hold a position that promotes an intrinsically evil act, the
    conscientious voter faces a dilemma. The voter may decide to take the extraordinary step of not
    voting for any candidate     or, after careful deliberation, may decide to vote for the candidate
    deemed less likely to advance such a morally flawed position and more likely to pursue other
    authentic human goods.
  4. In making these decisions, it is essential for Catholics to be guided by a well-formed
    conscience that recognizes that all issues do not carry the same moral weight and that the moral
    obligation to oppose policies promoting intrinsically evil acts has a special claim on our
    consciences and our actions. These decisions should take into account a candidate’s
    commitments, character, integrity, and ability to influence a given issue. In the end, this is a
    decision to be made by each Catholic guided by a conscience formed by Catholic moral teaching.
 
blackforest said:
Trump not being Catholic doesn’t give him a free pass to treat women like dirt.
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Could you explain why the women currently in his life continue to remain in his life? They don’t seem to be exceptionally dull, or coerced, or bimboish.

Let’s take a larger point of view on this.

Which would you prefer?
  1. A president who is personally impeccable but takes the country down the road to absolute ruin.
    Or:
  2. A president who has a plethora of personal flaws but steers the country on a course that makes life determinably better for virtually every citizen.
You might claim this is a forced dichotomy, but it is no more forced than the one you wish to impose. To wit: that voters should focus completely on Trump’s personal flaws and simply ignore the positive good he has accomplished.

Yes, I understand that the impact of his policies as a positive good is debatable, but the forced dichotomy of judging Trump by his personal flaws isn’t. It comes back, ultimately,to what he has accomplished, rather than his personal flaws.

As Catholics, we have a great deal of leeway regarding opinions on policies and their implementation. Catholics are not compelled to judge a politician’s merit on his personal flaws, but on the merit of the policies enacted by that president.

That is where this debate ought to be focused. This thread is one giant red herring.

We also have past examples of how individuals can change and be transformed by grace and God working in human hearts.

St. Paul was a Pharisee and a persecutor of the early Church. You appear to be of the school that insists that Saul’s past words and deeds ought to definitively determine any subsequent views the Early Church should have taken on him, and his teaching, and his theology.
 
TheLittleLady said:
We are blessed in the US that our Bishops have provided clear guidance, I would recommend reading the entire document, here is a small bit (bold mine):
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So your post is all well and good.

Now you need to spell out which of Trump’s policies are determinably “intrinsically evil,” not merely in your estimation, but indisputably so according to Church teaching.
 
This 10000%. I voted for Trump and I “overtly” support him. But I don’t prescribe to this all or nothing mentality. I also voted for Obama in 2008. There are positions and policies I agreed and disagreed with, with both presidents. The world of politics and those that support particular candidates is not as black and white as OP is implying. Stop being tribalistic.
 
Sedona said:
If you understand Jungian psychology, it’s pretty apparent how Trump happened. He’s a symptom, not the cause. Like the fascists of the 1930’s he doesn’t have a particularly nuanced or sophisticated message. He gets up in front of a crowd, belches out some inarticulate and visceral tirade from the bestial depths of the human soul that resonates with the lesser impulses within us. Then he reads the crowd’s reaction and adjusts from there. He feeds off the crowd’s reaction and the crowd feeds off of his reaction to them, creating a feedback loop. By doing this he becomes the personification of the American “Shadow.” There’s a “shadow” or dark side to every person and every culture. He appeals to America’s shadow of misogyny, racism and xenophobia. It has always been there below the surface. He reaches down into the depths of people’s despair and fears and gives it an expression. It’s not about what religion you belong to and how you reconcile him with what you profess to believe from a religious aperture. He appeals to a raw, unexplored and repressed region of the human psyche that lurks beneath the surface of every person, and just enough of us were unable to extricate ourselves from it in order to create a rupture in the thin membrane of decency that holds us together.

Couple that with the one issue voters who would vote for Pol Pot or Stalin if they promised to overturn Roe v Wade in the belief that God sometimes uses really bad people to do really good things. More often or not, a bad person is just that - a bad person. There’s a bad person in every one of us, and we simply have created an expression of it in this character. He’s not the cause. We are.

All the best!
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Okay, let’s accept your Jungian analysis of Trump.

How does “… appeals to a raw, unexplored and repressed region of the human psyche that lurks beneath the surface of every person…” not apply in spades to the women and feminists who marched wearing pussy hats and screamed at the sky for months after his election? I am sure Freud would have had a field day with that analysis.

Or when Bernie Sanders appeals to the deeply covetous nature of human beings demanding they get, unearned, what doesn’t belong to them, why is his appeal NOT to the “unexplored and repressed regions of the human psyche?”

Seems like your Jungian analysis, itself, could suffer from a Jungian analysis for attempting to appropriate archetypes in order to push a particular ideological narrative.

:roll_eyes:
 
How I vote(d) is not a topic I raised, also this thread is about a specific thing. Mr Trump’s words and actions about women.

The “Access Hollywood” tape is a recording of a person who speaks with disrespect for the dignity of people. I would begin at CCC article “Respect for the Human Person” which begins at paragraph 1929

This recording speaks of sexually immoral actions, see the 10 Commandments as well as the Catechism for teachings against sexual immorality.

The same teachings on sexual immorality, the same Commandment, speaks of adultery, fornication both of which Mr. Trump has a public record (including cheating on his former wives with the next wife). Marriage after divorce without the freedom to marry being declared by a competent Tribunal is sinful.

Mr. Trump late as during the election praised the US’s largest abortion provider, Planned Parenthood during the Feb 2016 Presidential debate. President Trump has given lip-service to the abortion debate, yet, continues with the Republican SOP of regulation loopholes.

You will likely respond that none of these are intrinsically evil.

One of the sins that cry out to heaven is to deprive a workman of their wages.


Torture CCC 2297


I could spend another hour finding reasons not to vote for Mr Trump.

I have been very clear on many political threads, I am a member of a “3rd Party”.
 
TheLittleLady said:
One of the sins that cry out to heaven is to deprive a workman of their wages.
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So the sins of socialism cry out to heaven?

The Dems are moving towards socialism.

Ergo, we ought not vote for individuals whose sins cry out to heaven.

Okay. I accept your thesis, although it seems biased in favour of men.

What about the wages of working women, LittleLady? Wouldn’t depriving them of their wages also “cry out to heaven?” Fair is fair, no?
 
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HarryStotle said:
So the sins of socialism cry out to heaven?

The Dems are moving towards socialism.

Ergo, we ought not vote for individuals whose sins cry out to heaven.

Okay. I accept your thesis.
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When we were kids, there would be arguments and squabbles.

One of my sisters, when she lacked a response she would say “because ‘Leaning On The Everlasting Arms’”

That was the early version of “Whaddaboutism”.

If you would like to open a thread about socialism, go for it.

When you asked about intrinsic evils, I posted examples and now you attempt to deflect into a whole 'nother stadium. That is not cool.

I could have been snarky and come back with “you are proposing Mr Trump is a socialist?”, but, I did not take that low hanging fruit.
HarryStotle said:
What about the wages of working women, LittleLady? Wouldn’t depriving them of their wages also “cry out to heaven?” Fair is fair, no?
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Seriously? James chapter 5 is one I have committed to memory. The earlier translations use male pronoun as the universal neutral, but, again, you know that.
 
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TheLittleLady said:
One of the sins that cry out to heaven is to deprive a workman of their wages.
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Donald Trump has had disputes with customers, contractors and others throughout the years, that’s what the legal system is for.

Mr. Trump contested the idea that the contractors in question fulfilled their part of the bargain so he saw them in court.

Is that a sin? How about Mrs. Clinton, she was a big cheese at Walmart, when the retailer had a lot of disputes with contractors and employers too.

These things happen in America.
 
Again, deflecting to another discussion. If you would like to start a discussion of Mrs. Clinton’s 6 years on the board of WalMart, that is for a new thread.
 
I don’t think the point is Mrs. Clinton at all.

But the fact that lots of people have disputes over whether contracts were properly fulfilled or not, and President Trump is just one of those people. I’ve taken people to court over the years if they haven’t fulfilled their end of a bargain and they refuse to budge.

So has Clinton, Trump, and millions of others. That’s what make the law such a lucrative racket.

Mr. Trump has a lot more different interests and deals going through, it would seem intuitive he would need the advice of lawyers more often.

Spinning Mr. Trump’s legal actions into “intrinsically evil” just seems overboard to me.
 
blackforest said:
The tone of this thread is a little bothersome. I’m fiercely pro-life.
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Is it not better that you have a President whose actions result in a reigning in of abortion, the nomination of pro-life candidates to the Supreme Court, the cutting of funding to overseas agencies that provide abortion and putting pressure on Planned Parenthood?

Whether President Trump has changed his mind on a previous position, or was previously pro-life all along, or is doing it for political purposes, the fact that result is a reining in of pro-abortion liberalisation is surely better than having a president who could liberalise abortion even further?

Ok, there will be positions we disagree with about any politician, but surely the potential impact on abortion in our country should be right there at the top when we cast out vote?

Incidentally I don’t live in the USA, but I do understand why a Catholic would vote for Donald Trump. I have more difficulty accepting why a Catholic would vote for a candidate that was pro-abortion.
 
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HarryStotle said:
Could you explain why the women currently in his life continue to remain in his life? They don’t seem to be exceptionally dull, or coerced, or bimboish.
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So they’re asking for it, huh? :roll_eyes: Stay classy, bro.

Was his daughter asking for her father to express publicly his incestuous desires? She hasn’t severed ties with him. Does that make is her fault that he said it?

I’m old enough to remember the Clinton-Lewinsky years. It’s so amusing to watch the Right use the same enabling excuses for Trump that the Democrats did in the 1990s. “But, but what matters is his leeeeeadership!!!”
HarryStotle said:
Which would you prefer?
  1. A president who is personally impeccable but takes the country down the road to absolute ruin.
    Or:
  2. A president who has a plethora of personal flaws but steers the country on a course that makes life determinably better for virtually every citizen.
You might claim this is a forced dichotomy,
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It is, so I’m refusing to indulge it.
HarryStotle said:
To wit: that voters should focus completely on Trump’s personal flaws and simply ignore the positive good he has accomplished.
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Those are your words, not mine, and therefore it’s your false dilemma, not mine. He hasn’t done enough positive good in my mind to outweigh the negative . . . or his dehumanizing view of women.
HarryStotle said:
As Catholics, we have a great deal of leeway regarding opinions on policies and their implementation. Catholics are not compelled to judge a politician’s merit on his personal flaws, but on the merit of the policies enacted by that president.
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@TheLittleLady posted an excellent summary on Church teaching as to how we’re supposed to weigh our choices as voters. I’m just bringing one more factor into the equation for Catholics to consider, one that I don’t think has been adequately addressed.
HarryStotle said:
St. Paul was a Pharisee and a persecutor of the early Church. You appear to be of the school that insists that Saul’s past words and deeds ought to definitively determine any subsequent views the Early Church should have taken on him, and his teaching, and his theology.
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When Donald Trump gets struck by lightning while riding horseback in the wilderness and experiences his come-to-Jesus moment, let me know. We already have someone in this thread convinced that he’s secretly wanting to become Catholic, so who knows?

All facetiousness aside, we do have a duty as Catholics to pray for Donald Trump and all other elected officials.
 
Brendan_64 said:
Is it not better that you have a President whose actions result in a reigning in of abortion, the nomination of pro-life candidates to the Supreme Court, the cutting of funding to overseas agencies that provide abortion and putting pressure on Planned Parenthood?
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Trump has done all of the required “pro-life” grand-standing that every Republican president feels compelled to do - e.g. reverse Mexico City policy and defund PP. All of that will go away with the next Democratic president. I can’t wait until Americans wake up and realize that they’re being played by the two-party duopoly.

By the way, abortion rates have been on a downward trend since the 1990s, regardless of who’s in office. And believe me, EVERYBODY wants to run away with the credit for that one!
 
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blackforest said:
Trump has done all of the required “pro-life” grand-standing that every Republican president feels compelled to do - e.g. reverse Mexico City policy and defund PP. All of that will go away with the next Democratic president.
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Is that alone not a good enough reason to vote to keep the Democrats out of power?

But if, as a result of Donald Trump’s nominations, Roe versus Wade gets overturned, then that would be a serious victory for life. Now that may not happen under Donald Trump, but it might. Would such a prospect exist under a Democrat presidency?
 
Why are you claiming that Catholic men aren’t attracted to women with breasts?
 
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