Yes, of course you are correct to admonish me, for not being more specific in the post you are commenting on especially concerning your quote above.
In my own election choice i did not vote for President Obama because of his position on pro-choice, or his other moral issues on disordered behavior choices.I chose him because I believe he has governed with the common good of our people upper most in his mind and that he is going to continue to do so,I firmly believe he puts our Country and her needs above all else to the best of his ability.
Although I am a practicing Catholic I am a sinner have struggled with obedience and I am at sixes and sevens many times when it comes to discernment about many things.
Mea, Culpa!
Peace, Carlan
Interesting. If one assumes (against all objective evidence to the contrary, though that’s another subject) that Obama really has proven beneficial to the country in the past four years in economic or perhaps international terms, one still has to consider the moral price one pays for supporting him.
In doing so, one must decide what negatives one affirms and perpetrates. Could one in knowledge of the facts, have morally supported Mussolini, who murdered many, on the grounds that he reduced unemployment and made the trains run on time? Many Italians thought so. Could one have supported Lenin, who caused millions to die of starvation, on the grounds that, by taking away all of the peasants’ grain he improved the diet of factory workers in the cities? Many Russians thought so.
It seems clear that we could not morally do such things, because supporting profound evils in order to achieve material benefits, especially marginal ones, can never be the moral choice.
And so, when we promote abortion by supporting its promoters, for whatever reason (real or only supposed) we have to consider the balance in moral terms. Making a decision based on purely pragmatic criteria (what’s in it for me or for some socioeconomic class) is fundamentally pagan, not Catholic or even Christian.
Americans have (choose to have) at least a partial blindness when it comes to abortion. Because children are invisible except to ultrasound prior to birth, we discount their lives and their humanity. But we shouldn’t, any more than we should discount the life of a person in the next room who we can’t see. If Obama had proposed support for killing a million two-year-olds per year, we would recoil from him as we would from Dracula, no matter what benefits he promised us. But we choose to equate invisibility with non-existence or non-humanity precisely because we are encouraged by the merchants of death to see it that way, despite the fact that we know full well it’s a falsehood. We take comfort in the lie.
And so, we are corrupted into being accomplices to murder as sure as if we handed the knife to one who wanted it to slit the throats of two-year-olds.
That’s how the Church sees it and, in truth, that’s how any rational human being should see it.
And that’s without even considering the violation of conscience and profanation of marriage for which Obama stands.
One of the most quoted lines in “MacBeth” is where MacBeth considers his bloody past and whether he should repent or go to greater crimes. Paraphrasing, it goes like this: “I am in blood stepped in so far, that should I wade no more, to return would be more tedious than to go o’er.” In other words, there is a point in evildoing where a person’s resolve to abandon it seems more difficult than to continue in it. As the end of “MacBeth” makes clear, that is a formula for self-deceit and, in the end, (let’s say it) damnation. Not to get overly literary here, but that’s precisely the reason Shakespeare has MacBeth incited, initially, by witches; consorts of the father of lies.
One of the real blessings of Catholicism is that confession and true repentence allow one to return. One is not required by one’s prior acts to “go o’er”. One is not required to struggle with the lies.
