Follow up question: What voting issue could possibly outweigh the murder of millions of unborn babies?

[fide]

Also predicted in Scripture is the final defeat of evil and death and all darkness, and the glorious victory of Christ and the holy ones in Him. And as for the others, in the culture of death, they are outside of the Kingdom of Life in Him:

Rev 22:15 Outside are the dogs and sorcerers and fornicators and murderers and idolaters, and every one who loves and practices falsehood.

 

[Emeraldlady]

To vote for a 3rd party with zero chance of winning any power in the government is a wasted vote.

No it isn’t but I can see how that false argument will be pushed to prevent people making a truly conscience vote. Governments are influenced by degree of the mandate they get in the election. A weak mandate based on the presence of an alternative force that represents the whole of the Catholic approach, would be a most powerful vote regardless of the party not getting up in this election. Votes made on conscience are never a wasted vote and I’d urge people not to buy into that.

 

[Thom18]

No need for corrections. OP was wondering, I am assuming, why some people don’t find the abortion issue to be the defining one for Catholic voters. I put in my two cents worth. That is all.

No one firmly convinced of their own opinion feels they need correction. I’m just here to tell you that this feeling isn’t a good one.

You can educate people all you want, but what are you really teaching them when you tell them that it’s fine to let millions of children be killed if it means the education system gets some more funding? If you are promoting such consequentialist morality, you’re turning out a morally corrupt youth.

 

[1cthlctrth]

President Trump is in favor of School Choice for kids who, unfortunately, live in bad school districts.
Democrats oppose School Choice.

 

[FiveLinden]

Does the Church really teach that abortion is ‘murder’? I thought it taught that it was the killing of a human being.

 

[Thom18]

Does the Church really teach that abortion is ‘murder’? I thought it taught that it was the killing of a human being.

Generally speaking, the intentional killing of a human being, not in self-defense, is considered manslaughter at best, murder at worst. Manslaughter means “I did it, but I didn’t mean to”, and murder is obvious.

 

[mythbuster1]

Ought implies can. With regard to nuclear weapons, Pope Francis doesn’t know what he’s talking about if he expects total disarmament immediately, because literally the only way to do that would be to detonate them. To get rid of nuclear weapons without detonating them, we have to dismantle them, convert their cores into commercial fuel, and burn it up in nuclear reactors. For reference, it took half the US commercial nuclear fleet 20 years to burn up just what the Russians declared “surplus weapons-grade uranium” after the fall of the Soviet Union. Anything less than burning up the cores is not disarmament, because anything less leaves those with the will to do so the ability to put the weapons back together.

 

[JSRG]

To vote for a 3rd party with zero chance of winning any power in the government is a wasted vote.

If you vote for a candidate, and that candidate does not win by exactly 1 vote, then your vote was effectively wasted. Given the astoundingly low odds of that happening in anything other than local elections, that means that your vote is basically wasted no matter who you vote for, so you might as well vote for the candidate you think is the best. (I suppose someone could use that as an argument for not voting at all, but voting does at least send a message of sorts about which kind of candidate you want)

 

[peter26]

I don’t see how any issue could be more important. However, in some parts of the world it just isn’t on the political radar. Here in England, it is very rare to hear candidates mention abortion at all. So you have to vote on other issues. Having said that, if a pro-life candidate did stand I would certainly vote for them.

 

[fide]

Every vote for that 3rd party pro-life group would have too be added together, to follow your logic. Everyone whose logic led them to the 3rd party, led them away from adding to the one major party total that is pro-life. That is the danger. Many “one-votes” add up.

 

[fide]

Conscience must be well-formed. The resort to “MY conscience” is noble when and only when it is well-formed. Too many keep their consciences “under-formed” - at a level of formation that does not threaten other values in their life-style. That is why so many Catholics, I grieve to say, persevere in a national party that is an abomination to truly Catholic values.

 

[Peeps]

Come November we’ll see if this is really what motivates people claiming prolife since there is now genuinely unconditionally prolife party in the US. (The ASP). It is a platform that is completely in line with every aspect of Catholic teaching. I don’t want to wish the year away but I’m very curious to be here after the election and see if that is truly what people did.

I’m not going to throw my vote away.

It’s living in a fantasy world. Voting for someone who can’t possibly win will assuage our consciences about our Catholicism, but since the candidate will never ever win, no public policy will be affected and evil will continue to be the legal situation in this country.

We aren’t REALLY acting Catholic to cast a meaningless vote. No one cares. The press won’t report it. The pro-choice candidates who win will not take any righteous message away–they’ll just gloat that they were elected by the majority in their district and that the “fringe” pro-lifers went down in defeat.

It’s possible that pro-life Republican (or rarely, Democratic) candidates will recognize that Catholics lost them the election because of their “principles” and hold resentment against Catholic legalism and insistence on voting for a “perfect” Catholic candidate. That means that these pro-life Republicans (or rarely, Democrats) may be closed-minded to the possibility of ever converting to Catholicism.

 

[TheLittleLady]

First we have to come to an agreement of what defined a pro life candidate.

 

[TheLittleLady]

I’d state that both are the potential loss of life. No one campaigns that they will guarantee x number of abortions in the next year.

Both are the potential of loss of life.

 

[TheLittleLady]

Correct. Murder is a legal term, the Church deals with moral terms

 

[RuthAnne]

To vote for a 3rd party with zero chance of winning any power in the government is a wasted vote

I disagree. To vote for a candidate you disagree with is a wasted vote. To vote against your conscience is a wasted vote. Sometimes to vote at all is a wasted vote.

 

[ricmat]

There is one issue that is more important, and that issue is unilateral nuclear disarmament.
This is the “elephant in the room” that no one wants to talk about. Our nuclear weapons arsenal threatens to destroy the human race; to wipe it off of the face of the earth, and this catastrophe is predicted in scripture. Its time frame is found in a prohibited list of future Popes that was published in 1595.

As evil as abortion is, it will not result in the demise of the human race.

Nuclear war would indeed kill a lot of people’s bodies. But it would affect only a few people’s souls.

Abortion kills not just the unborn child, but also “kills” the souls of the people responsible for the abortions. And that’s a huge number.

Matthew 10:28 Do not be afraid of those who kill the body but cannot kill the soul. Rather, be afraid of the One who can destroy both soul and body in hell.

Just in the USA from 1973 to 2018 (45 years)
60 million abortions / 45 years = 1.33 million per year
1.33 million / 365 days per year = 3600 abortions per day.

Remember 9-11-2001? About 3000 persons killed. Abortion (just in the USA) has been doing a “9-11” event every day for the last 45 years.

I remember when I was in 10th grade in the 1960’s being all freaked out over nuclear war at any minute. It never happened. Nobody lost their lives (or souls) due to nuclear war. How many souls were lost because of abortion?

 

[PetraG]

It can be a false question because someone can be in the situation of wanting to prevent an evil without thinking that making it a felony is the way to do it.

Having said that, by the numbers abortion is our most serious epidemic.

In 2017, there were 17,284 deaths documented as homicides, 47,173 deaths by suicide. Why do we seem so wound up in murder prevention while we seem less willing to address suicide prevention, when suicide is a far worse problem?

There were 161,364 accidental deaths in 2017. There were 647,547 deaths due to heart disease, which is listed as the leading cause of death.

There were 862,320 documented abortions in 2017. Even though the rate is falling, it is still the actual leading cause of death in the United States by a broad margin.

I think the reason abortion is not recognized as worthy of being a number one priority issue is that making it illegal has not made the rate lower in countries that don’t permit legal abortion. If making suicide illegal or even making murder illegal isn’t enough to lower the numbers, then the problem obviously needs other solutions.

That’s fine but how do we actually encourage women not to seek to end the lives of their unborn children? Just making abortion illegal won’t do it, not any more than jailing prostitutes ends human trafficking. We have to recognize the full scope of the problem. That doesn’t mean resigning ourselves to it. We don’t just resign ourselves to the idea that heart disease is rampant. OK, well, if making a bad diet or failure to exercise or grave failure to care for one’s body in other ways a crime won’t do it, what will?

I would like to see someone do something more than make abortion either a crime or a right. Let’s be honest: That’s not going to move this epidemic, is it?

 

[fide]

I have never voted for a perfect candidate, with whom I agree on every issue or aspect of leadership. In every case in which I have voted, it has been when I saw a clear and good possibility of limiting the evil that is growing in the world by voting for one or the other of the major candidates. I see democracy as a chance to try to limit or even reduce the darkness. I think that such discernment is what we are called to do, when voting.

When a possibility exists to limit or reduce evil by voting for one of the two major candidates - but deciding to vote for neither of those, but instead voting for a candidate who in all likelihood can not be elected - that is a wasted vote. It may give a good feeling subjectively for a time - but it does not “move the ball down the field” so to speak.

 

[RuthAnne]

Voting my conscience is NEVER a wasted vote.

If there are only 2 candidates to choose from, an R or a D, then I generally don’t vote.

We are not a democracy.