In an older blog post I posited that having bad values and positions on the life issues calls into question a person’s ability to lead an ethical and moral life. I want to revisit that today in terms of the election and the two candidates for President.
I believe that when you respect life from the beginning, that is at conception, you will have a better chance at making good decisions.
Why is that, Fric?
Because that person will have a more properly formed conscience. Note that I am not saying a perfectly formed conscience. Nor am I saying that this will guarantee that a person will make the morally and ethically correct decision every single time. I am saying that this will better prepare a person to make those decisions than someone who has little or no respect for human life as God’s own creation.
Let’s look at the the words of Christ and the 10 Commandments. When asked Christ said that the greatest commandment was to love the Lord you God with all your heart mind and strength. The second greatest was to love your neighbor as you love yourself. Then we have the Thou Shalt not Covet commandments. The things not to covet? Thy neighor’s wife and thy neighbor’s goods. As Catholics we separate these into the 9th and 10th commandments for a specific reason. While both are about wanting what another has that you do not, the subjects of the coveting are totally different.
Coveting goods is about greed and envy. It is about being concerned with the things of the world. Coveting people is about dehumanizing them and turning them into objects. This is a huge slap at the dignity of all men and how the universe is ordered. It turns the world upside down. It puts you at the top of the heap and orders creation to satisfy you. God is replaced by you whether you realize it or not. It makes all people, not just the one coveted, into objects created to satiate your desires for comfort, wealth, sex and anything else you desire. You may not act on all of these desires or even recognize them, but they will be evident in how you conduct yourself.
So, Fric, what does this have to do with the election?
Glad you asked! This mindset is the one that says that life begins at whatever point the courts say, no matter what common sense and science tells us. It tells us that because science can do a thing, it should. So we get a push to create clones of humans. And for what purpose? Is the traditional way of creating humans going out of fashion? Considering the amount of sex that permeates the culture, I doubt it. So why create man from a petrie dish? It seems to me that the only reason is to 1. play God, 2. make replacement parts and 3. create stem cells for science. Can anyone truly make the case that it is moral to create people for the sole purpose of destroying them?
And you can make the exact same argument when it comes to fetal stem cell research. Even though there has never been a single successful result of fetal stem cell research, scientists and those who see people as commodities insist that this is the only hope for people with Alzheimers and other diseases. Never mind that honest scientists admit this is a lie. Never mind that adult stem cell research has shown success. Never mind that these people create babies that they call embryos, an accurate though dehumanizing term, for the sole intention to destroy them in order to do research that leads no where.
When you have this mindset or at least support these things even though you say you are “personally opposed”, what does this say about your own values and character? To me it says that you believe people have no inherent dignity or value, despite what the faith you profess to believe says. When you say that your faith is strong and very personal but that you cannot impose that faith on others, what are you really saying? I think you are saying you don’t really believe what your faith teaches you. Faith without works is dead. That seems to mean that you must live and breathe your faith. You must act on it. In the parable of the sheep and the goats, Christ turns away those professing believers because they did not do their faith.
Doing one’s faith means voting and acting what you say is your conscience on all matters. It means you cannot vote to uphold abortion, gay marriage, cloning, fetal stem cell research and euthanasia. All these things are intrinsically evil and disordered. They turn God’s Will on its head and create a culture of death.
When you begin your day on the wrong side of these issues as one of the candidates does, how can I trust you to make correct decisions on anything else? Your world view is disordered from the beginning. I cannot trust you to make the correct judgement because you value things that should never be valued. I don’t care what you say you believe. I look at your actions and voting record and see what you really believe. Therefore I cannot in conscience vote for you. That would be cooperating with evil.
Mark Shea calls that party by the way, the Evil Party. He calls the other one the Stupid Party. After you get over the initial shock and or insult depending on your affiliation, you realize how correct he is. The Evil Party promotes all five of those non-negotiables as basic tenets of their beliefs. Sure they also say they are for helping the poor and the little man, etc. etc. But how can you help people by treating them as chattel and aborting them out of existence and devalueing the institution of marriage?
The Stupid Party on the other hand gives good lip service to life issues and will sometimes rise to the challenge of fighting evil. Sometimes they do a bang up job. Sometimes they give in entirely. Sometimes they fight to no avail. In the end little changes at the political level of discourse. We must change hearts and minds at the local level for that to happen. The Stupid Party also does little to reach out to the hearts and minds of those that are hurt most by the Evil Party, minorities and the poor.
I disagree with the idea that only more government programs will cure poverty and ignorance. The last 40 years of failures should convince anyone of that. I think their philosophy of a helping hand up is far superior to a helping hand out. That said, they don’t do much to really promote that because they are fearful of being called mean spirited and cruel, out to kill seniors and starve children. That is the rhetoric of the Evil Party by the way.
Does all this mean that I think the Stupid Party is above reproach and has perfect values? Of course not. But I find that the candidates of the Stupid Party value life far more than the Evil Party. And I would rather be Stupid than Evil when Christ comes again. I think I’ll have less to answer for.