Speaking of Intrinsic Evils…
The Washington Post has in interesting and important story today about the Bush White House’s support for torture. Here’s a taste:
The Bush administration issued a pair of secret memos to the CIA in 2003 and 2004 that explicitly endorsed the agency’s use of interrogation techniques such as waterboarding against al-Qaeda suspects — documents prompted by worries among intelligence officials about a possible backlash if details of the program became public.
The classified memos, which have not been previously disclosed, were requested by then-CIA Director George J. Tenet more than a year after the start of the secret interrogations, according to four administration and intelligence officials familiar with the documents. Although Justice Department lawyers, beginning in 2002, had signed off on the agency’s interrogation methods, senior CIA officials were troubled that White House policymakers had never endorsed the program in writing.
The memos were the first — and, for years, the only — tangible expressions of the administration’s consent for the CIA’s use of harsh measures to extract information from captured al-Qaeda leaders, the sources said. As early as the spring of 2002, several White House officials, including then-national security adviser Condoleezza Rice and Vice President Cheney, were given individual briefings by Tenet and his deputies, the officials said. Rice, in a statement to congressional investigators last month, confirmed the briefings and acknowledged that the CIA director had pressed the White House for “policy approval.”
Two discrete points;
1. If I believe, as I do, that abortion is intrinsically evil, why ought I believe that today, in the U. S., that the best way to reduce the incidence of abortions is to make them illegal?
2. The presidential election, for all practical purposes, between McCain and Obama, does not explicitly raise the question about whether abortion ought or ought not be made illegal. The election issue is: which candidate is more likely to provide leadership during the next four years that promotes the good of our political society? That is the question that the results of voting will determine. However any of us might want our votes to be votes on the abortion question, that’s not what is going to happen. Given that factual situation, I can’t see that it would be intrinsically evil to vote for either of them, or for Nader or anyone else.
Please explain why I’m wrong.
Strategy and tactics, perhaps.
The strategic end might be that we would like abortion to be illegal (AND unecessary, which would include the full array of life promoting ends supported by the Church). What are the tactics that we should pursue?
When one makes abortion the single issue for voting, one is not really voting for a single issue unless one is also voting for a single issue candidate. There is none in this election (nor has there ever been one in a presidential election since Roe). This means that EVERYONE is voting tactically whether they want to admit it to themselves or not.
The application of discernment is then something that a good Catholic needs to apply to their judgment of tactics, towards the strategic ends that I think we all share.
The main problem that I see in these discussions is that both sides have a tendency to confuse strategy and tactics. So of course there’s no possible resolution.
If Congress and the President were to enact legislation today outlawing induced abortion, the new law would be widely ignored. Medically safe (to the mother) abortions would continue to be performed, albeit discretely.
Our country is still working toward a consensus on this issue, a consensus made all the more difficult to achieve by Roe v Wade.
Laws not generally supported by the public at large are not worth much more than the paper on which they are written.
In the meantime, we press for programs to help women facing unwanted pregnancies and, we hope, to reduce the incidence of abortion.
I wish the Dallas and Fort Worth Catholic bishops would really give more than lip service to intrinsic evils other than abortion.They just put an an incredible harsh pastoral letter that was read from the ambo on Sunday. Two dozen people got up and walked out. This is not the understanding we had of Faithful Citizenship–which actually tells us not to be single issue voters.
Some Catholics in Dallas have begun protests and an online petition drive:
http://www.catholicsforchange.org