Black and White
Sep. 21st, 2004 05:32 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
rowynThis article bills itself as "A Voter's Guide". It can be summed up as "Abortion and embryonic research are the worst evils facing America today and any Catholic who votes for a pro-choice candidate over a pro-life candidate is in violation of his faith and is unworthy to present himself for communion."
This article bothered me. At first, I thought it might be the "these things are the worst evil" stance. But that's not it: even though I don't agree with Archbishop Myer's stance, it's not an illogical one. If you believe that a fertilized egg is a human being with the same rights as an adult human, then abortion and the potential for embryonic research is the worst thing that's happening in America today. I may not buy the underlying assumption, but I cannot quibble with the conclusion. (Note: I am not particularly interested in arguing this point, and the rest of this entry will not deal with the rightness or wrongness of abortion.)
No, what bothers me is his implication that the stance of any given politician will actually have an effect, one way or another.
He doesn't come right out and say "You can't vote for Kerry because he's pro-abortion; you must vote for Bush because he's against it." But his whole tone suggests that's the right conclusion.
The presumption here is that, if Bush is re-elected, he will make sure embryonic research remains illegal and he will outlaw abortions, while if Kerry is elected embryonic research will be legalized and abortions will continue in ever-growing numbers. I am somewhat embarrassed to admit that I don't actually know the current status of embryo research in the US. I know that many fertility treatments have the undesired side effect of resulting in non-viable fertilized eggs, but are legal anyway. I don't know if it's legal or not to fertilize an egg with the specific intent that the blastomere/embryo will not be permitted to develop into a baby. I'm thinking the latter is currently illegal, and that this is a law Bush pushed for, but I'm not sure.
But what I do know is that Bush has done virtually nothing, in four years of office, to make abortions illegal.
So why should a Catholic, in good conscience, feel that he has to vote for Bush to stop these 1.3 million annual abortions, when he's got no good reason to think Bush is going to do anything about it next term, either? (This isn't even to address the next problem, which is "how many abortions will be prevented by making it illegal?" Because you can sure bet that number wouldn't be close to "all of them".) Kerry and Bush may not "be in favor of embryo killing on roughly an equal scale" but in practice I think it's quite likely that they'd each have the same effect on the law.
And this, I think, gets us closer to Cardinal Retzinger's "proportionate reasons". If someone who is strongly opposed to abortion believes that Candidate A, pro-choice, has a 50% chance of, let's say, preventing hundreds of thousands from dying of starvation in Africa, while Candidate B, pro-life, has a 0.01% chance of doing anything about abortion in America .... well, I think it's pretty fair to go with the guy who might make a difference on something that matters to you.
Of course, there are arguments to be made on the other side: maybe Candidate B won't make a difference this year. But perhaps your devotion now to this single issue will someday bear fruit. It's similar to my reasoning in voting for Libertarians even when I know they won't win the current election.
But not all rational people agree with me that voting Libertarian now helps to make the Libertarian Party more credible, and I don't think everyone would agree that making anti-abortion your top priority in picking a candidate will necessarily make a difference in abortion policy down the road.
I'm not impressed by John Kerry, I'll admit. But even if I opposed abortion, I can't see making that a reason to vote for George Bush.
This article bothered me. At first, I thought it might be the "these things are the worst evil" stance. But that's not it: even though I don't agree with Archbishop Myer's stance, it's not an illogical one. If you believe that a fertilized egg is a human being with the same rights as an adult human, then abortion and the potential for embryonic research is the worst thing that's happening in America today. I may not buy the underlying assumption, but I cannot quibble with the conclusion. (Note: I am not particularly interested in arguing this point, and the rest of this entry will not deal with the rightness or wrongness of abortion.)
No, what bothers me is his implication that the stance of any given politician will actually have an effect, one way or another.
He doesn't come right out and say "You can't vote for Kerry because he's pro-abortion; you must vote for Bush because he's against it." But his whole tone suggests that's the right conclusion.
The presumption here is that, if Bush is re-elected, he will make sure embryonic research remains illegal and he will outlaw abortions, while if Kerry is elected embryonic research will be legalized and abortions will continue in ever-growing numbers. I am somewhat embarrassed to admit that I don't actually know the current status of embryo research in the US. I know that many fertility treatments have the undesired side effect of resulting in non-viable fertilized eggs, but are legal anyway. I don't know if it's legal or not to fertilize an egg with the specific intent that the blastomere/embryo will not be permitted to develop into a baby. I'm thinking the latter is currently illegal, and that this is a law Bush pushed for, but I'm not sure.
But what I do know is that Bush has done virtually nothing, in four years of office, to make abortions illegal.
So why should a Catholic, in good conscience, feel that he has to vote for Bush to stop these 1.3 million annual abortions, when he's got no good reason to think Bush is going to do anything about it next term, either? (This isn't even to address the next problem, which is "how many abortions will be prevented by making it illegal?" Because you can sure bet that number wouldn't be close to "all of them".) Kerry and Bush may not "be in favor of embryo killing on roughly an equal scale" but in practice I think it's quite likely that they'd each have the same effect on the law.
And this, I think, gets us closer to Cardinal Retzinger's "proportionate reasons". If someone who is strongly opposed to abortion believes that Candidate A, pro-choice, has a 50% chance of, let's say, preventing hundreds of thousands from dying of starvation in Africa, while Candidate B, pro-life, has a 0.01% chance of doing anything about abortion in America .... well, I think it's pretty fair to go with the guy who might make a difference on something that matters to you.
Of course, there are arguments to be made on the other side: maybe Candidate B won't make a difference this year. But perhaps your devotion now to this single issue will someday bear fruit. It's similar to my reasoning in voting for Libertarians even when I know they won't win the current election.
But not all rational people agree with me that voting Libertarian now helps to make the Libertarian Party more credible, and I don't think everyone would agree that making anti-abortion your top priority in picking a candidate will necessarily make a difference in abortion policy down the road.
I'm not impressed by John Kerry, I'll admit. But even if I opposed abortion, I can't see making that a reason to vote for George Bush.
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Re: Let the battle be joined
Date: 2004-09-22 09:52 pm (UTC)===|==============/ Level Head
Well, no
Date: 2004-09-23 05:23 am (UTC)But what I'm thinking is less "you can end-run around the law" and more that it would be easy to move out of a state if you didn't like the state's laws, just like Prester Scott doesn't have to live in a state with strict gun control laws.
By contrast, leaving the US for to take up residence in another first-world country (say, Britain, Australia, Canada, to pick English-speaking ones) requires a lot more effort, planning, luck, and talent. A homeless person can move from NY to Montana -- no authority is going to stop him. But if I want to move to Canada, I've got to do battle with their immigration laws first.
I hate immigration laws.
Re: Well, no
Date: 2004-09-23 09:36 am (UTC)For example, a state that has strict gun banning laws would be displeased with people simply being able to drive into the state on the Interstate with a load of weapons in the trunk or even guns in their pockets. Thus, checkpoints, IDs and such would be likely to come to pass.
Hard to say, obviously, but it seems likely to me. The clauses that require interstate reciprocality also depend to a large extend on Federal law trumping State law, it seems to me.
===|==============/ Level Head
Re: Well, no
Date: 2004-09-23 03:14 pm (UTC)I think that as long as the Constitution maintained its clauses on "no barrier to the free movement of people and goods", you could hand back a lot of other power to the states. For that matter, before Roe vs Wade, abortion was a matter of individual state law, if I recall correctly.
Even Canada/US customs is quite lax -- the difficulty isn't so much moving goods across the border as it is in preventing people from taking up residency in one country or the other.
Where I think you'll get into "immigration" problems is if one state chooses to set up atypically generous social programs. State-sponsored healthcare, for instance, or allowing longer stays or giving more money to people on unemployment or welfare. Tax-supported social programs are likely to attract, even if not actual leeches, the appearance of leeches. The people who are natives to the state will not want to share "their" social programs with those who "just got here". It's much the same resentment that people in the USA feel towards legal and illegal aliens who have their kids in public schools, or are receiving food stamps, or whathaveyou. All newcomers become suspected of being mooches -- and get treated as such.
This is one of the reasons I prefer extreme capitalism to extreme communism/socialism. It's much harder to "break" a capitalist system, because those who don't contribute to it also don't get anything out of it. Socialist and communist systems support people who do not contribute, so if they wind up with too many non-contributors, the system collapses. (And since they don't reward contributors over non-contributors, there's comparatively little incentive to be one of the former, either.)
In an extreme capitalist country, there shouldn't be a need for immigration controls, because there's nothing for the immigrant to "mooch" off of. That doesn't mean that extreme capitalism is the best system, but it would solve one problem.