yet more on voting and conscience

I suspect no one here disagrees with the statement of Cardinal George that if one professes the Catholic faith, one must evaluate her political choices in the light of that faith. But what I found missing in some of the responses critical to the Roche editorial is the issue of effectiveness of means, the discussion thread of last week that occasioned my posting of the editorial. Part of the evaluation of political choices in light of faith must be a consideration of how a candidate proposes to achieve the moral aims one supports.

None of the responses, for example, address Roches’s point that some of the highest rates of abortions are in countries where abortion is illegal. If that is true, how can one make the argument that faith compels one to vote for a candidate that proposes to make abortion illegal rather then seeking other means to attempt to bring an end to abortion?

Similarly, pointing to Kerry’s failure to vote for the partial-birth abortion ban (as one of piece cited in response did) ignores the valid point Kerrry made in the second debate. In that debate he expressed his opposition to partial-birth abortion but said he voted against the legislation because it did not contain even a narrowly defined exception for the physical health of the mother, something he believed to be required by the Constitutions. He is not alone in that belief - the three federal courts that have thus far addressed the statute have each held the statute unconstitutional on exactly those grounds.

The point here is not to defend the position of one candidate or the other, but merely to suggest that there is a real evaluative process here that can’t be short-circuited by simply looking at labels and who calls themselves pro-life the loudest.