Misplaced Guilt
It started innocently enough. My daughter was attending a retreat at the church. As a part of the retreat the participants were encouraged to attend reconciliation. Before you attend confession you go through an examination of conscience. That’s a rabbit hole by itself.
She got hung up on several things that alarmed her and I can definitely see why. One of them alarmed me. The examination of conscience said that voting for pro abortion candidates was a sin. So, in other words, voting for Democrats is a sin. Where can I even get started on that?
Okay, I know where. There is no such position politically. I’ve never heard of any politician being pro-abortion. I’ve never met a single person that would classify themselves as pro-abortion. I can’t say the viewpoint doesn’t exist because it is impossible to prove a negative. However, I can assert that the Catholic Church is distorting the truth in a document about truth. The irony is palpable.
The truth is that some people are pro-choice and some people are anti-choice. Anti-choice is a negative term, so we can use the pro-life substitute. The point is that they believe in the sanctity of life. That is not a wrong viewpoint. However, the pro-choice viewpoint is not the 180 degree opposite. It is a belief in privacy and the rights of self-determination over each individual’s body. Most pro-choice people are privately against abortion in most circumstances, but simply leave it to the individual to decide.
That might seem like splitting hairs, but the truth is far different and one of the reasons why the distortion is so hurtful. Truth is a four letter word, but one of the things that pro-choice politicians do is seek other ways to lower abortion numbers. If we follow the facts then we would see that abortion rates have been lower under Democratic presidents than under Republican presidents.
Admittedly, one cannot directly attribute any of that to a single policy or decision. It is impossible to definitively say that Democratic policies had anything to do with it. However, it should be telling that when you go back to the Reagan administration you see rates remaining level while they went down under every Democratic president.
There is a difference between posturing and actually doing something. The best way to limit the number of abortions is to limit the demand for abortions. You do that with contraception. You do that with sex education. You do that by financially assisting young families to take off the financial pressure. The church even had a program called “The Gabriel Project” that did this very thing.
However, all of this is just a cursory irritation. The real problem is calling voting for a person a sin. Voting is a choice. It’s a decision that calls for hard choices for anyone that’s a committed Catholic or Christian. Sure, it is hard reconciling our church’s teaching on abortion with a pro-choice position. It should be hard reconciling the church’s stance on life in general with a party pushing the death penalty, wars of choice, and are more supportive of police departments that kill so many unarmed suspects. Wouldn’t that also be a sin?
Wouldn’t it be a sin to support candidates that call for treating refugees as less than human? Wouldn’t it be a sin to support a candidate that places children in cages? Wouldn’t it be a sin to support a candidate that so cavalierly handled a pandemic that over 600,000 Americans died on his watch? We can play this tit for tat game forever as I’m sure Republicans reading this can rattle off a similar list of sins.
The overwhelming point here is that if voting for any particular candidate is a sin then voting for any candidate is a sin. They all commit sins. We all commit sins. We either weigh which sins we can live with or we turn that part of our brain off and pull the lever. Either way, I’m not taking responsibility for what a politician does. Either way I vote they will do something objectionable. I choose to vote for the candidates with the least objectionable positions. That’s what responsible citizens do.
Nick, following you and your daughter talking this over, where is she at this point with respect to her personal perspective and her relationship with the authority figures in the church?
1How about pro-death penalty candidates? Is it a sin to vote for them?
Or was God just kidding about that commandment? Great kidder, that Supreme Being person. (Example: when David slew Goliath, or when Sampson got excessive with the donkey’s jawbone, it apparently wasn’t considered a sin.)
2Being so-called “pro-life” is basically a syndrome indicating the person has such a fixation on abortion that it interferes with their ability to actually care for human life. It’s called aborticentrism.
One of the millions of examples of how it warps people’s judgment is the Italian Catholic saint, Giovanna Maria Baretta, who died some months after refusing to have an abortiion rather than save her own life.
Two of her three children attended the dedication in her honor of a stained glass window in a Toronto church. Why did not the third child attend? Because she was dead. Her mother had never considered that it might be better for her to be alive to tend to her daughter in her terminal illness rather than to risk dying from an abortion. She chose opposition to abortion over love for her child.
3Truth is a five letter word.
4RepubAnon – the actual translation is “thou shalt not commit murder”. Yet another mistranslation that the KJB authors committed. Right up there with “thou shalt not allow a witch to live” when the injunction was “thou shalt not allow a poisoner to live”.
A lot of evil done because a lot of self-righteous a**holes couldn’t be bothered asking a Jewish scholar what certain words translated as.
5This is the very reason why churches need their “Pay No Tax” card taken away.This kind of stuff smells strongly of GOP bovine excreta and meddling. One can only wonder if the GOP is filling the donation baskets for doing this.
6Reconciliation sounds a lot like indoctrination. And I don’t mean it in a good way. One reason I gave up on any church. Now this one sounds like an extension a political party and by association, an immoral leader.
7You’re trying to have a logical, rational discussion with irrational, –‘faith-based’– people. This is an impossibility, it cannot be done. Any related political considerations follow from that.
Advocating for “contraception” with them to avoid abortions is also pointless.
8The most dogmatic of them, which includes nearly all of the power-wielding hierarchy, believe that contraception is exactly equivalent to abortion [with a possible exception of the risky “rhythm method “]. In their views, basically, ‘bareback’ is the only holy way to ride.
“The best way to limit the number of abortions is to limit the demand for abortions. You do that with contraception.”
I’m assuming your daughter is either a teen or pre-teen. Girls her age shouldn’t have to be saddled with deciding whether voting for a Democrat is a sin. I thought religion was supposed to be a comfort. Silly me.
9I was in Catholic school in 1972. Two women I’d never seen before came into our classroom and told us we had to go home and tell our parents to vote for Nixon because George McGovern was “pro-abortion.”
I’ll never forget it as long as I live; it’s one of the reasons (among many) I renounced my baptism and joined a Unitarian Universalist church.
10The irony is that if you are a rightwingers and want to stop abortions from happening you’re far better off electing a “pro-abortion” Democratic candidate than a Republican. Abortions always go up during Republican rule due to their policies; it always goes down during Democratic rule.
It’s their choice.
11From Politico:
12THE NEW GOP — “An American Kingdom,” by WaPo’s Stephanie McCrummen, going long in Fort Worth: “A new and rapidly growing Christian movement is openly political, wants a nation under God’s authority, and is central to Donald Trump’s GOP.”
Umptydumpty,
Very good question. My daughter has never been shy about asking questions when she sees inconsistencies. I try to be honest with both the church’s and historical perspective about certain things. What makes it harder is that I’m s catechist (fancy word for Sunday school teacher). So, the pandemic and MAGA explosion has made it hard on the whole family in terms of maintaining faith.
I tend to take the same religious approach as I do politically. There are no perfect matches so you can choose to be dogmatic or pragmatic. It’s hard working with children and holding back but it forces me to keep up on church teachings and there’s a definite schism between Rome and the American church. I can only hope my daughter finds a path that makes sense to her.
13This is exactly why I am no longer a Roman Catholic. Several decades again, the Pope visit TX. In a stadium filled with college students he said, the Church is against contraception. That did it for me. Headed over to the Episcopal Church aka Catholic-lite – haha.
14I went to 2 different SB churches because of friends. The first one I stopped going to because the preacher advocated voting for Romney even tho he had preached emphatically previously about the non-Chrisitian aspects of Mormons. The second one’s asst pastor told me that he and the head preacher were going to vote for trump (2016).
15In both cases, anti-abortion and homosexuality are the main decision points; ie, they are the only sins that matter to many who call or consider themselves to be Christian.
The churches have, imo, many years to address this problem and, given the immense social and political power they had and still have maybe to a lesser degree, why is it that the fetus is the one most likely to suffer if allowed to birth?
So, Mr. Carraway, please answer me this: what is more important for one to be; ie, Catholic, Protestant, Christian? Or even agnostic, atheist?
Can this be answered without a commonly accepted definition/understanding for each term?
At what point does one consider changing churches/denominations?
You’re nicer than I am, because I stick with “anti-choice” to describe most of them.
As most are also pro-capital punishment, I believe that there’s no way most can be regarded as “pro-life”.
Choice for others is something they’re opposed to; death for others, not so much.
16Dems head for the Hill – 3 weeks in DC to wait it out the vote.
OT Happening Now:Texas Dems Flee State To Avoid Voting In Special
Legislative Session
Jul 12, 2021
Edit: At least 58 Texas House Democrats are fleeing to Washington, D.C. to avoid voting in the state’s special legislative session on Republican-backed voting bills. The lawmakers risk arrest by stopping the session, but are leaving the state to avoid state troopers and rangers.
video:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=I40bdaDmLYU
17The abortion thing has never been about saving lives. It is about controlling women.
18If voting for pro-choice Democrats were a sin according to the Roman Catholic Church, then voting for “pro-life” Republicans, who are perfectly willing to let people already born live in poverty, die of COVID and other preventable diseases, do without basic human rights, and have more babies than they can support, ought to be a sin far worse.
19The Catholic Church routinely fires unmarried pregnant women claiming a religious exemption from labor laws put in place to protect them from exactly this type of cruel action. The Church is not concerned about the life of the “unborn” in the womb when it takes away the income and medical coverage of the mother.
The Church does a lot of hand wringing about protecting the “innocent” but to treat pregnant women in this manner shows their contempt and disdain for both mother and child.
20The weird thing for me has always been that the Bible mentions abortion nowhere, and male homosexuality only in Leviticus (along with injunctions against shrimp, pork, and wearing two different kinds of fabric together). As a Christian, you’d think these folks would focus on the New Testament, which emphasizes feeding the hungry, clothing the naked, caring for widows and orphans,…
21@ Bob Boland: Yes, I’ve always been puzzled by folks claiming that one of the many English translations of the Latin version of the Greek version of the Aramaic transcription of the accounts passed down by oral tradition of the events described in the Old and New Testaments.
Given that the catchphrase “Catch the Pepsi Spirit” was translated into Chinese as “Pepsi will bring your ancestors back from the dead” – or the Electrolux vacuum commercials proudly complaining that “nothing sucks like an Electrolux”, I feel their faith is misplaced…
22That reconciliation (aka confession) thing never made sense to me. I questioned my parents why I had to tell some strange man in a dark box what I’d done wrong- what was the point of a middle man? I was thinking priests just had a morbid fascination with other people’s business. Maybe I wasn’t so far off?
23Van Herdof,
This is a lengthy discussion that likely would take another full post. Given that my answer here will likely be simplistic and trite. My answer in general is that people should go where they are fed. Beyond that it’s a bunch of noise.
24This would be hilarious if it wasn’t so ridiculously tragic. It begins by discussing the church’s rules about reconciling your conscience to see if you are fit to take part in the cannibalistic sacrificial rite of consuming the flesh and blood of a man-god. It then proceeds with an attempt to apply logic and reasoned arguments in the real world to the Rube Goldbergesque mechanisms of Christian mythology that arose from animal sacrifice of Judaic mythology. How do you reconcile the utter nonsense of applying logic to the mumbo-jumbo you apparently believe and practice? Could you please cease your pointless, long-winded discussions about your personal invisible sky wizard?
25RepubAnon @ 22:
26That was inspirational.
Seriously.
If Reg had taken a firmer hand at the meeting of People’s Front of Judea, and settled once and for all the Aramaic spelling of Aughhhh vs. Aaargh, so much strife could’ve been avoided with regards to maps that were all smudged up and hard to read.
Get out of *religion* and live your life properly .
27Do you really believe that your church sees the “one true god” and understands what she wants of man? Really? And that your holy book is actually the “word pf god”? And that you should use it as a guidepost for how to live? Unpack this. Gods are created by man. “Holy” texts are written by man. Good people create generous and kind gods. Angry damaged people create vengeful gods. If you must belong to a church, pick one that required the least mental gymnastics to accommodate to your values and beliefs. If you think people who are gay are perfectly fine people (ie. not sinners damned to hell), do NOT pick the Catholic Church. See? Simple.
28