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Every major candidate for the last 20 years (senate, congress, president….federal or state) has supported divorce laws, birth control, sterilization, etc.  Nobody had a problem voting for anyone then.  Why is abortion the ONLY litmus test for morality?

All the other candidates fail on a variety of topics.  Voting should’ve been off-limits for Trads starting 30 yrs ago. 

I know since I started voting, almost 40 years ago, the Republicans were always viewed as the pro family values side.  Although their personal lives were not keeping with Catholic morality, I never recalled them openly speaking or promoting agendas to legalize sins like sodomy, abortion, or drugs.  These laws were slowly implemented using the courts and that is why we would vote republican in hopes they would appoint conservative judges.  Since Bush senior, I have slowly realized that no matter who was in office, the country continues moving more liberal and the liberals of 20-30 years ago are now the new conservatives while the new liberals are openly demonic.  Eventually it became obvious to me, that the Hegelien dialectic was being employed to move the minds of the people to the left without them noticing.  Same tactic is in play in the church under the same liberal or conservative camps.  If you think about it, a Catholic cannot be liberal or conservative.

1 day left... after that, there will be no changing your mind. 

"Our Lady of Victory, Ark of the New Covenant, Co-Redemptrix, Mediatrix and Advocate, Pray for us."

Great post. I was thinking the same thing. Actually, there has never been a pristine candidate since this country’s foundation.

In constantly using strawmen, you're simply demonstrating intellectual dishonestly.  NOBODY says that we must have a "pristine" or "ideal" candidate.  NOBODY.  To refer to Trump, who is Pro Abortion, enthusiastically supporting abortion in 94% of all cases (abortion pill = 60%, and probably growing, various exceptions, abortions before 16 weeks, etc.) and also supports the Jew genocide in Gaza, as merely "not pristine" or "not ideal" represents a gross dishonesty.

This is not merely a NON-PRISTINE candidate, so please stop erecting fake strawmen to knock down.

2016 Trump I could see making a case for, before he backtracked on abortion and before the Gaza crisis developed.  In fact, I voted for him, knowing back then that he was FAR FROM "PRISTINE".  I was even open in 2020, with his support for sodomy being the greatest consideration in the double effect proportionality test.

But this 2024 Trump is absurd.  I fail to find any "good" when evaluating the good and bad effects of voting for him.  If there is any, it's very marginal and certainly does not outweigh his support for the abortion pill, women's "reprodutive rights", promise to fund IVF, etc.  It's NOT EVEN CLOSE this time, even though I stated in 2020 that it was borderline.  I can't even in the wildest stretch of my imagination justify a vote for Trump.

As I said, I commend you for upholding Catholic moral principles by stating that you were going on the basis of double effect ... but I disagree with you in your application.  I'm not going to argue with you too much on the latter, since the principle is generally more important than the application.  See, I don't think your vote counts anyway ... I'm morally certain of it ... but even more so if you're from a radically "Blue" state.

As I said, the problem with attempting to legitimize the notion of "lesser evil" is that you're finding Catholics now trying to apply it elsewhere.  We had one poster here who used language such as abortion being licit "in order to save the life of the mother".  No, it's never licit "in order to [anything]", as that's end justifies the means.  What you can do is to perform a procedure to save the life of the mother (without directly attacking the unborn child, which would turn it into end justifies the means) that has the unintended, unwanted, and unavoidable effect of having the life of the infant lost.  End Justifies the Means terms like "in order to save the life of the mother" have infected the minds even of Trad Catholics due to their having glommed onto various Prot "Pro Life" initiatves and buying into that rhethoric, not realizing that their princples are not Catholic, and that most of those Prots are wholeheartedly in favor of contraception.  In another thread, a different Trad Catholic failed the old classic "casuistic" test of whether you can throw one guy off the lifeboat to save the other nine.  So, the Catholic answer is no (because you can't do evil to prevent greater evil) ... whereas the Prot utilitarian would say yes, and even that you MUST throw the guy off, since otherwise you'd be guilty of "killing" the other 9.  We've had that argument made here before also, that by not taking a certain evil action, you're actually guilty of NOT preventing the other evil outcome.  As a result of this legitimization of "lesser evil" in the area of voting, we see Catholics being effected with utilitarian moral reasoning in other areas as well ... whereas the Catholic answers to these questions used to be crystal clear.