RMF5630 said:
contrario said:
RMF5630 said:
Ghostrider said:
Curious what a politician should do. Obviously Roe v Wade brought this back up, but I often wondered what a politician should do. If you are a devout Catholic/Christian, and you personally are against abortion (or whatever is the subject), do you vote your faith and beliefs? Or should you separate that for what you think is best for the country? If you believe abortion is a sin, how would God look upon you if you voted to allow it if you thought it should be legal since everyone is not a Christian? I assume this drives down even to a voter....do you vote what you think is right for the country or your faith? Can or should the 2 be separated?
Just a ramble, but curious your thoughts....
Yes, personal and political should be separated..
Elected officials represent a set of people and their actions should be in line with making those peoples opportunities better.
Certainly politicians do more than that. As a non-believer myself, I still think politicians have a greater calling than just that.
Really? Besides representing the areas they serve?
Unlike Judges, they are not lifetime appointments and they can move from office to office. I believe representing is a wide swath of life from social equity to infrastructure to benefits to lobbying for Federal projects. Curious on view.
Judges yes. They have an explicit responsibility to interpret law, not make law.
Elected officials, sorta. We elected them for what (we think) they believe, so that they can best represent the majority views of their district. Yes, compromise to make sausage is necessary, but if they find their personal views consistently in significant conflict with the interests of the constituents, they should resign. (or be defeated at the ballot box).
Individuals, absolutely not. Always vote interests and conscience, tempered only by sensibility. Never vote on what one thinks is best for others. That presumes one knows what is best for others, which invariably is not the case.
There is nothing more curious than the vanity behind the notion that one becomes more noble when one takes a political belief that is in tension with, if not opposition to one's personal belief. I see that in liberal friends, one of whom literally works for a pro-life organization yet is pro-choice in voting patterns. These are the people who are quietly pro-LGBT woke right down to drag queen hour at elementary schools, yet are quite sensibly devout at church. It's as if their self esteem rises in direct proportion to how much ground they cede to forces explicitly hostile to their self-claimed values. Compromising with those who have much in common (classical liberalism) isn't good enough. They have to step into a world with people with whom they have little in common (progressivism) in order to be truly tolerant. And they invariably howl in outrage when someone points out the explicitly marxist dialectics of the systemic oppression narratives they have adopted.
