Tuesday, February 26, 2008

National Catholic Register: "McCain and Pro-Lifers"

An editorial in the March 3-9 issue of National Catholic Register:
John McCain hasn’t been very popular in some quarters. It seems that his party doesn’t like him nearly as much as Barack Obama and even Hillary Clinton are liked by their party. Conservative talk-show hosts have even complained loudly that they would vote for his opponent rather than him because it would be bad for conservatism to have him at the head of the GOP and running the country.

When facing a choice like this, it is refreshing to be Catholic. What’s good for conservatism or bad for conservatism doesn’t matter to us — “convervatism” is against Church teaching as often as it’s for it. As Catholics, we only care about the common good — and the pre-eminent issue affecting the common good is abortion.

***
Now, McCain doesn’t have a perfect pro-life voting record. The significance of that shouldn’t be diminished: He has said he is for federally funded embryonic stem-cell research. To be clear what that means: He wants to force us to pay lab scientists for research experiments in which they clone and kill human beings.

All the same, a vote for McCain would be better than a vote for either Barack Obama or Hillary Clinton.

***
All of this is not a done deal yet. Far from it. We started by saying that McCain isn’t as well-liked in his party as the leading Democrats are in theirs. But important research showed that, in the last election, many Democrats who didn’t particularly like President Bush voted for him anyway — because of his pro-life stand.


[More]
(emphasis added)

My Comments:
One of the reasons "conservatives" aren't particularly enamoured with McCain is the same reason Catholics should be leery of him: he hasn't been solid when it comes to issues of concern to social conservatives such as abortion, ESCR, and same-sex "marriage". However, other reasons for which he is persona non grata among many conservatives, such as his opposition to torture and his views on immigration, should stand him in good stead among Catholics.


Previous Pro Ecclesia posts on this subject:
Associated Press: Brownback Working To Persuade Christian Conservatives To McCain

How the Catholic Left Will Tackle McCain

Brownback: “Pro-Lifers Can Trust McCain”

National Catholic Register: "McCain Sits Down for Life"

National Catholic Register on Candidate Endorsements by Pro-Life Catholics

Sam Brownback Lobbying John McCain on Embryonic Stem Cell Research

Two Catholic Pro-Life Advocates Endorse John McCain's GOP Presidential Bid

McCain Gets Help from Brownback to Lure Catholics

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1 Comments:

At 2/26/2008 6:02 PM, Blogger Jeff Miller said...

The article is not quite accurate.

"For this reason, John McCain opposes the intentional creation of human embryos for research purposes. To that end, Senator McCain voted to ban the practice of "fetal farming," making it a federal crime for researchers to use cells or fetal tissue from an embryo created for research purposes. Furthermore, he voted to ban attempts to use or obtain human cells gestated in animals. Finally, John McCain strongly opposes human cloning and voted to ban the practice, and any related experimentation, under federal law."

So cloning or creating embryo's are out of the picture as far a McCain goes. So he is moving in the right direction, he just needs to say no in regards to using "leftover" embryo's from IVF.

 

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