{"id":7241,"date":"2004-05-21T08:52:23","date_gmt":"2004-05-21T08:52:23","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/blog.beliefnet.com\/viamedia\/2004\/05\/moral_and_civil_law.html"},"modified":"2004-05-21T08:52:23","modified_gmt":"2004-05-21T08:52:23","slug":"moral_and_civil_law","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/viamedia\/2004\/05\/moral_and_civil_law.html","title":{"rendered":"Moral and Civil Law"},"content":{"rendered":"

A philosopher makes his case in The Tidings<\/a><\/p>\n

Laws against abortion are also unenforceable, because there would still be a large number of abortions if abortion were to be criminalized. Furthermore, abortions require proper medical attention. Our society does not want to take away the legal right to proper medical attention for women choosing to have abortions. Still, there are many people in America who consider abortions to be homicides. Can a politician or public servant declare that he or she is personally opposed to abortion, and yet say that they also think a woman has the right to choose to have an abortion? If so, a Catholic politician who is pro-choice can be a Catholic in good standing.<\/p>\n

As a public servant, the Catholic in public office has a duty to represent many people who are not Catholics. He or she must respect the consciences of their constituency. To support abortion rights as a politician is not to say that abortion is acceptable before the moral law. It is only to say that, legally, abortion is not a right that we are willing to take away from our citizens. It is presently the duty of our Catholic politicians to explain this distinction to the public. His or her own integrity and their honesty before the public would demand it. Taking such a position would require knowing St. Aquinas’ distinction between moral and civil law.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

A philosopher makes his case in The Tidings Laws against abortion are also unenforceable, because there would still be a large number of abortions if abortion were to be criminalized. Furthermore, abortions require proper medical attention. Our society does not want to take away the legal right to proper medical attention for women choosing to…<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":180,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-7241","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-news"],"yoast_head":"\nMoral and Civil Law - Via Media<\/title>\n<meta name=\"robots\" content=\"index, follow, max-snippet:-1, max-image-preview:large, max-video-preview:-1\" \/>\n<link rel=\"canonical\" href=\"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/viamedia\/2004\/05\/moral_and_civil_law.html\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:locale\" content=\"en_US\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:type\" content=\"article\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:title\" content=\"Moral and Civil Law - Via Media\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:description\" content=\"A philosopher makes his case in The Tidings Laws against abortion are also unenforceable, because there would still be a large number of abortions if abortion were to be criminalized. 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The Catholicism comes from her side. Amy grew up in a number of places - Indiana - Washington, DC - Lubbock Texas - Arlington, Virginia - DeKalb, Illinois - Lawrence, Kansas - and Knoxville, Tennessee, where the family settled in 1973. She attended Knoxville Catholic High School, then the University of Tennessee where she majored in history. She received an MA in Church History from Vanderbilt University, where she wrote a thesis on the changing role of women in 19th century American Protestantism, and the ways Scripture was used to justify those changes. She worked as as a teacher in Catholic high schools and a Parish Director of Religious Education and started writing for the diocesan press - the Florida Catholic - in 1988. Amy has written columns for Our Sunday Visitor and Catholic News Service at times over the past twenty years. Her articles have been published in venues ranging from Our Sunday Visitor to the New York Times to Commonweal. She has written 17 books. 18, if you included the as yet tragically unpublished novel. Amy has five children, ranging in age from 26 to 4 and was married to Michael Dubruiel, who died unexpectedly in February 2009. She lives in Birmingham, Alabama.","url":"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/viamedia\/author\/awelborn"}]}},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/viamedia\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/7241","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/viamedia\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/viamedia\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/viamedia\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/180"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/viamedia\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=7241"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/viamedia\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/7241\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/viamedia\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=7241"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/viamedia\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=7241"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/viamedia\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=7241"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}