By “buckets”, I mean different sets of issues: foreign policy, health care, poverty, taxes, education, marriage and family law, abortion, judicial appointments, the environment, crime and punishment, etc.

I’m all for having a consistent ethic of life, but unless you’re claiming that ALL of these issues can be lumped together and are of equal import, and that there is a one and only Catholic answer that addresses each and every public policy issue, then of course there are “buckets”.

In the real world, those of us who don’t eschew voting recognize the balancing and picking and choosing that, unfortunately, must be done when choosing between the different policy priorities (i.e. “buckets”) of the candidates. Perhaps there are instances when the choices are so bad, that one must abstain from voting. But I consider that the exception rather than the rule.

And regarding the expansion of S-CHIP, the creation of new entitlements, or your view of single-payer ect., I don’t need to have an alternative to have a consistent ethic of life. It’s a public policy matter, one I am still studying. (And you misrepresent again with assigning tax credits as my solution – I don’t have one and have stated so clearly). If you have your policy preferences – great. But it is moral preening not only to fold those preferences into the consistent ethic of life – when one may legitimately believe in alternatives, so long as there is the goal and the striving for life and human dignity – but to keep suggesting that those who would oppose whatever your preferences are do not. Wrong. Health care is simply not cloning, euthanasia, and abortion, no matter the ways you state it is.

Second, you are getting into definitional issues. Torture is not something you can fit into a narrow category, it is a basic attack on human dignity, the treatment of the human being as a means to an end. Because we cannot draw a fine line, does that mean torture is of lesser importance? No. And by the way, there are also vigorous debates over what does and does not comprise euthanasia (most recently over patients in persistent vegetative states)– to deny the importance of euthanasia simply because of this narrow grey area would be very wrong– but that is what you seem to be arguing in the case of torture.

Proportionate reasons are indeed valid criteria for moral decision making, if and only if the issue is not intrinscially evil to begin with, otherwise you are engaging in proportionalism. But the acting of voting is not an intrinsically evil act, and if do not share the evil intent of a particular action, then you may indeed vote for a person who supports such an action without engaging in formal cooperation — given “proportionate reasons”. It’s basically an application of doubl effect reasoning. Of course, we can have a debate over whether there are compelling proportionate reasons to ever vote for a pro-abortion candidate, but what we cannot do is rule it out absolutely.

So you have the party of war and mammon vs. the party of death and moloch.

Where is the consistent ethic of life?

It’s nowhere

The fact of the matter is that we are asked in this country to choose between the party of war and mammon which would like to see thousands killed in its name every year and the party of death and moloch which would like to see millions killed in its name every year.

Given that the one thing the church seems to consistently say every year –that we ought to vote–then only one of these choices seems justifiable. And it can only be justifed under the priciple of double effect, where the action intended is not to vote to put the party of war and mammon into power but really only to prevent the party of death and moloch from taking power.

There are no “buckets.”