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Comment by ocdtrekkie | Hacker News Reader

This is because the party will ostracize you if you don't conform. You can't survive in a liberal environment if you don't support abortion and you can't survive in a conservative environment if you support gun control.

Your friends will argue with you, you'll be surrounded by memes making fun of people who believe what you do. There's incredible social forces to conform to the exact set of beliefs espoused by political parties, which are mostly set by corporate interests.

It's a huge part of what the Republican party has struggled with: There's both the clear vision of conservative values and ideals... and Donald Trump. You can practically see on people's faces trying to reconcile their beliefs with party platform. And there's a massive amount of pressure to stay in line with everyone else.

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The core disagreements seem more moralistic and personal security issues rather than corporate pandering. The gun manufacturing industry is small and weakly compared to the real players--healthcare, finance, tech, MIC. While the left loves to paint the NRA as evil--and it is a bit, and grossly mismanaged--it is at its core a grassroots organization; rural people and some others will not consent to giving up 2A or being disarmed, full stop. Likewise there are no shadowy "Big Abortion" interests propping up that side of things, nor am I able to think of anyone poised to profit by forbidding it.

That said, the no-compromise issues really do have the effect of shoving all the important stuff into the background...

> Likewise there are no shadowy "Big Abortion" interests propping up that side of things, nor am I able to think of anyone poised to profit by forbidding it.

In fact, there are numerous pro-life groups who directly benefit from moving the ball around but never actually winning the game.

The same is true of race relations organizations, animal cruelty activists, the NRA, etc. With all of these, the spoken platform may or may not be a good thing, but the largest stakeholders would lose tremendous money and influence if they ever actually won.

You're describing pretty standard "mission creep." I.e. "if the problem this organization exists to address is fixed, fundraising efforts stop and staff must be fired. But we don't want to fire people, so we must perpetually move the goalposts to keep the momentum going." MADD is the classic example here.

> benefit from moving the ball around but never actually winning the game.

This is exactly how you win elections. If you gain enough single-issue voters you never need to debate the complex issues that might split your base.

It's important to portray the situation as if they are losing. Pro-Choice is a great example. Abortion-right are frequently portrayed as "under attack and imminently about to be destroyed" despite almost every SCOTUS judge publicly saying it's "settled law".

It is a political form of George Orwell's endless war, and the ultimate distraction.

Corporations don't need to fund them directly as politicians are happy to play this game so that corporations can fund THEM directly since the political attention is placed elsewhere.

> rural people and some others will not consent to giving up 2A or being disarmed, full stop.

I read some “gun people” discussing this. An argument was that they were not single issue voters, but rather they were a foundational issue voters.

That all rights (to him/them) are supported by the idea the public is a counter force to the government. Fundamental before all other issues because is the prevention of the gov backtracking or infringing on anything “down stream”. So...

That if a politician supported the disarming of civilians that was indeed a full stop to other thoughts on abortion or the foreign trade or etc.

It was a good read really, because calling them a single issue voter may give the wrong impression, which is good for no one coming to the table on other issues.

None of them have tanks, it's not a foundational issue, it's identity politics.

We just had a bunch of yokels with small arms nearly overthrow the government.

That's not a particularly apt description of what happened.

(they weren't yokels, they weren't particularly armed, they were aligned with officials, etc.)

It will take some time yet to unravel what happened, and more importantly, who permitted it to happen that way. Their arms didn't enter into the equation, and frankly it is shocking that violent insurrectionists at the Capitol weren't met by a hail of rubber bullets or worse.

"and frankly it is shocking that violent insurrectionists at the Capitol weren't met by a hail of rubber bullets or worse."

For the cynics and BLM activists and more, this is seen as obvious (no rubber bullets, no real resistance). The police forces will tear gas (illegal in warfare), rubber bullet, etc. black lives matter protestors, but won't dare go against white protestors / insurrectionists. We still have a 'uge race issue here. We just cover it up with policies. In reality (aka both insurrection and protests) we clearly see the two groups treated completely different.

A women was shot in the neck and killed. I am sure she would have preferred the tear gas or rubber bullets.

“Nearly overthrow the government” is a bit of an exaggeration.

“Nearly alter the executive succession contrary to the election results by application of violence to high government officials”, would be more technically accurate.

The photos/videos of people milling about after members and staffers narrowly escaped those in the crowd clearly intending violence combined with a rather intense propaganda effort aimed at minimizing the autocoup attempt have effectively spread a false narrative of the attack, though.

Well watch this and come back and say that with a straight face.

https://twitter.com/HeathMayo/status/1349944401179496449

Go tell that to the Afghans and Iraqis that don’t have tanks either.

I'm not making an argument about the effectiveness of small arms, I'm saying if you punt on tanks, you aren't actually an absolutist about the right to bear arms.

Ahh got it sorry, I misread your comment. My apologies!

> I'm saying if you punt on tanks, you aren't actually an absolutist about the right to bear arms.

Black's Law Dictionary defines the word arms as "anything that a man wears for his defense, or takes in his hands as a weapon."

The word "arms" in the right to keep and bear arms explicitly meant weapons that could be carried by a single infantryman. It was never about (and still isn't about) tanks, or cannon, or warships, or nukes. So no, you don't have to be committed to allowing tanks to be fully keen on the right to keep and bear arms.

(if you still doubt this, focus on the word "bear". You can't "bear" a tank, if anything a tank bears you.)

( https://www.buckeyefirearms.org/iii-what-arms-meant-circa-17... )

That said, it actually happens to be totally legal for private citizens to own a tank in most countries, including the US. They're expensive, get terrible gas mileage, probably not street-legal to drive on the freeway, unlikely to fit in your garage and the neighbors are bound to complain if you fire the main gun...but you totally could own one (and drive it around your own private property) if so inclined.

Is it your position that you could purchase and possess shells for your main battle tank without uncomfortable inquiries by BATF?

You could register the gun and make it fully legal to use under the NFA in which case yes, you could possess shells and even fire them. There's paperwork, but it's possible and some people do it. Um, here:

https://www.dailydot.com/unclick/operational-tank-for-sale-a...

(Making, say, a 50 caliber gun legal under the NFA is indeed somewhat more onerous than owning a shotgun. And a gun rights advocate certainly could care about trying to make it less so but they're not required to care about it because - as I said above - a tank doesn't count as "arms".)

> That said, it actually happens to be totally legal for private citizens to own a tank in most countries, including the US.

Case in point: A few years ago I had a company outing to go play tank paintball. This was in the UK.

It's excellent that your post arguing that, sure they are absolutists, is full of word parsing and technicalities.

Even say free speech absolutists don’t pretend that the interpretative process doesn’t matter. Pretty much everyone recognizes say that fraud was never protected as free speech.

Actually it may also be about warships; the US has language related to the issuing of letters of marque embedded within the Constitution, and issued them from the nation's creation up through the civil war.

I don't think that any American civilians own a working MANPADS, regardless of willingness to undergo background checks or pay for tax stamps. And that's explicitly designed for a single infantryman. I'm not well versed in the constitutional law but there seems to be a principle that extremely dangerous weapons will not be owned by civilians in the US, regardless of historical precedents, textualism, originalism, or any other contrary principles.

I'm also curious about the constitutional ramifications of the ban on civilian ownership of machine guns manufactured after 1986. Could any class of small arms be gradually banned by specifying a date of manufacture cutoff for legality in a similar way? Seems contrary to a plain reading of the 2a to phase out weapons this way but I know that my layman's plain reading is worth very little here.

Why stop at tanks in your argument? What about nuclear weapons?

Tanks are fully legal to own. So are the cannons. Not thinking a tank is a good buy doesn’t make a gun rights advocate any less of a foundation issues voter.

I’m pretty sure you dismissing the conversation I reported as “identity politics” is exactly what the argument was warning against; people misreading opponents of gun control as some surface level thing that can be hand waved away.

Also, “identity politics” isn’t right. No one is born a gun owner, nor can you identify one in a line up or nod to one walking down the street unless they want you to know they are “one of us”. Nor does owning a gun preclude you from another group like being white or black might, although there is a long running AK vs AR debate, but I think that’s pretty much been settled!

Tanks that are capable of firing are not usually legal to own - much like most military equipment. Obviously, it is state dependent.

But I agree there is a foundational element to the 2nd amendment (which is why they passed it 2nd), and it is not (only) identity politics.

People brought pipe bombs to the US capitol.

Point of order - there are a fair number of us in the US that do in fact own tanks.

If you expand the definition of “tanks” to the commonly used one of “armored vehicles”... then there are a lot more than you’d likely expect.

> This is because the party will ostracize you if you don't conform.

Is it? When I debate some partisans, I can't find bedrock logic under their opinions. It's like the opinions are pointers to beliefs they receive from an authority figure.

They are unconvinceable--because the decision maker isn't in the room.

I agree. Many political topics are very complex, and it is hard to independently form opinions on them. Humans rely on fallacious shortcuts all the time when making decisions, otherwise we’d be paralyzed. We would see people switching their views even without social pressures.

A book I always recommend on this topic is by Jonathan Haidt "The Righteous Mind: Why Good People Are Divided by Politics and Religion"

Also, there is a page in there where Haidt hypothesized that the low agreeableness/asperger personality people actually do better in the startup world precisely because they don't fear being ostracized and thus don't engage in the groupthink showcased in the article. Peter Thiel type people. Of course that's hard to really test one way or another, but the narrative fits...

Check out this book on the two major systems of thought (in the US):

* https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Moral_Politics_(book)

Probably also worth nothing that our political view point(s) may, to a certain extent, be biologically determined:

> Studies have found that subjects with conservative political views have larger amygdalae and are more prone to feeling disgust. Liberals have larger volume of grey matter in the anterior cingulate cortex and are better at detecting errors in recurring patterns. Conservatives have a stronger sympathetic nervous system response to threatening images and are more likely to interpret ambiguous facial expressions as threatening. In general, conservatives are more likely to report larger social networks, more happiness and better self-esteem than liberals. Liberals are more likely to report greater emotional distress, relationship dissatisfaction and experiential hardship and are more open to experience and tolerate uncertainty and disorder better.

* https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Biology_and_political_orientat...

I normally avoid these political threads on HN, so made another throwaway.

I and friends have for a few years discussed the idea of freezing all gun and abortion laws in place for 20 years as a means to declawing the US parties' stranglehold on dialogue.

Thats a real interesting thought, it really is issues like these that basically make every other actual issue fade into the background fir many voters. Of course, good luck getting it passed...

Points for genuine effort. Nice idea. It is very compelling.

Sans wedge issues, there is a solid American consensus out there and it trends populist, and does so for simple economic reasons.

I agree, it’s a fun idea.

Entirely entirely unrealistic and would go nowhere. Both sides love their wedges. They campaign on they both saber rattle with, they make their careers on them. When they have a chance to make movement, they usually don’t, if they fixed the issue it wouldn’t raise money anymore.

Look how many people already say there is a UniParty when looking at pretty shitty things like both sides voting for Iraq war, Patriot Act, meager amounts of citizen Covid relief compared to corporate interests... so take away the wedge issues and the two parties may look far more similar.

I’d like to see viable third and fourth party options. No decent person can be entirely red or blue.

Uniparty is a bit over the top for me, but Washington Economic Consensus is near spot on. That said, you are plenty close to the mark. Subtract the wedges and it is awful bland.

I have quit responding to labels directly and nearly always move to clarity first and foremost.

Uniparty?

Usually this is met with either righteous indignation, or a hard pass, or agreement of some kind.

When I ask, "how so?", I tend to understand the other person better and have an opportunity to have a respectable, sometimes productive dialog.

Re: more parties

I agree with you. Sadly, I do not believe those party options make much sense in our current system.

And it is the system, meaning changing it will require similar effort as it does to get anything else done, so...

I feel factions, blocs, caucuses can serve a similar role. On the right, the Tea Party was quite effective. Not endorsement, just noting dynamics that apply here.

The economic left is contemplating similar ways and means.

The other tool we do have is collective action. Class type moves that can deliver very significant incentive to change.

I don’t mean to diminish the importance of “wedge” issues—but the terminology is useful for thinking about the nature of the polity. There is a center of political gravity in the country that’s somewhat left of center on economic issues, and somewhat right of center on social issues (I.e., as you say, populist): https://s.wsj.net/public/resources/images/BN-UO873_BUCKLE_8H...

I have been framing things in terms of priorities to get at this kind of thing.

Ie: Let's make sure everyone sees the doctor without going bankrupt or being denied for lack of money

, or

relitigate the SCOTUS decision gun ownership being an individual right, and like all rights, is not absolute, subject to reasonable regulation.

Pick one.

And one is all we get due to how politics currently works in our US system. As for changing it? Same priority discussion.

Without our people being able to express consensus in a potent way, we basically ignore them right now. No judgement there, just hard reality.

How do we want to play it then?

So far, these kinds of conversations have been super interesting! They often go pretty well. The core idea is being for something we have majority consensus on rather than burn time on things we don't.

Expressing all this stuff in terms of priorities could be a way to get past how toxic it all is.

What I will say is quid pro, pro. Get health care sorted and we all can have a much lower cost, lower risk conversation about guns...

> There is a center of political gravity in the country that’s somewhat left of center on economic issues, and somewhat right of center on social issues,

That center is always moving: over the last 30 years, the economic center has moved rightward (see Bill Clinton and the "Third Way", or the tax rate of the top bracket), while the social center has moved leftwards (see public opinion of interracial marriages and LGBTQ unions). On both axes, the US center is right of center, compared to the rest of the world.

Is that even possible without a constitutional amendment?

It's hardly possible with one, creating a an amendment that is somehow immune to further amendment for 20 years and constrains state's abilities to change their laws would be unlike any other amendment ever passed.

I still love the idea a little bit, federal abortion and gun laws have moved only incrementally in the last 20 years and yet they've prevented coalitions surrounding so many other pressing issues from forming.

In ancient Athens they used to try to make laws like that. They would create a penalty for bringing up certain ideas like melting down golden statues in their temples for money or proposing ideas that disasterously failed in the past. These laws had a tendency to be broken though.

That's been tried before with intensely-debated political issues in the United States; didn't turn out too well:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gag_rule_(United_States)

What if they just find new wedge issues? eg. gendered bathrooms

You still need to account for the leap from party to community. Unless you are active in politics in a capacity that needs party support (such as running for office), you don't really care if the party ostrizes you, as long as the community does not.

I've regularly found both issues retaining liberal and conservative friends because I don't fully support the party platform of either. As long as sharing political memes of your party to the community continues, many people are outright pushing away anyone in the middle.

Bear in mind, many people's politics and values have become very aligned: If you don't support someone's views on identity issues, for instance, they may not feel they can be friends with you anymore. If you consider abortion to be literal murder, the color it places on someone who supports or has had an abortion, may make friendship similarly challenging.

You really hit the nail on the head. I've had issues even outside of politics. For whatever reason, if you don't conform to certain beliefs in a group, other members will sooner or later think you're the nail and they're the hammer.

Nobody (ed: I mean, "few people", as of course there are non-zero people who believe this) believes abortion is literal murder. They might say they do, but if there were buildings where actual literal murder were happening it wouldn't be long before people would destroy those places. Folks would lynch abortion providers -- not one or two, but en masse. Plenty of conservative women get abortions. If it were the type of thing that led to social ostracization as a general rule, you'd see articles being written about it. It doesn't.

That's actually kind of the point of this article, as I read it: political opinions are very malleable. Tribal identification is one mechanism by which they can be changed. If the tribe decides we're cutting taxes, we change our opinion to favor cutting taxes. If the tribe decides that trans identity is extremely important, we do too. Not because of any overt pressure but simply because of natural herd and instincts.

But self-interest is an even stronger hammer with which to shape political opinions. If it is strongly in my economic best interest to get an abortion, there's a pretty decent chance I'm gonna finagle my way to believing it's OK -- at least for me -- even if I "thought it was literal murder" before. It's easy enough to do because abortion has none of the physical hallmarks of literal murder (you know, struggling, screaming victims, blood everywhere, etc.) and society clearly treats it as a different thing, no matter where in the U.S. you live. I have noticed a similar pattern whereby rich liberal friends are slightly less in favor of eating the rich than poor liberal friends, even though the Twitter crowd has pretty much decided where they stand on this issue. Self-interest is a powerful motivator! Us rich folks like to talk about all the entitlements we support but we get a little less comfortable when it comes time to talk about who pays for them.

This is just a general rule, it doesn't apply universally by any means. Even this article suggested that there's just a 15% shift in personal opinion directly after a tribe opinion change. But I guess the change grows over time too. I hadn't heard a damn thing about illegal immigrants from my conservative father until about 2016. Now sometimes it seems like every third article he sends me is on that subject.

Hey, you know another interesting thing about this: everyone hates literal murder, but somehow murderers families often -- not always, but often -- come around to forgiving them. Sometimes they forgive the murderer so hard that they come to court to support them before they're even convicted, pay for lawyers, etc. You'd almost never do that for someone who wasn't family. Self-interest, family, and tribe are extremely powerful mutators of political and even moral opinion!

> Nobody believes abortion is literal murder

Sure people do. There are plenty of us. Even those of us who are atheist and/or pro-LGBT. It doesn’t strictly align with parties; for instance my own views are rather liberal except for this particular issue.

> Folks would lynch abortion providers -- not one or two, but en masse

This did not happen for a lot of other viewpoints throughout history that we now consider illegal and unthinkable. Those of us who are anti-abortion consider abortion to be much the same—it will take a long time to change society’s opinion but violence is not the answer to solving the problem.

>They might say they do, but if there were buildings where actual literal murder were happening it wouldn't be long before people would destroy those places.

What if it's state sanctioned? Where were all the people destroying nazi concentration camps?

Well, the Nazi concentration camps were guarded by lots of soldiers with many guns, so that's one thing. My understanding also is that people had largely changed their opinions on whether killing Jews was actual murder by the time Hitler got around to setting up his final solution. For example, there was never a point, during Hitler's reign, where a political opposition strongly opposed to killing Jews controlled all branches of the government. (This did happen with the Republicans in 2016, and they did not stop abortion at that time, though it was within their power to do so.)

I would also just note that there are policies that have been clearly demonstrated to reduce the number of abortions, but they require a small amount of spending. I struggle to believe that someone who believes abortion is literal murder would shrink from providing e.g. free contraceptives, given the alternative. Yet Republicans tend to be opposed to these things, certainly at the legislative level. The behavior and voting patterns just don't support the claim, IMO.

It was not within Republicans’ power to stop abortion so long as Roe v. Wade is on the books. And a significant fraction of Republicans don’t oppose abortion (just as a significant fraction of Democrats do).

Packing the court and organizing a case to arrive at the correct time would seem to have been an option to do just that. Although I'm not sure the moderate Republicans could have been convinced (maybe just moderate Republicans don't believe it's murder?). So you may have me there.

Packing the court would destroy it and the country, and even if you believed abortion was murder you’d have to balance it against the suffering caused by the destruction of the rule of law.

  (This did happen with the Republicans in 2016

No, Obama remained President throughout 2016.

Republicans controlled Congress and held the Presidency for various times from 2001-2006.

Many people absolutely do believe that abortion is state-sanctioned murder and in fact there have been terror attacks against providers [1]. The ones that aren’t carrying out terrorism like this still believe that clinics and doctors are complicit in murder, they’re just smart enough to know that reacting with violence would not work to their benefit and/or just aren’t unhinged enough to do it.

[1] https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Anti-abortion_violence

> Nobody believes abortion is literal murder. They might say they do, but if there were buildings where actual literal murder were happening it wouldn't be long before people would destroy those places

The number of clinic bombings and assassinations of abortion providers in the US particularly given how few there are in slem areas demonstrates that enough people believe it to feel compelled to act.

Worth pointing out that the political spectrum isn’t a line with democrats on one extreme and republicans on the other, it stretches much further on either side and probably has more dimensions. I’d put myself much further left than the establishment democrat platform.

But your main point is right, that things like memes often serve to push people away if you’re not already in the in-group.

Edited to add a space

> You can't survive in a liberal environment if you don't support abortion and you can't survive in a conservative environment if you support gun control.

Would that explain why Catholics, who, ah, generally don't support abortion, are split ~50/50 between blue and red? [1]

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Catholic_Church_and_politics_i...

It's more complex than that but does work with the parent's comment. The official policy of the Catholic Church is that abortion is a terrible sin. Many other (but obviously not all) Christian churches have the same views. That does not mean that individual Catholics or their Christian brothers and sisters agree with the views of their churches on abortion or don't always agree that their religious views should be imposed on all of society. Abortion, while an important issue, is just one of thousands that church dogma preaches and there is no party that matches up to any of them completely. Some members of the church simply see the balance of other issues as being greater than the issue of abortion.

So, you are saying that when one social group you belong to (the church) has an inconsistent belief system with another social group you belong to (loose party affiliation), you pick the one that suits your personal opinion on other issues.

This begs the question - why do people pick and choose their religious dogma, but not their political dogma?

I feel that the answer to this question is 'The world is a little bit more complicated than the parent poster claims.' These claims have little predictive, or explanatory power, given this rather prominent counter-example.

Probably because most people don't pick what church they belong to; their parents do that for them. While people do convert between religions, most will stay with what they grew up with and try to make things work within that framework. Sometimes that's not possible so they pick one or the other of their religion or their political ideology. Religion doesn't always lose out and my gut instinct is that it wins out more than politics does but that's more difficult to see since membership and public interaction for religion works differently than it does for political parties.

People pick and choose both. What I have seen is that people generally start with what their parents taught them, but it's not that uncommon for them to end up completely different. And it changes over time. I was very much a "D" voter when I was young (as my parents were) but mostly vote "R" now. I've never been religous though (neither were my parents).

> This begs the question - why do people pick and choose their religious dogma, but not their political dogma?

Interesting possibility: Religion is a protected class, politics isn't. So people fear viewpoint discrimination (i.e. getting canceled) for diverging from the dominant political party, because that isn't protected, but not for diverging from any given religious doctrine, because that is protected.

Maybe we just need to declare the political parties to be religions. In a way they are. And it's in the same way that caused religions to be protected to begin with, isn't it?

California has some pieces of political affiliation carved out as a protected class.

It feels risky to me. Coupled to the protection of freedom of religion in the US is both the interpretation of the First Amendment and the political custom that there be a "high wall" between religion and politics. In practice, this isn't always true, but the principle serves as a counterweight to people's faith not being formally, structurally questionable.

For obvious reasons, no such high wall can exist between people's politics and politics, so making political affiliation a protected class risks giving protection of the law to things that society will greatly suffer under if they are protected (imagine if he SPLC couldn't fire a staffer who's an active Klansman).

> For obvious reasons, no such high wall can exist between people's politics and politics

I don't know if I buy it, because the purpose of the wall is to constrain people from being punished for their beliefs, which you could do just as well with politics. That isn't the same as having their beliefs questioned in a public debate -- which we already do with religion. Questioning isn't punishment. Getting fired is punishment.

> imagine if he SPLC couldn't fire a staffer who's an active Klansman

The strongest objection to a Klansman is that they commit acts of violence. But violence isn't protected speech. If they're committing acts of violence, fire them.

Whereas if your only objection is that they go home and give sermons against interracial marriage while wearing a stupid hat, isn't that kind of the point?

How is it any different than Planned Parenthood can't fire a Catholic for opposing abortion outside of work?

The larger concern is they use SPLC's money to pay for venues for those sermons, or direct SPLC's resources away from SPLC's goals because those goals are counter to the individual's politics.

Companies ought to have the right to fire people acting counter to their goals.

It's not "SPLC's money" once they've paid it to someone else for labor, any more than it was Planned Parenthood's money when a Catholic donates it to a church that gives sermons against abortion.

> This begs the question - why do people pick and choose their religious dogma, but not their political dogma?

Well, in a multiparty democracy (which was where the study happened; if you didn't know that going in to the article, the reference to multiple center-right parties should be a pretty big giveaway) if you dissent from a party on an issue of any salience, there's a pretty good chance there is another party available that is just like that one, except for it's view on the issue you dissent on. So, if the party fails to convince you when it changes, you stop being a party member rather than become a dissenter on the one issue.

That's less true for religions (especially religions with certain features: you aren't going to find a Church like the Roman Catholic Church including it's view of the papacy and it's historical descent, but differing on the moral parameters of abortion.)

It's also less true of parties in a system which isn't a robust multiparty democracy, which is why both major parties in the US system are big tent parties with stark internal divisions that sometimes try to paper over them to present a united front.

You can be culturally catholic and support abortion. There’s even atheist catolics.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Christian_atheism

>You can be culturally catholic and support abortion.

No actually, you can't. You can fit the broader definition of Christian but if you hold these views and profess to be a Catholic, you are in fact a heretic and can be excommunicated[1]. I see this fiction posted again and again on HN, and while it's not my intention to support or oppose the Church's viewpoint on this people should be educated and aware that they can't claim to be certain things if they aren't them.

[1] https://www.vatican.va/archive/cod-iuris-canonici/eng/docume...

This is for having an abortion, not supporting them. The later group is much larger than the former.

This is technically correct (the best kind of correct! ;) ).

In practice, there's a wide gulf between what the Church formally establishes as dogma and the adherence of individual Catholics. It's generally resolved as the Church holding the door open for forgiveness through a person's entire life, as long as penitence is a possibility. It's rare for the Church to excommunicate an individual Catholic (or even deprive them of communion) even for very public statements regarding their support of abortion.

Sometimes, the door is held open so long the Church's view on the topic changes and forgiveness is no longer needed to align the practitioner with the Church's stance.

You don't even have to go to church to be culturally a catholic.

> if you hold these views and profess to be a Catholic, you are in fact a heretic and can be excommunicated

No, you can't, and nothing at your link supports your claim. Support for legal abortion (or the non-criminalization of anything; criminalization is not symmetric and there are cases where this wouldn't be the case for supporting criminalization of an act) is, where not obligatory, inherently a prudential judgement as criminalization always inflicts harm intentionally.

Moral support for abortion would be dissent from authoritative teaching, which is of a more serious (both doctrinally and in canon law) character, but that's an intensely different thing.

> You can be culturally catholic and support abortion

You can be religiously Catholic and support legal abortion, and do so without dissenting on any essential doctrine (though you’d be in tension with how the heirarchy tends to apply certain important doctrines.)

If you morally support abortion, you'd be in dissent, but doctrinal dissent isn't really unheard of among Catholics (even within the heirarchy.)

I would guess most blue catholics who don't support abortion either avoid the topic or at least don't admit to their opinion to their blue friends.

My mother is very anti-abortion while also being a die hard straight ticket Democrat. Not all Catholics in her social circle are the same but many are. I can't say she has a political social circle, so maybe she is able to balance her beliefs because she isn't called on them. The issues her and her friends care about tend to be about extending entitlement programs, public education, assistance to immigrants, and things of a similar nature. For these the Democrats are much more inline with their views than Republicans, which is probably how she and other Catholics like her justify supporting the pro-choice political party despite being strongly against abortion.

Two things come to mind. First (and I don't know how true it is), some contemporary Catholics are not hard-line anti-abortion; second, at the end of the day you usually have a choice of D or R. You go with what lines up best. Voting for either one does not mean you lockstep agree with their position on every issue.

A large portion of Catholics (about 35%) are Latino, who are often more socially conservative.

The European Catholics (Primarily Irish, Italian, German ancestry) are often more liberal, perhaps because historically they've lived in the urban North East.

As a catholic, I would say that the catholic church has done a pretty decent job of not taking sides in politics. (Probably so as to not push anyone away from church, they dont suck people in and have growing memberships like some other denominations ). I have friends and extended family in those “newer hyper Christian” churches, and they all somehow manage to attach way more identity into their church life than any catholics I know. As well as pushing their beliefs on other people. Whereas the catholic view as I have experienced it is “you're different? Thats cool, lets be nice”. Theyre still super pro life, but i havent heard anything that makes me think the overarching catholic political stance is a one issue vote.

> As a catholic, I would say that the catholic church has done a pretty decent job of not taking sides in politics.

Have you not seen the current Pope? Far more injecting in politics than the previous. Obvious in a historical perspective, this is still very hands off for the church.

I believe this view is due to social media. The pope isn’t that extreme, our world is

For a Catholic, supporting abortion by knowingly voting for it is "formal cooperation"[1] with the taking of innocent human being's lives. This is why by Canon law, not that it's always followed, politicians who support abortion should not be given communion: they are manifestly in a state of mortal sin and giving them communion is desecrating the Eucharist and causing scandal[2]. Because of this, well catechized Catholics will oppose abortion. That said, it's unproductive to be a jerk about it and the correct response for those who don't have pastoral responsibility for the individuals in question is just to pray that they realize their error and repent.

[1] https://www.consciencelaws.org/religion/religion002.aspx

[2] In this context, by scandal Catholics mean action that invites others to sin.

While what you say is true, what im trying to say is that my experience has been that most catholics (that i know anyway) are not “well catechized”, the church i go go has not been pressing your points, and other denominations seem to be more focused (than the catholic church) on pressing their religion into political votes and action these days.

> Would that explain why Catholics, who, ah, generally don't support abortion, are split ~50/50 between blue and red?

American Catholics support legal abortion at pretty similar rates to the general population. [0] The Church heirarchy may not, but that’s not the population of interest.

[0] https://www.pewresearch.org/fact-tank/2020/10/20/8-key-findi...

The Southern Baptist Convention was pro-abortion for a time. Things can change.

That's a different phenom entirely.

People flip flop on policies because they are part of social groups, not coherent ideologies. They don't perceive themselves as flip flopping, because of course they have not changed groups.

If a 'strong' leader of a group such as the President, characterizes something as positive, followers will buy it.

Especially when there is a political divide, people tend to be 'against' ideas as well, much more so if 'the other side' approves or proposes them.

If you gave any number of policy recommendations to a random group, and indicated at random they were proposed by either Republicans or Democrats, I suggest you'd get responses more consistent with group alignment than ideological alignment.

> There's both the clear vision of conservative values and ideals... and Donald Trump.

I've lived long enough to see the terms "liberal" and "conservative" morph multiple times. (You will too eventually, just watch carefully.) They've long since lost any connection to their origin in classical European political philosophy and have now become merely placeholders to give the pretense that the two major US political parties have some kind of consistent ideological (as opposed to financial) backing, which they don't.

There's a certain irony in Barry Goldwater being credited with launching the modern "conservative" movement in the US when Goldwater himself could be considered much more "libertarian" and was opposed to the policies and increasing influence of "conservative Christians" such as Pat Robertson.

Scratch either of the two parties and underneath you'll see a very loose coalition of differing, sometimes opposing interests, not a clear set of consistent, unwavering beliefs. It's an ongoing power struggle, and the political labels just reflect the currently dominant group in the power struggle.

It’s not that hard to survive having thoughts of your own, you just have to surround yourself with people that think for themselves and are ok with differences of opinion. More succinctly, separate out intolerant followers from your life.

Ok it’s not that easy.

> It's a huge part of what the Republican party has struggled with

It is, but it's not just them. Mainstream Democrats are more center than the Party. "Defund the Police" did not play well with many centrist Dems.

Defund the police wasn't a Democratic Party position no matter how much conservatives try to make it one.

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