And we get pro-life “good-guy” Rick Santorum telling everyone to get out and vote for the notorious pro-abort Arlen Spectre in a very close primary battle against 100% pro-life Pat Toomey. (And to RS – explaining is not repenting).

Allow me to laugh in the faces of those in Catholic media who trumpet both Santorum and “the non-negotiables”. Hey, maybe they can get Santorum to do an ad telling everyone why it is critical they vote pro-life.

And the war is not just if you simply apply the conditions and theory equally to our abortion holocaust (grave, nothing has worked, success, limited collateral damage) and Iraq or Afghanistan. Prudential judgment is not political calculation, and those who won’t do to abortionists or their clinics what they will do to an insurgent (and their family!) in their home in Iraq, are psychotic, irrational, and/or sociopaths.

Abortion sets the threshold for the just use of force or violence. Move it where you will but apply it equally, that is with justice.

But I don’t think anyone can reliably predict with enough certainty to justify voting largely against their interests in the hopes of gaining something on just one issue. To do so assumes that the party or candidate you are supporting places the same importance on the single issue that you, the single-issue voter, do, and this is almost never the case. Now, when it comes to something like war, I can see the logic of an argument that there may be a moral obligation to try to contribute to a just policy by supporting the candidate, in this case, who is against the war. But generally I think this puts too much weight on any one issue. Antiwar voters who backed Obama because of Iraq will probably come to feel as foolish in a year or two as the pro-lifers who backed Bush who now regret doing so because of the war.