Rand Paul and other Trump defenders are lying to you about the sixth amendment

Dave, I don’t what to think of your answer - I don’t want to think about it; I don’t want to think about the ramifications. I’ll be honest, it saddens me. I guess, in one sense, I appreciate that you’re honest that you’ll, “always vote for the one I perceive to be a lesser evil, no matter how bad the one I vote for may be.” So, there is no minimum character threshold for you.

Trump was right all along, he could actually murder someone in broad daylight and not lose support. I used to think that was hyperbole. I don’t know anymore.

John,

If you are not comfortable voting for Trump, I respect your right to make that decision. Voting for a President is also voting for a Vice President, in this case Pence. Also, voting for a President is voting for Supreme Court Justices, hundreds of Federally appointed judges, and multiple Cabinet positions. The presidency is not just one person. You should take that into consideration. I heard one “Never Trumper” today on the radio who admitted that he voted for “Popeye The Sailor Man” for president in 2016. Seriously, he wrote that in. No doubt Trump has had many egregious sins in his past and many personality quirks in the present, but his overall record of accomplishment as President in many areas has been beneficial to freedom loving Americans and the Bill of Rights, not to mention a robust economy. You and Aaron make a valid point about Character. For instance, could I vote for Pete B. if he was a practicing political conservative? That would be a difficult one for me. So I do respect your position. If I compare Trump’s public sins to King David’s public sins, I think David loses in that contest. Adultery (both are equal), multiple wives (equal), rape (though I don’t think David is guilty of this, many others do), murder (David). Yet, God allowed him to remain King. So it is difficult to know where the objective line is in every case.

[John E.]

So, there is no minimum character threshold for you.

If the choices are two candidates with “minimal character” the only alternative is to waste your vote or refuse to participate, and while I understand those views, I don’t agree with them in general. Depending on the how bad the choices are, I might not vote if they are equally bad, but if one results in less evil, it’s still a pretty clear choice for me.

Trump was right all along, he could actually murder someone in broad daylight and not lose support. I used to think that was hyperbole. I don’t know anymore.

I hope it doesn’t come down to a candidate that has murdered one vs. a candidate that has murdered more (this choice probably would apply to most of ancient Rome’s leaders, and their senators probably had to make some tough choices). If it does, I’ll have to think long and hard about what I will do, but if one is clearly a better choice than the other, I can vote for that one, vote for someone who won’t be elected and may take votes from the “less evil” one, or refuse to participate. Those are the only valid choices, and again, while I would understand why one would choose one of the latter two, there are reasons to go with the first, even if you don’t agree.

It comes down to this — my hope is in God, not the leaders of this world. However, as long as we can have input into the process, each of us will have to answer to God for what we have done, not to others who also have to answer to God.

I do think this is where more of the conversation/thinking needs to go. Is there such a thing as too low? Why/why not? What would it be?

I understand that for many it’s a simple matter of a single transaction (a vote) and that this vote should be evaluated solely by one criterion: which of the two most likely winners am I directly or indirectly helping to win?

Like John, I’m not sure how to answer that… though I think I may understand it better than he does at this point?

The frustration for all involved is probably that there are assumptions here that are not examined. And so various pieces of the thought process are so obvious to us, we can’t figure out why the others “don’t get it.”

But we’d probably all agree that examining and testing assumptions is important, right?

Along those lines, I’m not sure if I’ve raised this particular question before:

• When evaluating the ethics of an action, does it make any difference whether the outcomes are direct or indirect?

For the sake of simplicity, I’m assuming the outcomes are “very likely” ones.

So, for example, this dilemma from internet somewhere…

A pregnant woman leading a group of people out of a cave on a coast is stuck in the mouth of that cave. In a short time high tide will be upon them, and unless she is unstuck, they will all be drowned except the woman, whose head is out of the cave. Fortunately, (or unfortunately,) someone has with him a stick of dynamite. There seems no way to get the pregnant woman loose without using the dynamite which will inevitably kill her; but if they do not use it everyone will drown. What should they do?

Let’s modify it slightly and say that the person (“the chooser”) with the dynamite is outside the cave and will survive regardless.

The argument can be made that by refusing to kill the woman via dynamite, the chooser is choosing to kill everyone else. The argument can also be made that using the dynamite is murdering the woman (and her unborn child).

What the chooser decides depends to some extent on how he views indirect outcomes. As a Christian, I think my reasoning should be: If I use the dynamite I’m directly taking the woman and her infant’s life. If I don’t use the dynamite, I’m indirectly causing the deaths of everyone else, but I will not have murdered them by my actions. I can’t kill two people directly in order to save several other people indirectly.

Of course, one could also argue that using the dynamite is really an effort to make a way of escape, and the death of the woman and infant are an indirect outcome. I’m not sure I could convince myself of that though.

What if we say it’s not dynamite, and you have to simply kill the woman to remove her from the mouth of the cave? (Sorry if this whole scene is giving you nightmares!)

What I hope is evident: direct vs. indirect does sometimes matter. Direct outcomes of actions vs. indirect outcomes of inaction are not exactly equivalent.

When it comes to voting, and there are two very bad likely winners, and one is clearly worse than the other… my choice to vote for neither does have an indirect outcome of helping the worse one win. Sort of. Let’s say it does. But if I vote for the other bad candidate I am directly helping that individual gain power. Can I do that? I think for most of us it depends on how bad the “better” one is and how much worse the alternative is.

One fly in the ointment for deciding someone’s character is “too low” is that we’ve seen a number of times where the media refused to cover the improprieties of candidates, generally on the Democratic side. They never really dug into JFK’s adultery (or LBJs), sat down politely as Carville and Hilliary set up the “bimbo eruptions” team, never really followed up on Obama’s drug use and weak student records (mentioned in his autobiographies), and while in office never really answered why all of the “oopsies” of the Obama and Clinton administrations just “happened to” benefit them.

So applying a minimum standard to the ethics and morals of candidates is more or less both a unilateral disarmament and an invitation for the media and the left to smear candidates to make it appear they are below that target. You create an incentive for people to cheat in that business, they will. A great example—see Powerline for details—is the habit of “fact-checking” websites to “helpfully” change the questions asked to make conservatives into liars and liberals into honest men.

And to be honest, the place where I stop supporting a hypothetical conservative/libertarian candidate is therefore when they arguably will result in effects worse than that of prenatal infanticide and gun control/socialism, both linked to over 100 million premature deaths worldwide in the past century or so. That’s a lot of mistresses, to put it mildly, and that’s a lot of lies.

Put in another way, we might suggest that to impose a “minimum standard” is to enable the left’s game of “Calvinball”, whereby the little boy changes the rules every time his tiger gets the upper hand paw, or Lucy’s game with the football and Charlie Brown.

You don’t need to think about hypothetical situations to see this dilemma. Just read about a number of the events that took place on 9/11. The story of the two pilots whose job it was to take down flight 91 (turned out to be unnecessary since the passengers brought it down themselves) is a study in direct vs. indirect. Do you kill all the people on the airliner to save many more people? President Bush was willing to do that (he ordered it), as were the two pilots who answered the call (who, by the way, would have had to kamikaze to complete the mission, as at that time they were flying jets that hadn’t had time to be armed). You’ll have to decide for yourself if those were right decisions or wrong ones, but it’s not going to be that easy to put the “only possible Christian position” clearly on one side or the other.

Another really obvious example was using the first nuclear bombs on Hiroshima and Nagasaki. The rightness/wrongness of that action is still debated today, and much of it comes down to saving a much larger number of lives and more years of war by bombing whole cities which included many civilians, not just factories and military installations.

Those dilemmas and ones like them constitute one of the reasons there is going to be disagreement about directly putting someone “less evil” in office vs. indirectly putting a greater evil there. Just as in our current political environment, we are going to have to learn to get along with (if not understand) those who don’t come down on the same side of this question. I respect those who couldn’t vote for Trump. I disagree with them, but they have to answer to God and their conscience the same way I do.

[John E.]…Secondly, I once asked this question in an article - for those who claim to hold their nose while voting for a man like Trump, is there a minimum character threshold that would prevent you from voting from someone? If so, what is it?

I’ve never received nor heard an answer. I’m still curious, though.

I think I answered it the last time around with this topic.

The answer is, yes. The character of the other candidate.

Rather, they claim to have an eye witness. Time will tell. We’ve heard similar claims for more than two years, and they seem to evaporate under examination.

The reason for using the fictional dilemma is that it allows you assume the conditions and focus on a particular problem. The problem I was going for was not just direct vs. indirect outcomes but also the ethics of doing something in and of itself independently of the alternatives.

• So, regardless of what would happen if he didn’t (regardless of the alternatives), would it be right for the observer to indirectly kill the woman blocking the mouth of the cave in order to save the rest of the occupants?

For the sake of the argument I’m making, it isn’t necessary to prove that killing the woman would be wrong (though I believe it would). It’s enough to establish that killing the woman might be wrong. If that’s even a possibility, it introduces a layer—a criterion—for evaluating all of our ethical decisionmaking. If we think of that evaluation as a series of questions, the new question this requires is: is the choice I’m considering wrong in itself, regardless of the alternatives?

It matters because I think it’s pretty fundamental to Christian ethics to affirm that we are never truly required to choose between two sinful choices, and opt for the less sinful one. So, if an act can be wrong—even though the only alternative seems worse—our theology says there must be another option. We don’t have to sin smaller in order to avoid sinning bigger.

This is the evaluation I’m not seeing happen among reluctant Trump voters. I’d like to see an effort at least.

What that would look like is an analysis of why it would be or wouldn’t be wrong to vote for a leader of extremely poor character—in an of itself, without regard for who else is on the ballot.

Because I believe acts can be wrong in an of themselves, no matter how much worse the alternative(s) may be or seem to be, evaluating whom to vote for has a different starting point. I do not begin with “What will happen if I don’t?” I begin with “Is it wrong in itself?”

Answering that question relies on a number of debatable premises, yes, and the answer can have a wide range of probability/certainty. I get that. Still, if I can, I’d like to win more people over to at least starting in the right place.

Here is some sobering analysis. Excerpt:

Sitting on a pile of smoldering rubble while taking potshots at mutated bloatflies swarming nearby, the last member of humanity confirmed his satisfaction at making sure Clinton wasn’t elected.

There’s a big difference between analysis and satire.

It was a joke!

[Aaron Blumer]

It matters because I think it’s pretty fundamental to Christian ethics to affirm that we are never truly required to choose between two sinful choices, and opt for the less sinful one. So, if an act can be wrong—even though the only alternative seems worse—our theology says there must be another option. We don’t have to sin smaller in order to avoid sinning bigger.

This is the evaluation I’m not seeing happen among reluctant Trump voters. I’d like to see an effort at least.

Well, if voting is a moral act, you have a point. I don’t see it as such, though I wasn’t at all for Trump last time.

However, voting is a political act, I have a hard time seeing it as moral or immoral, unless maybe you just flippantly go into the booth and toss a coin or something. A thoughtful vote, weighing the pros and cons of all candidates as best an individual can tell is good citizenship and good morally, no matter which way you vote.

At least that’s my theory! I might change tomorrow.

Well, if voting is a moral act, you have a point.

All actions are moral.

and I don’t share the opinion.