The main problem with that work of the flesh which Paul calls "party spirit' (Galatians 5:20) is that it urges people to evaluate Church teaching in light of their sect's pet doctrines instead of evaluating their sect's pet doctrines in light of Catholic teaching. So, for instance, Calvinists filter Catholic teaching through a few pet doctrines about the sovereignty of God and predestination and original sin, while universalists filter Catholic teaching through a few pet doctrines about the love of God and the hope of heaven. Other pertinent considerations get filtered out.

Party spirit is a major affliction of modern Americans, Catholic and non-Catholic. And it tends to be expressed in different ways depending on the party's needs. For instance, party spirit can radically warp a healthy Catholic understanding of conscience. So, one the one hand, you get discourse from some sectors representing the Don't Form Your Conscience doctrine, when the Party needs you to think that. What do I mean? When somebody like Nancy Pelosi stands up and declares that her Catholic faith "compels" her to support gay "marriage" she is making what I call the "something something conscience something something' argument. Basically what she means is that all you need to do to appeal to "conscience" is to have a really strong feeling. You don't actually need to educate yourself about what the Catholic Church you are invoking actually teaches about the ontological impossibility of gay "marriage". You simply have to say, "The Church says to follow your conscience, not form or educate it. My really strong feeling is that gay 'marriage' is fine. So it is."

Of course, Pelosi doesn't beleve other people should be allowed to follow their conscience when it comes to gay "marriage". So she brutally denounces as "frauds" those chaplains who have real issues of conscience about gay "marriage".

This means that, in addition to the Don't Form Your Conscience doctrine, there is also the Don't Follow Your Conscience doctrine when the Party requires that. What both doctrines have in common is "Party needs trump Church teaching". And it's a black thread that binds both political parties together in a secret bond and makes partisans of both parties brothers under the skin.

And so, in addition to Pelosi simultaneously appealing to her ignorant "conscience" in order to prop up Dem dogma about gay "marriage" while shouting down other people's informed conscience in order to prop up Dem dogma about gay "marriage", you can also find things like this on the Right:

Now with somebody like Nancy Pelosi, who has never evidenced the slightest understanding of her Catholic faith as anything other than a tool for acquiring power, and whose public pronouncements on it have been of such immovable and unteachable stupidity as to persuade me she knows nor cares not one thing about the Catholic faith beyond its political utility, I just don't expect much.

But when Catholics who purport to know the faith talk to me, I expect much more since those to whom much is given, much will be required, as our Lord said. So I think it particularly dangerous when, under the influence of party spirit, conservative Catholics start arguing that the solution to the Pelosiesque hogwash of "something something conscience something something" is, as above, "Do not vote your conscience".

Sorry, but rejecting one's conscience altogether is just as poisonous--indeed more poisonous--than refusing to form it. And under the influence of party spirit, Catholics can often be inveigled into buying these two options --Don't Form Your Conscience/Reject Your Conscience--as the only possibilities there are.

Understand: my point here is not about who you will choose to vote for. My point is that the way this particular graphic (and a lot of arguments like it) works is to say, "Obeying your conscience is contemptible." This one happens to be an attempt to denounce conscience on behalf of Romney, but I could just as easily find arguments from previous elections in which lefties made exactly the same attempt to denounce the consciences of Nader supporters. The problem is not that somebody is trying to persuade somebody of the merits of their major party candidate. It's that in attempting to do so, arguments like the one in this graphic specifically argue that those who obey their consciences to the best of their ability should stop doing that and instead violate their conscience in order to serve party spirit.

Attempting to shout down and smash conscience is what Catholic teaching calls "evil". It's evil when Pelosi does it to try to smash Catholic consciences about gay "marriage" or contraceptives or abortion and it's just as evil when some zealous righty tries to smash a Catholic's conscience and force them to get on board with party spirit for the Home Team.

What the Church actually teaches is this: a person must--absolutely must, without any exceptions whatsoever--always obey the certain judgment of his or her conscience (CCC 1800). Anybody from any party that tells you otherwise is a false prophet and an agent of hell. That said, what conscience must also always do is be formed more and more closely in the image of Christ so that we do not erroneously obey a false or badly formed conscience. So a mere "strong feeling" that directly contradicts the immemorial teaching of the Church is not the "certain judgment of conscience" but the ignorant guess (and, in the case of somebody who refuses the Church's guidance, the arrogant rejection) of light and life. Since this is, surprisingly, news for an awful lot of people, permit me to reproduce here the Church's full teaching on conscience from the Catechism. It is plain, simple, lucid common sense. But as the examples above from everyday American moral discourse make clear, it appears to be one of the Church's best-kept secrets: