As the U.S. Bishops' recent document Forming Consciences for Faithful Citizenship (www.faithfulcitizenship.org) makes clear, not every issue is of equal moral gravity. The inalienable right to life of every innocent human person outweighs other concerns where Catholics may use prudential judgment, such as how best to meet the needs of the poor or to increase access to health care for all.
"Carry the same moral weight"..."Outweighs other concerns": it's these affirmations that require a three-day-long explanation (or even a semester-length course in natural law theory 101). Again, lacking that luxury, let's attempt an answer in brief.
First let's consider what "moral weight" does not mean in this context. That one issue has more "moral weight" than another does not mean weighing up all the bad consequences of one and the other -- say of an unjust immigration policy, and of legalized abortion-on-demand -- and of judging which issue, on the whole, renders a greater net-amount of moral evil. (Oh that morality were so simple!) Unfortunately -- given our inability to foresee all possible consequences, not to mention there being no reasonable way to assign value to them even if we could foresee them all -- such "weighing" of issues is not possible.
Here, "weighing of issues" means rather perceiving the degree and kind of malice each brings about. X, Y, and Z might all be moral evils, but they are not so in the same way. Lots of otherwise sensible people seem to miss this point.
Some things are gravely evil because they involve greater magnitudes of goods (as when a CEO pilfers millions of dollars from his company, an act much greater in malice than snitching a candy bar from a drug store). Some things may acquire a greater degree of malice because of some circumstance or motive (as when a young woman announces to her fiancé that she is breaking things off having waited precisely until the anniversary of their engagement to do so in order to hurt him all the more). Some things may be gravely evil because of poor prudential judgment or the lack of truly grave reason for moving ahead with a proposed action (such as when a country engages in what many might presumably consider a just military intervention, but without truly reasonable (grave) cause; or as when legislation -- such as an immigration policy -- comes into effect, bringing about considerable hardships that could have been precluded had there been greater foresight, better prudential judgment, and a greater sense of human solidarity; one could say the same of such issues as welfare, care for the environment and economic policy).
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Other things are gravely evil, not by reason of magnitude or circumstance, motive or lack of judgment. Rather, they are evil in and of themselves, and gravely so, because of the manner in which they reach to the core of one's personhood, attacking the very good of the human person in him or herself. The natural law tradition refers to these as intrinsically evil actions. Adultery, homicide, euthanasia, human trafficking of all sorts, torture, abortion, the creation and destruction of human embryos for research purposes: all these name actions which are gravely -- intrinsically -- evil.
Now one might argue: there are many forms of intrinsic evil going on daily in this country. To say that abortion is an intrinsic evil still does not explain why we should consider it the "most important" issue facing us as we approach election day.
To which I would respond that first and foremost there is the point of magnitude: 50 million innocent (fetal) human lives deliberately destroyed.