A Question of Conscience
At lunch a few weeks ago, a co-worker told me that the residents of the Faith & Leadership House (an intentional Catholic community of students living on campus) were “shocked” when a professor told them that you didn’t automatically have to vote Republican if you are Catholic. I laughed, because I wasn’t sure if it was a joke that the students were really naive about the question, or if it was a reactionary cry from the professor who sensed that her ideology is dying with the rise of the next generation.
Either way, this is evidence of the same shift that Catholics experienced 25 years ago, just from the opposite side of the aisle. Catholics between 1935 and 1980 voted Democrat. It was the political party of immigrants who felt welcomed by the labor movement, and it was bolstered by pride in the Catholic JFK’s presidency. If you were Catholic, you punched the candidate with the “D” next to his or her name: “that’s just the way it is”, in the words of Bruce Hornsby.
The slow shift started in the late 70’s, with Ronald Reagan’s ascendancy, and all of a sudden, younger Catholics realized that just because they made the sign of the Cross, they didn’t have to vote The Big D. All of a sudden, Catholics heard the message, and started to move over to the “R” side of the ballot.
Commonweal Magazine, a stalwart of the left wing, has a piece this week that repeats the professor’s story: they say that Catholics don’t have to vote Republican. It’s a baldfaced Obama advert, quickly setting aside Obama’s abortion position in the first two paragraphs in order to discuss his anti-war policies. Unfortunately for the author, his brush-off of Obama’s abortion record (he received a 100% NARAL-approval rating, versus McCain’s rating of 0% pro-abortion voting) fails to convince anyone who has a conscience. Let’s compare the numbers of dead produced by the war in Iraq to the number of dead from abortion (figures from Planned Parenthood’s Alan Guttmacher Institute and anti-war.org):
US deaths: 4102
Iraqi deaths: 1,225,898
Total Iraq deaths: 1,230,000
Deaths by “legal, safe abortion”: 45,000,000
Difference: 43,770,000 by abortion
My conscience tells me that a candidate who is avowedly pro-abortion is far, far worse than a candidate who is solidly anti-abortion, even if he is not as anti-war as the first.
Obama is the wrong decision for Catholics, the wrong decision for people of conscience, and the wrong decision for America.
