I’ve been reading a lot of articles and seeing a lot of blogs/groups etc. about the upcoming election in November and the Catholic vote etc. etc. I read an article in the Notre Dame Alumni magazine that talks about religious groups ’selling out’ on the abortion issue since they make it ’so important’ and they shouldn’t do that because we need to face the facts that legalized abortion-on-demand is here to stay. According to these people, being a ’single issue voter’ (but apparently ONLY if that single issue is abortion and not anything else for example ‘the environment’ or ‘the war’) is backwards and wrong and we are holding the faithful hostage by demanding that they vote a particular way based on a ’single issue’. After stewing on this idea for a day and having a hard time understanding how easy it could be for a Catholic to discount the abortion issue as simply unimportant, I was sent another blog entry that defends the so-called ’single issue’ position—written by a Southern Baptist preacher. In his blog, he talks about how a single-issue is NOT enough to make him vote FOR someone but it is enough to make him vote AGAINST someone. For example, he says that racism is a single issue whereby if a candidate said he is a racist, he would not vote for that person based on that single issue. And again, here is my personal commentary on that: If support of abortion-on-demand and the barbaric partial birth abortion procedure is not important enough to disqualify a candidate from receiving my vote based on that single issue, then I don’t know what is.
If you haven’t already looked at it, I encourage you to go to the USCCB website on being a ‘Faithful Citizen’ at http://www.faithfulcitizenship.org/ This is your guide to the election and how to decide on who to vote for in good conscience. You need to be careful to read the entire document though—some groups are putting out only excerpts of it in their blogs and articles which again, in my opinion, ignore the whole context of the document. Do not be deceived—go directly to the source.
there is a lot at stake in this election—keep praying!!! The good news is that Jesus has already won the overall victory for us and we just need to cooperate with His will through His grace.
