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The single issue voter

 3 years ago
source link: https://hexmode.com/2020/09/christians-and-politics/
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The single issue voter

I remember sitting in a journalism class at the University of New Orleans almost 30 years ago listening to an old hand from the Times Picayune regaling us with stories about his work at the paper. One that stood out to me was how the church excommunicated a politician for their stance on integration (and then physically blocked him from entering the church for his daughter’s wedding).

The exact details of what he said escape me and so I’m probably wrong on parts, but looking at Wikipedia, I think he may have been talking about the excommunication (and later, after a public retraction, reinstatement) of Leander Perez in 1962 who was the secretary of the Citizens Council of South Louisiana for aggressively opposing the integration of Catholic schools.

I mention this because I was reminded about this when reading the letters to the editor for my local paper. There seems to be some confusion about Biden, the Catholic running for president of these United States. Many people have written into the local paper over the last month and pointed to a single issue—abortion—as a reason no Christian should vote for Biden.

Biden certainly has his faults. A reader was gracious enough to give us a few of them in the Letters page recently. She isn’t wrong.

But as she said, Biden has had 47 years in politics and the issues she managed to find were a molehill compared with the mountain Trump has managed to accumulate during just four (4!) years in political office.

One question—why are some good Catholics willing to support Biden?—really got me to write.

Abortion is a real issue, but no matter if you think it should be outlawed or kept legal, it should not be the only reason a Christian uses to pick a candidate for president.

It is a fact that Biden supports abortion and the Catholic church is against abortion. But, thinking Catholics might also recall that in 2018 the Church reinforced its Culture of Life when it updated the catechism to include these words from a speech Pope Francis made: “the death penalty is inadmissible because it is an attack on the inviolability and dignity of the person“.

This thinking Catholic might also remember that, in 1989, Trump paid $85,000 for a full page ad in four New York papers calling for a return of the death penalty—something that just happened to coincide with the trial of the Central Park Five, black men who were ultimately exonerated despite Trump’s best efforts.

Thinking Catholics might also recall that the catechism of the Church says “Every form of social or cultural discrimination … on the grounds of sex, race, color, social conditions, language, or religion must be curbed and eradicated…”.

Then they may remember that Trump’s first appearance in the New York Times was on the front page in October 16, 1973 under the headline “Major Landlord Accused of Antiblack bias in City”.

Christians should use their faith to help them make decisions, but we would be wrong to dictate who any Christian (Catholic or otherwise) should vote for.

Photo: Choices are hard (Public Domain image from Commons)


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