How Laity Can Help Bishops . . . Improve Their Thinking About The Election

By JEFF KOLOZE

(Editor’s Note: Dr. Jeff Koloze is president of Koloze Consultants, which works with faculty who wish to promote their pro-life research. Although retired, he still enjoys teaching English grammar, rhetoric, research paper, and literature courses to learn how contemporary students negotiate contemporary controversial issues.)

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The September/October 2016 issue of Northeast Ohio Catholic, “the magazine of the Catholic Diocese of Cleveland [Ohio],” carried an interesting article about voting, one section of which immediately got my attention. Titled “How to Cast a Vote When Neither Choice Is Right?,” I had to read this section first to see what the official organ of one diocese had to say about the matter.
The article states:
“This reality underscores the need to vote according to a well-formed conscience. However, when all candidates in a given election hold positions that promote one or more intrinsically evil acts . . . the Catholic voter faces an even more difficult dilemma.”
So far, so good.
The recommendation for such a situation is given thus:
“In such cases, according to the USCCB, the voter may ‘decide to take the extraordinary step of not voting for any candidate or, after careful deliberation, may decide to vote for the candidate deemed less likely to advance such a morally flawed position and more likely to pursue other authentic human goods’.”
I understand the last portion of the quote from the United States Conference of Catholic Bishops as the “lesser of two evils” approach. That is, let’s say, for example, that one had to choose between a candidate whose style may seem “crazy” while another candidate may have committed actions which are “criminal.” According to the principle of the lesser of two evils, one should vote for the person whose style is deemed crazy and not the criminal. The reader knows, of course, that Trump is considered the “crazy” by the media elites and that Hillary is the “criminal” according to the general perception of most Americans.
(One thinks of the criminality of her complex email scandal, her threats against women who came forward when her husband Bill seduced them, her active support for the abortion business Planned Parenthood which kills the unborn, her lying about the threat against the four Americans who were killed by Islamic terrorists in Benghazi, etc.)
The first part of the USCCB recommendation, however, is clearly problematic, and we laity need to help the bishops understand how not voting is not an option in the 2016 presidential elections.
Not voting means that pro-life Donald Trump loses a precious pro-life vote. Any pro-life vote not given to Trump becomes a credit for anti-life Hillary Clinton. Not voting is just as bad as voting for a third-party candidate since a vote to that candidate takes away a vote that should go to pro-life Donald Trump vs. his anti-life opponent, Hillary Clinton.
Is the above paragraph slightly repetitious? Intentionally so, since the pro-life issues should be paramount for Catholic voters this election.
The reader may wonder why the ellipsis occurs in the above USCCB quote. Now is the time to complete that ellipsis.
The words excised above contain a list of political matters that are deemed of importance by, if not the USCCB in toto, then at least some of its staff. The full quote should read:
“This reality underscores the need to vote according to a well-formed conscience. However, when all candidates on a given election hold positions that promote one or more intrinsically evil acts (like abortion, euthanasia, assisted suicide, deliberately subjecting workers or the poor to subhuman living conditions, redefining marriage in ways that violate its essential meaning or racist behavior), the Catholic voter faces an even more difficult dilemma.”
I am unaware that in the United States there is a conscious effort to force people to live in “subhuman living conditions.” Our world is not the world of Upton Sinclair’s The Jungle.
Similarly, although there are vocal agitation groups like Black Lives Matter which proclaim that racism is endemic in American society, racial behavior is so nebulous a political issue as to be meaningless. Does one consider affirmative action programs racist behavior, suppressing the rights of those not of a protected class to obtain a job? Is any police action against an African-American automatically a racist behavior?
No wonder ordinary folk are fed up with the political correctivity that many of my fellow academics, the media, and Democratic government officials have thrust upon American society over the past eight years of the Obama reign.
The USCCB litany of political issues does have one thing right: abortion, euthanasia, and assisted suicide are rightfully the most important social issues facing the country. Along with infanticide (the killing of the handicapped newborn), these topics constitute the right-to-life issues which every American should be concerned about and which every American Catholic should not only be concerned about, but vote on as the litmus test for any candidate.
In fact, one can expand on the three issues that the article got right and show just how important this presidential election is.
Hillary wants federal funding of abortion with taxpayer money. Trump supports the Hyde Amendment which prevents taxpayer funding of abortions.
Hillary supports third-trimester abortions. Trump supports the right to life of the child in his or her third trimester of unborn life.
Hillary wants the government to increase funding for abortion businesses like Planned Parenthood. Trump supports life-affirming agencies.
Hillary supports the Democratic Party’s attack against Christians and wants to stifle their support for the first civil right to life. Trump supports freedom of speech regarding the first civil right to life.
Hillary wants to force Catholic hospitals and medical facilities to renounce their life-affirming positions. Trump supports religious freedom.
Full disclosure: I am a former Democrat who left that party years ago because of its anti-life positions. Moreover, my first choice for president within the Republican Party was Rubio. However, I fully support Trump now if only because of the massive threat that an anti-lifer like Hillary poses to American Catholics.
The choice is clear this November. Hillary is anti-life; Trump is pro-life. Given such a clear choice, why would anybody sit out this election, not vote, and help an anti-lifer to occupy the White House for four years or (worse) eight years so that she can stack the Supreme Court with anti-lifers like her?