It’s not 2004 anymore: The stale Catholic debate over voting ignores new threats
By Peter Wolfgang ( bio - articles - email ) | Oct 26, 2024
In 2020, Ross Douthat wrote “The Decadent Society.” It is a book in which, as Vox described it, “Douthat’s definition of a ‘decadent society’ is that we’re trapped in a stale system that keeps spinning in place, reproducing the same arguments and frustrations over and over again.”
Could there be any better description of how we think about Catholics and voting in the United States? It has been the same thing forever. Or at least since the 1980s.
That was the decade in which New York Gov. Mario Cuomo, in 1984, made his infamous “personally opposed, but…” speech about abortion at Notre Dame University. It was the Magna Carta of pro-abortion Catholic politicians. We have been living in the shadow of that speech ever since.
Cuomo claimed that, as a Catholic, he was “personally opposed” to abortion. But that, as a public official in a pluralistic society, he had to support abortion’s legality.
I won’t refute all the logical fallacies in Cuomo’s reasoning. To do so would be to fall into the very Douthat-defined decadence with which I opened this column. Suffice it to say that many others did so at the time of Cuomo’s speech and in the decades since.
But those arguments, on both sides, remained locked in place. When John Kerry, a pro-abortion Catholic, ran for President in 2004, the Catholic cases for and against him were identical to the terms defined by Cuomo and his critics twenty years earlier.
And in fairness to both John Kerry and his critics, why not? In the twenty years between 1984 and 2004, nothing had really changed.
But by 2020 another pro-abortion Catholic, Joe Biden, was running for President. This time, successfully. And in the years between 2004 and 2020, everything had changed.
Yet the Catholic arguments for and against supporting a pro-abortion candidate had largely not changed. And even now, in 2024, when circumstances have gone beyond even what they were just four years ago, the battle lines among Catholic laity still seem drawn largely along the lines of Mario Cuomo’s now-40 year-old speech.
You know the drill. One side notes that abortion is in a higher moral category from most other issues. The U.S. bishops consider it the “preeminent” issue of the day. The Vatican says “there may be a legitimate diversity of opinion” on other issues “but not however with regard to abortion.”
The other side counters with official Church statements on those other issues—scores of them—that, to their mind, seem to weigh in favor of voting for the pro-abortion candidate for other reasons. They are either unpersuaded by Church teaching on the preeminence of abortion or they treat it as a dilemma. “On the one hand this candidate opposes abortion, but on the other hand, his opponent favors social justice. Oh heavens, what’s a faithful Catholic voter to do?” Something like that.
Again, my goal is not to go down the rabbit hole of refuting that false dichotomy. Others have done so for decades, to little effect.
Rather, it is to ask why the onus is not being put on that second group to explain away their support for all the new outrages against God that have arisen in the twenty years since John Kerry ran for President in 2004?
Focus on new threats
Take the Obamacare contraceptive mandate, for instance. What Obama did in 2012 was unprecedented. Never in all of American history had the federal government attacked the religious liberty of Catholics, and the conscience rights of millions of others, like it did here, when it tried to force employers to provide and pay for contraceptive and abortion-inducing drugs to their employees. And with a religious exemption so narrow that it put the federal government in charge of declaring which Catholic institutions were or were not Catholic.
Indeed, the federal government was claiming for the first time that, in order for a Catholic institution to be Catholic, it could only serve other Catholics, not the general public. Never in all of American history had there been such an outrageous attempt to legally curtail religious influence in public life.
Catholic Americans, rightly, reacted with white-hot anger. Catholic institutions filed lawsuits. Catholic laity held hundreds of religious freedom rallies simultaneously across the country, three or four times in one year.
Yet when Joe Biden ran for President in 2020, this rarely came up. Much of the Catholic argument centered around the tired old “on the one hand pro-life, on the other hand social justice” canard. The massive, unprecedented threat to our fundamental right to religious liberty is, to this day, not a factor in the way the Cuomo-era lines over abortion are.
Add to this, too, the change in abortion rhetoric itself. We have gone from “safe, legal and rare” to “shout your abortion.” How do the “personally opposed, but…”-Catholics account for this? They simply ignore it. “On the one hand, abortion, on the other hand, social justice,” yadda, yadda, yadda.
To be sure, some have tried to raise these issues. But not to the point where it has moved the Catholic debate on voting beyond where it has been for forty years.
And then we come to now, 2024, when matters have grown even more dire. There is a direct line from Obama’s attack on religious freedom in 2012 to the Biden-Harris Administration’s post-Dobbs Kulturkampf against Catholics. Think of the outrageous arrest of pro-life activist Mark Houck. The disproportionate jail sentence given to elderly pro-life hero Joan Andrews Bell and others. The FBI’s reluctance to investigate the hundreds of attacks on Catholic churches since the Dobbs ruling. The whistle-blowers reporting that the FBI is actually investigating Catholics instead.
And this is to say nothing of the Democratic Party’s legislative agenda. The Equality Act’s attack on religious freedom. The Reproductive Freedom Act which would be more pro-abortion than Roe v. Wade.
In the twenty years between Mario Cuomo’s 1984 speech and John Kerry’s 2004 presidential run, nothing had changed. In the twenty years since John Kerry’s campaign, everything has changed. But we are still “trapped in a stale system that keeps spinning in place, reproducing the same arguments and frustrations over and over again.”
Think I’m making it up? Here’s a quote that appeared in the New York Times just last week:
Denise Murphy McGraw, national chair of Catholics Vote Common Good, is working to mobilize Catholic voters for Ms. Harris in Pennsylvania, Wisconsin and Michigan.
“She understands Catholic social justice teachings, and that’s how many of us who are multi-issue Catholic voters look at our elected officials,” Ms. McGraw said. “We want to make sure that they respect all people and lift up all lives in this country, and we see that in her.”
Her group is pushing a “Love Thy Neighbor” digital ad campaign and Catholic-to-Catholic postcard outreach.
Ms. Muphy McGraw takes into account none of the recent developments I just mentioned. She could have given the same quote twenty years ago. Or probably, no matter how bad it gets, twenty years from now. “Yes, we realize the Democrats’ 2044 platform calls for throwing virgins into volcanoes to appease the gods. But they understand Catholic social justice teachings, and that’s how many of us who are multi-issue Catholic voters look at our elected officials.”
None of this is to deny the attrition that has occurred on the Republican side under Trump-Vance. I called it out in this very space in July. “[T]he present situation of national politics is morally disgusting,” as Cardinal Burke rightly says.
And that is where I want to end today’s column, with Cardinal Burke’s Moral Questions regarding Voting. You can read it here.
In the cacophony of noise that is Catholic commentary on the 2024 election, I read Cardinal Burke’s statement and I am reminded that the sheep know their shepherd’s voice (John 10:27). As Cardinal Burke says in #3 (and Pope Francis has also said) we must vote to limit the evil.
On Election Day (if not sooner), make whichever choice you know will limit the evil. And as Cardinal Burke says—and despite everything I’ve said here—never lose hope.
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Posted by: Randal Mandock -
Oct. 30, 2024 11:07 PM ET USA
To me, the greatest evil the U.S. has been embarking upon since 1991 is WWIII. If the U.S. proceeds on the course set by Clinton, then Bush, then even more so by Obama, then less so by Trump, and finally excessively so by the current regime, "social" justice will not matter because those who think it matters may find they have bigger fish to fry. The worst of the current evils: WWIII, genocides, human trafficking, Catholic revisionism, abortion, professional liars, corruption of youth & children