Oh My, How the Election Conundrum Has Changed
by Rachel MacNair
A reminder: The Consistent Life Network doesn’t necessarily endorse everything said in its blog, since we encourage individual writers to express a variety of views. This is especially so when analyzing elections.
I’ve been through several presidential elections now. Consistent-lifers have this conundrum (as this post details for 2020): The Republican is terrible on many things but at least better on abortion. The Democrat is better on many of those things but absolutely horrendous on abortion. People who vote for a minor party instead may stay cleaner, but they aren’t helping to decide which one wins.
But as I posted and documented earlier, several conservatives who would normally be enthusiastic about supporting Republicans have noted that Trump is sabotaging the pro-life movement. Since then, the situation has gotten even worse, to the point that mainstream media is taking notice.
Which Candidate is Worse This Time?
Here I expand this with comments from people who would normally assertively support the Republican for president on anti-abortion grounds.
Ramesh Ponnuru asks this cogent question in The National Review:
Ramesh Ponnuru
I’m also wondering how the political parties will interpret the election results. If Harris wins, will they take it as a vindication of the Democrats’ strategy of being all in for abortion? If Trump wins, will both parties take it as a vindication of his strategy of running as far and fast as he can from the issue? Which would be worse for the pro-life cause in the long run?
The National Review also quotes Lila Rose of Live Action:
Lila Rose
“Vance has come out and said that [Trump] would veto an abortion ban, that he supports abortion pills, that he supports ‘reproductive rights’ without clarifying what that means,” Rose said, adding that Trump “was behind the RNC platform being weakened on this, which for four decades was strong on life, and now it’s been weakened.”
The activist said that she, as it stands, would not cast a vote for either Trump or Democratic nominee Kamala Harris. It’s “not the job of the pro-life movement to vote for President Trump,” she said, but it is “the job of the pro-life movement to demand protection for pre-born lives.”
Other Republicans disagree . . .
But Rose said she doesn’t buy the “idea that you are morally responsible to vote against Kamala Harris by voting for someone like Donald Trump.”
“In some cases, you can make the argument that it can be the right move to vote for the lesser of two evils,” Rose said. “But part of our job is not to just accept whatever position we’ve been handed — especially from a politician who, in the past, has counted on our vote and has indicated that he is pro-life [before] changing his position. It’s our job, if we want to be an effective lobbying group in any way, to demand more and to say, ‘If you want my vote, I need to see more from you.’”
“This is how politics works,” she continued. “This is how any advocacy or movement works . . . if you will always be happy to support a candidate provided that they are just a fraction better than the next candidate, you will never achieve your goals for the group that you’re fighting for.”
The Babylon Bee, a humorous satire site like The Onion, explicitly for conservative Christians, put it this way: Pro-Lifers Excited To Choose Between Moderate Amount Of Baby Murder And High Amount of Baby Murder.
Another important point is that the Trump administration couldn’t have arranged for a stronger backlash to the overturning of Roe if such a backlash had been its plan. We can count on it that any repeat Trump administration would provide extra energy to keep that backlash going.
Euthanasia
Meanwhile, on euthanasia – which I don’t recall Trump ever expressing opposition to – is now an issue on which he’s made especially cringe-worthy remarks against a member of his own family – William Trump, the son of his nephew Fred Trump III. From The New York Times,
Fred Trump’s son was born with a rare medical condition that led to developmental and intellectual disabilities . . . he was able to convene a group of advocates for a meeting with his uncle . . .
After the meeting, Fred Trump claims, his uncle pulled him aside and said, “maybe those kinds of people should just die,” given “the shape they’re in, all the expenses.”
The remark wasn’t a one-off, according to Fred Trump. A couple of years later, when he called his uncle for help because the medical fund that paid for his son’s care was running out of money, Fred Trump claims his uncle said: “I don’t know. He doesn’t recognize you. Maybe you should just let him die and move down to Florida.”
Other than Trump
As for the other major candidate, extreme abortion advocacy is just one of the problems. Biden has been rightfully subjected to intensive war protests on sending weapons being used against Palestinian children, and Harris shows no signs of having better policy. And that’s only one of the horrific wars being supported by the U.S. now. The 2024 Democratic platform has dropped previous opposition to the death penalty and support of reduction in military spending. Moving away from anti-violence positions is happening in both parties.
graphic from our member group Rehumanize International
I’m thinking the third-party option (say, for our member group the American Solidarity Party) has the advantage of clearly communicating why the major parties lost your vote. That may make more sense this year than usual.
Meanwhile, we can certainly feel comfortable working on referendums – while they’re generally single-issue by nature, there are quite a few that cover several of the consistent-life issues.
===========================
For more of our posts on election dynamics, see:
What History Shows: The Consistent Life Ethic Works for Pro-life Referendums
Elections 2020: Three Consistent-Life Approaches
Pro-life Voting Strategy: A Problem without an Answer
My Difficulty in Voting: Identifying the Problem (about the American Solidarity Party)
How Consistent-life Advocacy Would Benefit from Ranked-Choice Voting
Moving away from anti-violence positions (such as they were) is indeed happening in both parties – and they were never that good on them to begin with! That’s part of why I’m politically independent, as I think consistent-lifers generally should be at least to some degree (although it hopefully does help to have CLE sympathizers in the parties to try to push them in that direction). And I’m glad to live in a state that now uses ranked choice voting. It’s still a partial solution that’s only as good as the candidates we have, in major and minor parties, but it gives at least a marginally better opportunity for an honest and conscientious vote.
This post addresses just two consistent life issues – abortion and euthanasia. In thinking about this election, I have a major focus on another consistent life ethic (CLE) issue – war.
How we prioritize the different aspects of the CLE IMHO needs to vary by the responsibilities of different levels of government and the realities of what is feasible. At the state and local level, I put little priority on the war issue, since only the federal government wages war.
At the federal level, more than half of the general fund is spent on wars and preparations for war. The USA is currently the major funder of Israel’s war crimes in Gaza and the NATO proxy war against Russia. Abortion is being handled largely, and physician-assisted suicide enitrely, at the state level. While both sides of the abortion divide favor federal action on abortion (and this is a major part of the Harris agenda), it seems highly unlikely that any legislation on this could get through Congress. Therefore, I consider war as a far higher priority than abortion from a CLE point of view in the current environment at the federal level. On physician-assisted suicide, there have been no proposals AFAIK for federal legislation, so it is moot for federal voting, and I don’t believe either duopoly candidate has publicly stated a position on it.
On war, Harris pledges to continue funding Israeli war crimes and strongly supports continued military funding of the NATO proxy war on Russia, in addition to taking an overall hawkish stance. Trump also supports funding of Israeli war crimes, but is opposed to the NATO proxy war against Russia and pledges to end it even before his inauguration (doubtful that he can actually accomplish that, but he is on the right side of the issue, although not entirely for the same reasons that CLE folks are). While he pledges not to engage in any wars, his record on war issues is decidedly mixed. While Trump may not be as bad as Harris on war, he is still unacceptable on that issue (not to mention the many other problems with Trump) IMHO.
There are no real CLE candidates AFAIK in the Presidential race, The American Solidarity Party is nominally CLE, but its Presidential ticket has not taken a clear position on either of the current major wars. So I consider that ticket not really CLE and unacceptable. (NOTE: the 2020 ASP ticket also did not take a clear position against war.)
Besides the two duopoly parties, there are two other parties – Libertarian and Green – who will be on the ballot in all or most states and have a theoretical possibility of winning. Both are strongly against the current wars and wars in general. The Green Party is more attractive to most CLE advocates because it takes a strong position for federal actions to address poverty and income inequality while the Libertarian Party generally believes the federal government should stay out of this arena. Furthermore, the Greens have shown electoral strength in one constituency highly concerned with the war in the Middle East – Muslims. While Muslims traditionally heavily favor Democrats, a recent poll of Muslim voters in the state (Michigan) with the highest percentage of Muslim voter shows 40% plan to vote for Jill Stein, the Green candidate, while only 12% plan to vote for Kamala Harris, the Democratic candidate.
How to vote if you are a CLE advocate is a really tough issue given the general lack of CLE candidates. How CLE advocates approach voting varies widely. We need continued dialogue on this within the CLE community.
Green Party members, sadly, cannot be relied upon to take the “peace” stand, once in office. In 1999, the Germany military went to fight for the first time since World War II, even though Germany had not been invaded. It joined the action against Serbia in Kosovo. And a leader of Germany’s entering the action was its foreign minister Joschke Fischer, of the Green Party.
Pope Francis has suggested that American Catholics choose between “the lesser of two evils” in the upcoming U.S. presidential election.
Following Christ invariably means choosing good over evil.
The platform of the American Solidarity Party closely reflects Catholic teaching on the sanctity of all human life, including the unborn and migrants.
Some may say American Solidarity Party candidates (on several state ballots, requiring write-in on others) have no chance of winning. This is thinking according to the ways of the world.
From a Catholic perspective, a handful of persons speaking and voting the truth on the sanctity of human life is worth far more than millions of votes for “lesser evils”.
Something else. This November, US and State legislative elections could be at least as important as the Presidential election.