{"id":2739,"date":"2020-05-12T11:25:15","date_gmt":"2020-05-12T15:25:15","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/consistent-life.org\/blog\/?p=2739"},"modified":"2020-10-14T13:03:03","modified_gmt":"2020-10-14T17:03:03","slug":"elections-2020","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"http:\/\/consistent-life.org\/blog\/index.php\/2020\/05\/12\/elections-2020\/","title":{"rendered":"Elections 2020: Three Consistent-Life Approaches"},"content":{"rendered":"

by Rachel MacNair<\/p>\n

The Consistent Life Network takes no stand on specific candidates. This is my own personal take on how people who support the consistent life ethic view the U.S. presidential election of November 3, 2020.<\/p>\n

\"\"<\/p>\n

Three Categories<\/h3>\n

Category 1: Trump is Out of the Question; Biden is Bearable<\/strong><\/p>\n

People in this category are so aghast at Trump that they regard his being in office as intolerable, for a long list of reasons. For example: he doesn\u2019t understand any taboo against using nuclear weapons; he\u2019s sabotaging the diplomacy in the State Department that might prevent war; he eagerly supports the death penalty and suggests it in cases where accusations of guilt are sloppy; his words and policies often have negative effects on minorities and refugees; his budget has drastic cuts in the social safety net for the poor; he\u2019s sabotaging efforts to mitigate climate change; and most recently, his response to a pandemic has cost lives and increased poverty far more than would have happened under someone more competent.<\/p>\n

His anti-abortion stand is one of the few good things about him, but even there, he doesn\u2019t understand the issue well. He\u2019s doing the opposite of life-affirming things \u2013 such as having decent health care available to the poor and avoiding cruelty to immigrants \u2013 that would help pregnant women choose life. \u00a0He gives the pro-life cause a terrible public image, which is crucial to winning hearts and minds. He wouldn\u2019t answer<\/a> when asked if he\u2019d ever paid for an abortion himself.<\/p>\n

In addition, there are conservative columnists (not consistent-lifers) who admirably articulate what\u2019s wrong with abortion but who also regard Trump as unfit and dangerous, such as David Brooks, Ross Douthat, and George Will.<\/p>\n

Category 2: Trump is Crucial; Biden is Impossible<\/strong><\/p>\n

The people in this category reason this way: First, if the most vulnerable of us don\u2019t have the right to life, then nobody does. It\u2019s foundational to everything. You can\u2019t have good medical care if you\u2019re not even allowed to live.<\/p>\n

The huge numbers of abortions make it by far the most horrific bloodshed going on in the U.S. This in turn impacts abortion policy in other countries. Those numbers will be shockingly higher under any current Democrat\u2019s abortion policies. Therefore, a vote for Biden is a vote for thousands more babies being killed right away, and bodes ill for the future.<\/p>\n

Additionally, Trump has this difference from his predecessors: the pro-life movement has for decades dealt with Republicans who don\u2019t really mean it. Reagan had right-to-lifers working hard for his election, and yet appointed two pro-Roe<\/em> Supreme Court Justices, thus keeping Roe v. Wade<\/em> in place all these decades. (I\u2019ve worded this as a betrayal<\/em>; most pro-lifers won\u2019t use that term, but heaven knows they were frustrated). George W. Bush considered the Title X regulation that would keep family-planning money from going to abortion facilities, but he didn\u2019t put it in place in 2006 because he didn\u2019t want to risk alienating Congressional allies when he needed them for support of his war in Iraq<\/a>. This delayed the regulation another 13 years.<\/p>\n

Trump is the only one of the set who\u2019s actually gotten the job done on Title X and several other abortion-focused policies. He\u2019s the only president who addressed the March for Life in person.<\/p>\n

Most important of all, he\u2019s been more faithful in appointing Supreme Court judges who may be inclined to overturn Roe v. Wade<\/em><\/a>, and would likely appoint more in a second term with probable upcoming vacancies.<\/p>\n

Besides, do we really think that Biden will be better on keeping us out of war, given his past experience? It was the Obama-Biden administration that pushed a costly program of \u201cmodernizing\u201d nuclear weapons.<\/p>\n

Category 3: Not Willing to Choose Between Disasters<\/strong><\/p>\n

Those in this category won\u2019t select either Trump or Biden. They may vote third party or independent. As my mother put it (my family has a long third-party tradition), she votes not for a selection<\/em>, but for a direction<\/em>. By voting for what she actually wants rather than what she merely finds not quite as objectionable, she communicates what she actually wants.<\/p>\n

But there\u2019s one obvious and glaring disadvantage to this approach: absent something weird and unpredictable, it\u2019s only one of the candidates in the two major parties who will win. People in both the above two categories insist voting for anyone else is not really making a choice at all. You can feel cleaner, but you\u2019ve helped the more objectionable candidate win by not voting for his or her opponent.<\/p>\n

\"\"<\/p>\n

Putting the Blame in the Right Places<\/h3>\n

I fall in the third category, and with great trepidation I face an election year in which the many friends I have in both of the other categories are going to castigate me for not being in theirs. But in addition to the point that Category 3 is where my sympathies lie, I also know I would completely and entirely lose any shred of credibility with all my friends in either one of the first two categories if I selected the other one.<\/p>\n

But here\u2019s the point I most want to make:<\/p>\n

While the logic of elections will have the people in each of the first two categories rebuking the people in the other, I don\u2019t think this is where the rebuke best goes. <\/em><\/p>\n

For people in Category 1, their actual opponents aren\u2019t the people who use the reasoning of Category 2. Those in Category 2 are tender-hearted people with crucial concerns. The real problem is that Democrats are so extreme on abortion. They don\u2019t merely have horrendous policy stands, but they constantly have words of contempt for people who think otherwise. Not mere disagreements, but disdain. They\u2019re very deliberately chasing possible voters away.<\/p>\n

I watched in a 2016 Clinton-Trump debate as Clinton justified late-term abortions<\/a> using astonishing euphemisms. I watched in amazement that she didn\u2019t understand that everyone that agreed with her was someone whose vote she already had, and the only thing she could possibly accomplish with that answer was to lose votes. Not people who would vote for Trump, necessarily, but people who she was discouraging from showing up to vote at all. Her answer was stomach-churning.<\/p>\n

And for people in Category 2, their actual opponents aren\u2019t the people who use the reasoning of Category 1. Those in Category 1 are tender-hearted people with crucial concerns. The problem is that while some Republicans are sincere, many candidates (including Trump) only give lip service on abortion because they know that\u2019s where the votes are. In Trump\u2019s case, he doesn\u2019t have a hands-on approach to policy. He lets sincere people who do care handle the policy.<\/p>\n

But he\u2019s doing far more to keep pro-abortion resistance going than a president who was actually sincere and understood the issue would. The work of reaching hearts and minds has been made so very much harder because people who are rebelling against the cruelty he\u2019s practiced put pro-life advocacy into that same category. We\u2019re going to have a lot of trouble correcting the stereotypes he\u2019s doing so much to bolster. Mere policy can only do so much, and we need to understand how much of an obstacle he\u2019s setting up for us in years to come.<\/p>\n

More Positively<\/h3>\n

For the future, we can have less of an election dilemma by having ranked-choice voting<\/a>.<\/p>\n

For this year, those of us in the U.S., or who have friends in the U.S., can at least work directly on anti-violence referendums this November<\/a>.<\/p>\n

But we also need to remember that elections aren\u2019t what decide everything. While they have strong impacts, lots of other actions have strong impacts as well.<\/p>\n

I\u2019ve noticed over the decades that when the Democrats are in office, the pro-life movement seems much more visibly active; during Republican administrations, the peace movement has more and larger demonstrations. Too many people have a sense that when their preferred candidate gets elected, they can sit back and let that person take care of the policy.<\/p>\n

It doesn\u2019t work that way. It\u2019s absolutely crucial that, whoever wins, we keep active at the grassroots. We\u2019ll never achieve what we need to achieve if we just leave it to politicians.<\/p>\n

\"\"Henry David Thoreau
\nSlavery in Massachusetts<\/em>, 1854<\/a><\/p>\n

\u201cThe fate of the country does not depend on how you vote at the polls,\u2014the worst [person] is as strong as the best at that game; it does not depend on what kind of paper you drop into the ballot- box once a year, but on what kind of a [person] you drop from your chamber into the street every morning.\u201d<\/p>\n

\u00a0<\/strong>===========================<\/p>\n

Stickers with the graphic on top are available from the Consistent Life Network\u2019s shop<\/a>.
\nStickers and t-shirts with the second graphic are available from Rehumanize International\u2019s shop<\/a>.<\/p>\n

For our posts on similar themes, see:<\/em><\/p>\n

Pro-life Voting Strategy: A Problem without an Answer<\/a> \/ John Whitehead<\/p>\n

My Difficulty in Voting: Identifying the Problem<\/a> (about the American Solidarity Party) \/ Monica Sohler<\/p>\n

How Consistent-life Advocacy Would Benefit from Ranked-Choice Voting<\/a> \/ Rachel MacNair<\/p>\n

See also our website on<\/em> Peace & Life Referendums<\/a><\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

by Rachel MacNair The Consistent Life Network takes no stand on specific candidates. This is my own personal take on how people who support the consistent life ethic view the U.S. presidential election of November 3, 2020. Three Categories Category 1: Trump is Out of the Question; Biden is Bearable People in this category are… <\/p>\n