A Catholic Time Warp Election
Anthony Annett
August 4, 2016 - 6:13pm
When it comes to Catholic political discourse, sometimes I think this election is stuck in a time warp. It’s almost as if Pope Francis was never elected pope. It’s almost as if the Republican Party had not nominated one of the most unfit people ever to seek high political office.
Instead, it’s all 2004 all the time, with its single-minded obsession with abortion. Or it’s a modified 2004 with a wafer-thin trifecta of abortion, same-sex marriage, and religious liberty. These, you see, are “non-negotiable.” Everything else is, by definition, negotiable.
Nowhere is this narrowness clearer than with Carl Anderson, Supreme Knight of the Knights of Columbus. Just recently, as noted by my friend Michael Sean Winters, Anderson argued that “abortion outweighs all other issues in the presidential campaign and Catholics cannot vote for a candidate who supports abortion rights.”
Why is abortion raised to such a unique category? One standard answer is that it is intrinsically evil. It is, but this category makes little sense in a political context. Masturbation, for example, is intrinsically evil while war is certainly not. Taken to its absurd conclusion, this approach would hold Bashar Al-Assad to a higher standard for masturbation than for barrel bombing!
https://www.commonwealmagazine.org/blog/catholic-time-warp-election