We need to participate for the common good. Sometimes we hear: a good Catholic is not interested in politics. This is not true: good Catholics immerse themselves in politics by offering the best of themselves so that the leader can govern.
For a long time, we've been in a spot due to abortion and, more recently, gender issues.
Abortion is murder. There's no two ways about it. Mutilating the body to change genders isn't murder, but it is a mental disease and entertaining it is gravely wrong. At one time there were Democrats who acknowledged these things. Rep. Henry Cuellar of Texas is the last pro life Democrat in the body. Generally, Democrats are in favor of seas of infant blood flowing out of doctors' offices everywhere.
Today, more than ever, without prejudice to the right to self-defense in the strictest sense, it is important to reaffirm that the ‘just war’ theory, which has all too often been used to justify any kind of war, is now outdated
Pope Leo XIV
Undeclared wars of aggression are also gravely wrong. Under at least Pope Leo's view, only defensive warfare is morally licit. Attacking Iran was not only illegal under the U.S. constitution, it was not morally licit. Attacking Venezuela was illegal and illicit. Murdering people in boats off South American coasts as they're suspected of being drug runners is illegal and immoral. The people ordering these things are committing homicide, as are the people doing them. The US is killing people illegally and immorally as a matter of national policy, or rather the policy of handful of illegally acting people.
Threatening to take property? or life because we can is gravely immoral. Threatening to steal Greenland, or whatever, is immoral. Taking the mineral wealth of Venezuela is immoral.
We are a deeply immoral nation.
How does a person weigh these thing?
Well, in my case anyhow, it means that I will not vote for Republican members of Congress. I just won't. I won't vote for people who are supporting military murder or extrajudicial killings.
Indeed, I do not think it's morally licit to do so.
Nor is it moral to demonize people based on their race or inclinations, which this administration has done and continues to do.
Finally, as a Catholic, and the same would be true for an Orthodox Christian, or a Mainline Protestant Christian, this administration is thickly populated by a certain sort of Evangelical thought that would convert the nation into a Calvinist theocracy. People find that, it seems, to far fetched to consider, but it's a fact and many other things that were only recently too far fetched to imagine have now occurred.
Moreover, abortion, at the Federal level, is no longer constitutionally protected. That takes that fight down to the state level, at least for the time being, although it is certainly not impossible to imagine a Democratically government, House, Senate, and Oval Office, acting to protect it on that level. Whatever is going on in regard to transgenderism seems to have sort of stabilized and there doesn't seem to be anything going on with same sex "marriages". Indeed, nervous Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent is in one, putting him in the same category as Pete Buttigieg who was routinely lampooned by MAGA for being a homosexual in a same sex union.
Indeed, it's hard not to notice all the hypocrisy in the Republican Party on all of the remaining moral issues. Bessent is homosexual and in a homosexual "marriage". Vance is a Catholic but was boosting IVF. Trump is a serial polygamist. Republican politicians engage in marital infidelity and misbehavior with the GOP ignoring it ,while the opposite is true for Democrats when they transgress.
And finally, Trump, in order to remove the threat from Robert F. Kennedy, Jr., made a deal with him to appoint him to the head of the nation's health, resulting in a further moronic decline in vaccinations and a major boosting of health stupidity.
All of this, again, haunts the Apostolic Christian. Does a person vote for Republicans on the threat of abortion reviving, and thereby vote for war, childhood death by disease, ICE shooting in the streets, and on and on, let alone just voting for the patently stupid.
Of course, the two party system really isn't. And often you really don't have to vote for the Republican or Democrat. I haven't voted for a GOP nominee for White House in at least the last three elections, nor have I voted for the Democratic one. I voted for the candidates from the American Solidarity Party.
The trouble there is that there often isn't a ASP candidate on the local level. There are none here. The third parties that show up here are the Libertarian Party and the idiotic Constitution Party. The Constitution Party is worse than the Republican Party, and always has been.
So for this year, I will vote for Barlow for Governor He's a good choice. I'd like to vote for Byrd for Senate, and I won't vote for Hageman, but I have yet to decide what I will do. For House I'd like to write in Christensen and I won't vote for Gray while I want to avoid Kinney.
All somewhat tough races to face.
Locally, I'm lucky that I don't have to make such decisions for my local legislative districts. The City Council race is non partisan. The County Commissioner race is partisan, however, and one of the finalists is simply awful, and I'd guess, quite frankly, actually extremely liberal in spite of running as a Republican, and another nice but not a great candidate. That leaves the two Democrats to consider. Abortion and whatnot will not be a county issue and while I have not made my mind up on who I will vote for, I won't vote for two of the three GOP finalists.
If any come by, I'll flat out ask; "why are you in a party which picks on Canada, declares illegal wars, and hates the original native name for a large lake?"
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