Voting isn’t as easy as you might think.
Each election cycle, you can expect Catholics with different points of view telling other Catholics for whom they should vote. You will also see Catholics telling some Catholics for whom they may not vote. Some bloggers will tell you it is this way, that way or the highway. This is an annual pastime of the Catholic blogosphere, so I thought I might have my say about the principles which guide my vote.
Let me repeat this again at the outset. These are my opinions and my opinions only. I do not speak for the Catholic Church, yet. Let me also say that I have good friends, both in and out of the blogosphere that will vehemently disagree with some of my thoughts. I respect them, I just disagree with them and hope that in time with counseling and a good med regime, they will come to understand how right I am. Enough preamble, let’s get to it.
You are not electing the Pope. In any election…
March 17, 2012 at 3:10 am
here is so much wrong with this post that it’s difficult to gather my thoughts enough to respond to it in full. But let’s start here:
Patrick, with this article, you have trashed your own credibility. This clearly contradicts an earlier article you wrote and proves it to have been disingenuous. On March 7 th , you posted this article which was disingenuously titled, “Romney Still Needs To Win Me”:
https://creativeminorityreport.com/2012/03/romney-still-needs-to-win-me.html
In that article, you futilely tried to explain that, “If he wants [you] and [your] ilk, he has a lot of convincing still to do.” In the comments section, you were called out on the credibility of your article and the fact that all Romney would really need to do to get your vote would be to win the nomination.
So now (and possibly because you know it’s only matter of time before you eat your words and come out in support of Romney), you post this above article, which completely proves the point. So before, it was "Romney Still Needs to Win Me," which you were rightfully called out on, and now the truth comes out about how you will vote for Romney and how you apparently believe that any other choice is a bad one. This is pretty embarrassing for you. Your credibility took a bad hit on this one.
March 17, 2012 at 3:12 am
Your statement that “[t]he lesser of two evils is good enough for [you],” as well as, “[you are] pulling the lever for the other guy because he will not be as bad” are so pathetic that you should be ashamed for having posted this. Way to abandon any and all principle. As I believe another commenter pointed out, if the choice were between two candidates who were both utterly appalling, you apparently would think that picking the slightly-less-appalling candidate would be the right thing to do.
March 17, 2012 at 3:16 am
This attitude has rendered the Republican party useless. I am tired of being fed garbage every Presidential election and being told that I have to eat it or else I might get something worse. Shove it. The Dems just voted in one of the most liberal Presidents in history, yet the Republicans are too weak-minded to ever vote for a true conservative and always and only manage to nominate establishment candidates who are barely right-of-center, if that. And they still do this even in the wake of the ultra-liberal Dem president victory. It's utterly pathetic.
The attitude that unless we support the Republican nominee, we're essentially "helping" the Democrat is appalling and arrogant. It means that conservatives are expected to fall in line and compromise for the Republican establishment's desires, but never the other way around. The better solution would be for Republicans to abandon their party's establishment and support a true conservative third-party candidate. But the arrogance of these attitudes causes many Republicans to consider it blasphemy to ever question the establishment's pick.
Until Republican voters reject the establishment, or until the conservative base splits from the Republican party and finds a new home with a third party, we are reduced to merely hoping that the "least worse" candidate wins and that the collapse of America will simply drag out at just a slightly slower pace.
March 17, 2012 at 8:42 pm
The great Catholic writer Joe Sobran had another viewpoint. Paul haters, read to the end:
"In essence, Paul appeals to that subversive document, the U.S. Constitution, long since abandoned by both major parties, not to mention the U.S. Supreme Court. He tests every proposed law by asking whether it exercises a power authorized by the Constitution. The answer is seldom yes.
Many years ago Paul told me, with his affably ironic smile, that he felt more pressure from his fellow Republicans than from Democrats, because the Democrats weren’t embarrassed when a Republican voted like a real conservative, but the Republicans were. Showing up his own party has been the story of Ron Paul’s career. No other Republican has voted against President Bush as consistently as he has.
Paul isn’t flamboyant or defiant about it; his style is quiet and reasonable, not combative. Being a maverick isn’t a pose for him. It’s a matter of conscience and logic.
As a result, the GOP doesn’t care much for him and, if he runs, will try to stifle him. The allegedly right-wing Newt Gingrich, when he was riding high, once supported Paul’s opponent in the primary race; Gingrich knew what he was doing. A genuine conservative’s worst enemy is a fake one. And vice versa.
Paul ran for president once before, in 1988, when he bolted the GOP to run on the Libertarian Party ticket. Much as I admired him, I voted for George H.W. Bush, afraid of ”wasting” my vote on Paul, who had no real chance of winning. Silly me. I soon realized I had really wasted my vote on Bush. It made no difference to Bush, after all, since he was going to win no matter what I did; but it made a difference to me. I still regret it. (And to this day, Bush has never thanked me.) (Read the rest)…
http://lewrockwell.com/sobran/sobran-j26.1.html