Time Immortal

One wonders if Joe Biden’s apparent gaffe — his statement that Obama, as president, would be “tested” within his first 6 months in office — might just have been prophetic (or at least prescient) after all.

The cheering hadn’t even died down after Barack Hussein Obama announced his victory in the American presidential election when the Russian prime minister, Dmitri Medvedev, announced his government’s intention to deploy short range ballistic missiles along the border between Russia and Poland, to “neutralize if necessary the antiballistic missile system in Europe.”

Meanwhile, at home, the stock market plunged on the very eve of Obama’s election. By almost 500 points.

And yes, all this is happening on the watch of the Bush presidency during its final months. I’ll grant that. But equally, it won’t be Bush et. al. who have to deal with the ramifications of these things; it’ll be up to Obama to decide whether to stand up to the Russian bear, or to concede on missile defence. It’ll be up to Obama to decide how to pull the economy out of a recession.

And if he fails in either capacity, the optics on the world stage will be awful.

Erf writes, in response to my last reply to him:

Great answers, Ken, thanks! Unfortunately I don’t have time to respond to everything in that kind of detail, but I do have a couple more things to say.

(Thanks for the clarification on the tags. I was curious.)

I won’t go into much more discussion on the ACORN business, except to clarify: you’re saying that Slacktivist is wrong (or lying?) when they say that ACORN actually flagged the questionable or unverifiable voter registrations before passing them on to the government, as they’re supposed to?

I didn’t realize Joe Biden is an abortion supporter. He’s also Catholic; has he been excommunicated?

What makes Obama’s “brand” of Christianity more egregious than McCain’s, when the latter supports torture, among other things, and as you say isn’t likely to do anything about the existing abortion laws in the states? Why doesn’t that (especially the torture issue, which he’s explicit about) automatically disqualify him from receiving our support also?

Out of curiousity, what is it about Palin that you find appealing, aside from the abortion issue? I can’t find anything in your tags about it.

Thanks, Ken. Your responses are always well thought out and researched. Keep up the good work.

Congrats to the three of you, and welcome to Ella! (Love the pictures of her and Grace you’ve posted.)

Thank you kindly, Erf; I’ll be sure to pass that along to Grace (although she reads this site daily, so I’m sure she already knows).

Now, as to Erf’s question, good Reader, about what assertions (if any) I am making about Slacktivist, I think it’s safest to say that I’m not making any assertions, but rather simply taking note of a few things that perhaps were missed. I’ll grant, for example, the point that ACORN has some process of identifying fraudulent votes — they’d have to have such a system, since there are thousands (tens of thousands, actually) of frauds being uncovered and reported on. Obviously, someone is discovering these things, in many cases.

This was kind of touched on in my previous observation about fraudulent votes. Obviously, many of the frauds have been uncovered, and that’s good…but the fact that ACORN supporters are nevertheless churning out thousands of fraudulent registrations, and encouraging yet more, is still very concerning, and certainly damages the overall legitimacy of the organization and its branches. The fact that the problem is not isolated to one or two districts, but has in fact cropped up in a wide variety of locales, suggests that the corruption is systemic, or very near to it.

Moreover, there’s also the matter of New Mexico, and the fraudulent votes which were linked to fraudulent ACORN voter registrations. Phony registrations are one thing, and not as bad, since they don’t influence an election’s outcome (necessarily — they have some value as a form of propaganda). But phony votes do influence that outcome, and phony registrations are a part of the process of getting phony votes on record. Obviously, not all of ACORN’s fake voters have been uncovered, since votes were case in the “name” of several of them, and I expect we’ll see more fake votes turned in because of it.

And there’s a real problem with that, and it’s what we must keep in mind when we consider the ACORN issue. In the 2000 and 2004 elections, key “swing” states were won or lost by fairly narrow margins. One recalls that in Florida, in 2000, the difference came down to around 500 votes. Five hundred votes isn’t that many, compared to the total number of people who cast votes…but then, with tens of thousands of fraudulent registrations already on the books, is it perhaps not possible that ACORN or some affiliated group might manage to get, say, 600 fake votes cast in a key county or state, thus swinging a close election toward the candidate who wasn’t actually winning? It’s not an absurd scenario to propose, given how small the numbers may in fact need to be (especially now that John McCain is gaining ground in the polls once again).

Slacktivist isn’t lying, I don’t think, but I note that his(?) source exhibits a curious…quirk. The Guardian article that Slacktivist links to uses many links to references, except (notably) when making reference to ACORN’s oversight procedures. Though obviously, many registration frauds have been caught, was there no linkable document which detailed the various anti-fraud schemes that ACORN employs? Are we to take a British columnist’s word for it that they have comprehensive oversight?

There’s a detail or two missing here, methinks.

But let’s move to the issue of Joe Biden. Yes, he’s a Catholic — or, rather, claims to be — and yes, he’s pro-choice. I’m not a Canon Law expert by any means, but in my understanding of things, there’s not much room for a Catholic to claim to be pro-choice, especially if he or she is a legislator. “Any Catholic who obstinately denies that abortion is always gravely immoral commits the sin of heresy. The sin of heresy also incurs a latae sententiae excommunication…This sentence of latae sententiae excommunication applies to any Catholic who denies that abortion is gravely immoral, regardless of whether they keep this denial hidden or publicly reveal it.”

Additionally, “Catholics who publicly announce their denial that abortion is always gravely immoral, or who publicly promote abortion, or who publicly argue in favor of legalized abortion, also commit a mortal sin and also incur a sentence of automatic excommunication. This sentence of excommunication applies to Catholics who are politicians, as well as to those Catholics who are political commentators, or public speakers, or who write or otherwise publicly communicate their erroneous view that abortion can be morally-acceptable or that abortion should be legal.”

And finally, “[a]ny Catholic politician who casts a vote with the intention of legalizing abortion, or of protecting laws allowing abortion, or of widening access to abortion, commits a mortal sin. When such a vote indicates that the Catholic politician believes that abortion is not always gravely immoral, such a politician incurs a sentence of automatic excommunication, under canons 751 and 1364, because of heresy.”

So while Joe Biden claims to be Catholic, his public pro-choice stance would, I think, seem to mean that he has in fact brought upon himself an automatic excommunication from the Church, which cannot be rescinded until such time as he repents of his erroneous views and offers a full confession for the mortal sin of defending or promoting abortion.

The problem with automatic excommunications is that they require enforcement. Not only does the individual have to humbly accept that he or she has contravened the faith and, in heresy, removed herself from the fold of the Catholic faithful — the local bishop and priests must likewise stand firm and enforce Canon Law, and its consequences, during Mass and from the altar. The principal outward sign of excommunication is, of course, denial of the Eucharist to the excommunicated person; it takes real guts for a priest to actually state, to any person, that he or she is unfit to receive the Body of Christ.

There have been priests who have stood up for Canon Law. There have been priests who haven’t. I don’t know enough about Joe Biden’s church life, or the priest(s) at the parish(es) he attends to say whether or not the Canons have been enforced in his case. But from my understanding of Canon Law, it would seem that Joe Biden has incurred a penalty of automatic excommunication, whether he acknowledges this to be the case or not.

Now, I didn’t really discuss the respective denominations of the candidates, apart from Joe Biden, all that much, so I admit that Erf’s question about what makes one candidate’s denomination more egregious than another’s catches me a bit off guard. I didn’t really make that assertion, did I?

Be that as it may, I don’t actually think that one candidate’s faith is more egregious than that of any of the others, although certainly I will say that I regard the faith of each candidate to be in error to the same degree that it does not reflect full communion with Rome. Of the two presidential candidates and the two VP picks, the only candidate whose faith is, I think, left more or less un-compromised is that of Sarah Palin.

I don’t know much about John McCain’s churchgoing ways, if in fact he is a regular churchgoer. I know even less about his faith overall. It hasn’t really even been an issue in the campaign. We’ve already discussed Biden, of course; the best word for him might be “hypocrite.” Palin is an evangelical, and some have attempted to lambaste her as a Young Earther. I don’t actually know if she holds that view or not, though I’m not inclined to think so; she has said that she favours some teaching of the idea that life was created, although from what I know of her statements in this regard, she wasn’t explicitly referring to a literal, six-day creation, but to the general idea that God is the author of life. Perhaps the strangest aspect of Palin’s church is its emphasis on speaking “in tongues.” Take that with an appropriate quantity of salt grains, good Reader, but do remember that among the various evangelical churches, especially those with a Pentecostal basis, such “gifts of the Spirit” are a common focal point for worship gatherings. Palin’s church is hardly unique in this regard.

The issue of Obama’s faith — and now I think I know from where Erf’s question stems, given my citation of Binky’s observations about the volume of hagiography being directed at Obama — isn’t a question of whether or not his church and its teachings are “more” egregious than the church which McCain attends (if he has a church he attends on a regular basis, mind — this I do not know). The issue is that Obama’s supporters have invested a boatload of effort in casting Barack Hussein Obama in divine terms, prompting some to quip that he is the Obamessiah.

What’s egregious, then, isn’t Obama’s denominational stance, but the fact that whatever he believes about Christ, he seems to not have a problem with the sheer volume of hagiography being directed his way. “As…noted before, no Christian would permit music, accolades and statements to be made about them that infringe on the turf of divinity. The One? Halo-pictures? If that was me being divinized, I’d rightly fear the flames of eternal punishment for presumption. But so far as I’ve heard, Obama hasn’t called it off, whatever he’s heard of thusfar. Indeed, he seems to have deliberately wrapped himself in Religion: healing the planet, change, hope, transformation!”

Remember: “It’s evil to claim God’s proper praise for oneself.”

Obama’s denominational stance concerns me very little; the fact that he has wrapped himself in the mantle of divinity concerns me greatly. Secular messianism can only have a messy end, if history is to be taken as any kind of guide.

Now, I want to end by answering Erf’s question about why McCain’s support for — or, at least, his probable inaction on the issue of — torture does not also disqualify him from our (Catholic) support. I kind of addressed that in the previous post, and will do so again, but let me get the rest of what Erf has said out of the way first.

Concerning Sarah Palin, I think the thing about her that I like is that she’s…real. She’s not an establishment hack, for the most part; she doesn’t come across as a politician as much as she does as normal folk. Since I began dating — and then subsequently got married to — a small-town girl, I’ve come to appreciate the open honesty in the way that people who live in smaller communities see and talk about the world, and I get that same sense of sensibility and graciousness from Palin. Unlike the other three people she shares the spotlight with, she seems to be the one that is the most normal, the most human.

She’s also, apparently, as sharp as a tack. Moreover, she doesn’t play the victim card because of her gender; her career in politics has been marked by taking on — and defeating — one “good ol’ boys” club after another, whether it was the local law enforcement agency, an oil company, or her own political party in the years prior to her election as governor. The fact that she walks the walk, rather than just talk the talk, on the pro-life issue is icing on the cake.

Now let’s come back to the issue of supporting McCain, as Catholic voters. In an article I linked to previously, John Zmirak made an apt comparison: Catholic voters are in the same ugly position as were the guards at the Tsar’s palace on the eve of the Russian Revolution. The mob is approaching, the Tsar is safe behind his walls, and the order to fire has been given. What do we do?

The choice facing American Catholic voters next Tuesday seems to be between a vote that will result in an increase of evil, and a vote will maintain the present level thereof. This is not a good choice, especially if one votes with a Catholic conscience. As such, nobody should be under the delusion that good will come of it; the argument can be made that a vote for either major candidate will be a vote for some manner of evil, and we know that we cannot promote the use of evil in the hope of achieving a good, nor should we be deluded into thinking that good will result from the doing of evil.

Obama’s platform is certainly “transformational,” and what it desires to see America transformed into is a very concerning thing indeed. We’ve discussed the ramifications of an Obama victory before, and many of them center on the issue of abortion. By signing FOCA into law, something Obama has pledged to do, not only would abortion law become substantially less restrictive in the United States (in fact, abortion would become a de facto “fundamental right” of women, legally on par with any Constitutional right), but almost all freedom of conscience protection for doctors and nurses opposed to abortion would vanish. As Zmirak notes, this would essentially result in one of two ugly possibilities: either Catholic hospitals would have to provide abortion services, or they would have to close. This sort of result is just a slightly more convoluted way of doing the equivalent of hanging a “No Blacks” sign in a restaurant window. The effect of FOCA would be the same: people opposed to abortion, including most Christians, would essentially be barred from working in medicine.

There’s other concerns as well. Obama would probably repeal BAIPA, and might even bring back some form of the Fairness Doctrine, which would have the effect of stifling political commentary critical of his administration. Toss in a tax scheme that reflects his desire to see “redistribution of wealth” become a reality in America, and the result is, at the very least, highly concerning. That it would probably also be economically ruinous, and steeped in Censorship, adds an additional measure of evil to a platform that has already failed — utterly and completely — on life issues. And to put a cherry on top of it all, there’s one other tidbit of information that has just come to light: even with his proposed tax increases and other changes, Obama’s numbers don’t add up…his government wouldn’t be able to afford e.g. universal health care, his proposed reforms to education, and all the rest. “If he closes every loophole as promised, saves every dime from Iraq, raises taxes on the rich and trims the federal budget as he’s promised to do ‘line by line,’ he still doesn’t pay for his list.” So if he can’t do what he’s promised, he’ll do something else. But what?”

So, at best, a vote for McCain will maintain evil at its current levels. A vote for Obama, or for a doomed quixotic candidate, risks the possibility of an Obama victory, which will increase evil. Now, there’s obviously a certain logical peril inherent in looking at moral ramifications by means of a mathematical/quantitative framework, but I think the point stands: though Catholics cannot support evil, the option does not exist in the American presidential election to functionally, effectively, reduce the perpetration of evil in America.

To that end, the only — and then sinful, but this is a sinful world — choice remaining is to vote against that which will increase evil. And that means voting to keep Obama out of the White House.

Let’s come back to the soldiers for a moment. They have three choices: fire on the mob, fire in the air, or join the rush and help the mob overthrow the Tsar. In this example, the Tsar is the extant establishment, represented by McCain. If the soldiers fire on the mob, all the evils of the Tsar will continue, as surely as they would have had the soldiers of Russia managed to put down the revolutionaries way back in 1917. If the soldiers do not fire on the mob, either by shooting in the air (an analog to voting for a third party, spoiling a ballot, or prematurely deciding that Obama has won and simply abstaining from the vote entirely) or joining the mob (an analog to voting for Obama), the the evils of the Tsar will perish…only to be replaced by the evils of Lenin and Stalin, as happened in history.

Now, keep in mind: I’m not suggesting that Obama would turn the U.S. into a totalitarian dictatorship. This is a metaphor, not a prophecy. But at a moral level, American Catholic voters face the same quandry as those Russian soldiers would have faced. There’s no avoiding evil in the imperfect scenario of the upcoming election. The choice is between the evil that is, and the evil that could be. And one is worse than the other.

I don’t know how history would have turned out had the Tsar somehow retained power, had Lenin’s little uprising been defeated. I suspect, however, that we would not have seen, in Tsarist Russia, the sheer volume of slaughter and human suffering that we saw in the Soviet Union, even given the corruption and excess of the Tsarist regime. In like manner, I don’t think things will improve under McCain…nor will they get any worse. But under Obama, I think things will get much worse, and then at a moral level.

And when facing a doomed choice to begin with, it behooves Catholic voters to choose that which will not make things measurably worse.

Update: Welcome, Steynians!

David Warren has, up on his site, an excellent column about the fundamental differences between the Republican side of the ticket and the Democrat side of the ticket, as seen through the lens of that which matters most in a democracy: the practical view of the person in the street.

Read the whole thing, good Reader. Highly recommended.

Erf writes in after a lengthy hiatus, and brings up a subject I have studiously avoided thus far:

Hi, Ken,

Although I’ve been sadly lax in reading your blog lately I know you’ve been following the doings of the American presidential campaigning with some interest, especially since you’re always interested in the use of lies and litigation to pursue an agenda. Thought you might be interested in this excellent discussion of the attempts by the Republicans to shut down the “ACORN” project — whose only crime is getting poor people registered to vote — by accusing them of voter registration fraud:

http://slacktivist.typepad.com/slacktivist/2008/10/block-the-vote.html

This is the sort of dishonesty and outright scary behaviour that has me very, very glad that Barack Hussein Obama has a strong lead over John Sidney McCain. The corruption in JSM’s campaign has been so _blatant_ I can’t imagine what he would do if he got into office…

(How come you never use McCain’s middle name like you do with Obama’s, anyway? Just curious.)

Anyway, I figured you’d be interested in this discussion. (Slacktivist is pretty consistent in its coverage of this sort of thing, and is very good about keeping it about real issues like poverty and international relations, rather than getting personal. Recommended reading!)

Cheers!
-Erf.

I’ve been trying to avoid commenting on the whole ACORN business, good Reader, although I am not unaware that the whole affair reeks to high heaven. Not being an American citizen, and thus not having a vote to register against Obama, I’ve tended to focus on the only aspect of the entire presidential race that I can honestly say I find to be more or less agreeable, at a political and/or philosophical level: Sarah Palin.

If I may, I’m going to answer Erf’s letter in reverse (more or less). The above certainly addresses my interest in this particular aspect of the campaign: I’m aware of it, and following some of the details, but I had previously decided not to touch on the matter with an article. I suppose, for the purposes of an answer I’ll be giving presently, that I will now have to enumerate many of those details, and will do so in a while.

Concerning the bit about names, and why I use Obama’s middle name but not McCain’s: it’s the tagging system on the website. It’s a very handy convenience feature, not only for the good Reader to quickly find additional discussions about key topics in articles I have written previously, but also for me, in that the same tags that can be used to point the Reader to other material on the site can also be used to publicize written articles over e.g. Technorati, increasing the “reach” of what I write and (hopefully) boosting my readership a little bit. The disadvantage of the tagging system is that once something has been tagged, it’s “locked in,” and I cannot violate its format.

To give one example, consider what happens if I try and tag the word Morality. Though I’ve written the word with a small ‘m’ at its beginning, it should appear with a capital ‘M’ when displayed on the site. That is because in the first instance in which I tagged the word, it was at the beginning of a sentence, and so had been capitalized. And the tagged word will now always be displayed with that capital ‘M’ at its front.

So too with Obama’s name: the first time I tagged it, it was in an article which used his full name. When first I tagged John McCain’s name, it was in an article that did not include his middle name. Because I try and avoid needless duplication in the tags (there are over 4,000 of them as is!), I’m not inclined to go about tagging, for instance, just Obama’s last name, or just his first and last name. He’s already in the system, so to speak…he doesn’t need to be in there in triplicate. I’ve opted to just obey the convention that the tagging system has established for me, because it’s the most hassle-free course of action.

Even if I do have to pause to explain the decision every once in a while.

Now, as to the matter of dishonesty and scary behaviour in each candidate’s presidential campaigns…well, let’s be realistic: attack ads have been a fixture of American politics since the days of Thomas Jefferson (yes, that link is to a humour site, but the history is real). As troubling as it is, one expects it to happen…and happen it does, from both sides. And sometimes, it’s downright nasty stuff that gets said.

One recalls, for instance, the anti-McCain ad from the Obama campaign that lambasted McCain for his “computer illiteracy,” mocking his inability to do something as simple as send an email (McCain has been open about the fact that his wife helps him check his messages). Now, if McCain actually didn’t know how to use a computer, or how to check his email, that would actually be a concern…but the truth is, of course, somewhat more interesting. McCain is a Vietnam war veteran, and was captured and tortured during the course of that conflict. The injuries he sustained were severe, and the effects have been permanent and somewhat tragic: “McCain’s severe war injuries prevent him from combing his hair, typing on a keyboard, or tying his shoes.“

As to fraud and corruption, much the same could be observed. I note that Slacktivist doesn’t provide all that much in the way of examples of actual fraud or corruption perpetrated by the McCain campaign, although I’m sure examples could be found if one did some digging. But if one wants to avoid a candidate for fear of the corruption of his campaign, one would do better to avoid the Obama campaign, then. Massive online credit card fraud is, I submit, rather staggeringly corrupt, especially since Obama may have netted as much as $100 million in donations by this fraudulent means.

In the broad strokes, what has happened is this: the Obama campaign’s online donations website appeared to have AVS (the Address Verification System, a fairly basic security feature of every online credit card payment software) disabled, and then for an unknown duration. This means, of course, that when people submit a name and address along with their credit card information, so as to donate money to the Obama campaign, the submitted name and address do not have to match the billing information for the credit card.

What does this mean, then?

In the United States, electoral law prohibits an individual from donating more than $2300 to a presidential candidate. Were AVS being used, it would be very easy to maintain a database of contributors to prevent illegal donations (i.e. donations from individuals which exceed that limit). John McCain’s donations website uses this security feature. Its absence on the Obama campaign’s site, however, means that by simply giving a fraudulent name (which is, I remind the good Reader, illegal), a person could easily contribute many thousands of extra dollars to the Obama campaign without restriction or oversight.

For example, certain Mary T Biskup of Manchester, Montana, just found out that she had apparently donated over $174,000 dollars to Obama. Or, rather, she found out that her name had been used for multiple donations totalling up to that amount. Another noted Obama donor is a Mr. Adolfe Hitler, of #1 Reichstag Building, Berlin, Germany A Ms. Della Ware of 12345 No Way also managed to donate some funds to Obama, but failed in her attempt to donate to McCain using the same fraudulent name and address.

To be fair, McCain has had a few embarrassing contributors as well, because there are ways to get around verification schemes. But there’s a difference between getting past a verification scheme and turning the verification off altogether, which is what the Obama campaign did, thus opening the doors to the possibility (and probability) of massive credit card fraud.

And to be fair, if one wants to get into the finer points of the scary behaviour of each candidate, one has to pause for a moment — especially if one is a faithful Christian — to reflect on the blatant hagiography that Obama has been subjected to. As Binks notes, “WHATEVER OBAMA BELIEVES, it’s not classical Christianity. As we’ve noted before, no Christian would permit music, accolades and statements to be made about them that infringe on the turf of divinity. The One? Halo-pictures? If that was me being divinized, I’d rightly fear the flames of eternal punishment for presumption. But so far as I’ve heard, Obama hasn’t called it off, whatever he’s heard of thusfar. Indeed, he seems to have deliberately wrapped himself in Religion: healing the planet, change, hope, transformation! That’s why his opponents are given heresy-trials in the media, before their media-executions. It’s ironically fitting for the non-absolutist left to long for an absolute candidate; no secularity, just Obama & anti-Obama. Soon, like the Taliban, there will be trials for any blasphemy and desecration and doubting of The Obama. It’s evil to claim God’s proper praise for oneself.“

As to Obama’s being ahead in the polls: that doesn’t mean much, especially once one corrects for the latent pro-Democrat bias in polls and poll reporting. Obama’s lead is not as strong as it looks.

Now, as to ACORN: if ACORN’s only “crime” was getting the poor registered to vote, there’d be no problem, no controversy, and no story here. But ACORN’s interests seem to extend beyond ensuring that the poor are not disenfranchised. They also seem to be striving to ensure that other traditionally disenfranchised demographic segments of the American population — the non-existent and the deat — are properly registered to vote.

One ACORN worker, Clifton Mitchell, helped to register over 2,000 voters for ACORN — and not one of them was an actual, living person. And Mitchell wasn’t acting alone. Nor was he the only ACORN worker to submit fraudulent voter registrations: Jemar Barksdale submitted 18 fraudulent forms using the names of extant voters, and an additional 22 applications with fictional names. Even one of ACORN’s in-house lawyers suggests that ACORN and its 174 branch offices/affiliates may have committed illegalities in their drive to get voters registered.

And the rabbit hole gets deeper still. Fully 100% of ACORN’s voter registrations in Lake County, Indiana, were found to be fraudulent (although the YouTube video covering the story may have since disappeared). In Ohio, many people have come forward testifying that ACORN encourage them to (fraudulently) register to vote multiple times (shades of Capone: “vote now, vote often!”). Another 10,000 fraudulent registrations turned up in Cincinnati, again as part of an ACORN campaign.

In fact, ACORN’s activities have become so suspect, they’ve attracted the attention of the FBI. And yet, in spite of the mountain of evidence against ACORN an in support of allegations of voter registration fraud, Obama has suggested that those attempting to investigate voter fraud should be prosecuted.

(Note: fraudulent registrations are one thing. They’re concerning, to say the least, but, in the end, a voter registration doesn’t impact the outcome of an election. A fraudulent vote, on the other hand, can do just that. And ACORN has been explicitly linked to fraudulent votes cast in, for example, New Mexico. It would test the boundaries of reason to suggest that this is, and will remain, one isolated incident. Fraudulent registrations, after all)

There’s one other fly in the ointment here: Obama is very closely linked to, and involved with, ACORN. So much so, in fact, that he recently contributed some $800,000 to the group, and also provided the group with his 2007 donor list, something that the Obama campaign has guarded closely in other circumstances. There’s also mounting evidence that Obama and ACORN may have been involved with Freddie Mac and Fannie Mae in the whole sub-prime mortgage mess.

Again, I don’t pretend that McCain is blameless. Personally, I don’t much agree with McCain, although I find him more palatable than I do Obama. Realistically, the only person in this whole campaign that I’d feel comfortable voting for is Sarah Palin — McCain is a fairly typical establishment Republican, despite his “maverick” image, and both Obama and his running mate, Joe Biden, are abortion supporters of a fairly egregious sort. McCain is little better, given his support of embryonic stem cell research — only Palin really has any solid pro-life bona fides.

For Catholics, which both Erf and I are, Obama’s stance on abortion should automatically disqualify him from receiving our support. Oh, one desires not to be a one issue voter, and one shouldn’t be. But still: if one is faithful to the Church and her teachings, one has to take Canon Law into consideration when making any informed political decision. And in Canon Law, a person who “deliberately and knowingly provides essential or substantial means for any woman to procure an abortion also commits a mortal sin and also incurs the…sentence of excommunication.”

Now, typically, the concept of “knowingly providing substantial means for any woman to procure an abortion” does not extend to voting in favour of political candidates; Catholics may vote in favour of pro-abortion candidates under certain circumstances, provided that the candidate in question, should he or she gain power, not do anything to expand the legality or pervasiveness of abortion in society.

With Obama, however, that won’t happen. Not only did Obama enjoy Planned Parenthood’s endorsement above and beyond even Hillary Rodham Clinton (there I go, following the tagging conventions again) during the primaries; he has pledged to make legal the Freedom of Choice Act (FOCA). This comprehensive bill would abolish legislation against partial-birth abortions, get rid of parental notification laws across the U.S., and make abortion fully taxpayer funded. He has also spoken out against the Born Alive Infant Protection Act (BAIPA), which mandates that those infants which are “accidentally” delivered alive as the result of an abortion must be given live-saving care, rather than be left to die in a closet. There is good reason to suspect that Obama might attempt to see this act repealed.

It should also be noted, good Reader, that FOCA could potentially strip freedom of conscience protection from doctors and nurses who refuse, on moral grounds, to perform or assist with abortions.

Thus, the argument could be made that a vote for Obama is an act of “knowingly providing substantial means for any woman to procure an abortion,” and as such is a Canon Law violation. Not that any bishop or priest is likely to go to such lengths and deny Communion to Obama supporters post-November 4th, of course. But the moral argument is there, and so are the facts at hand: a vote for Obama is a vote for a candidate who will vastly expand abortion “rights” in the United States. In general, that not a vote that a Catholic should make, and it should be troubling to Catholics that a candidate who is so ardently pro-abortion appears to be leading in the polls, even against an otherwise despicable candidate.

John Zmirak, whose article I link to above, likens the electoral choices facing the American people to the line of soldiers outside the Tsar’s palace, facing the advancing mob and being given the order to fire. “They must choose,” he suggests, “between a crooked, bumbling oligarchy prone to starting futile wars — and a ravening, reckless mob. While it’s mostly made up of citizens rightly enraged, the mob is led (or will soon be led) by vicious ideologues who promise to persecute Christianity.” The soldiers given the order to fire know this; the know whom they defend, they know his crimes, and they know the grievances of those rushing forward. Do they fire, or turn on their officers and join the mob?

Discussing the implications of FOCA where freedom of conscience is concerned, as noted above, Zmirak concludes thusly. “So President Obama and his congressional supermajority would force every Christian hospital, doctor, or nurse either to abandon their faith, or go out of business. By federal law, believing Christians would be banned from a major industry (and apostolate). This is literally equivalent to a law banning faithful Jews from owning newspapers.

History tells us that steps such as this aren’t where religious persecutions end. It’s where they begin. Things are already scary enough in neighbouring Canada, where Christians are now routinely hauled up before human rights tribunals for repeating what the Bible teaches concerning sex. Who knows what some Obama-appointed judge, 20 years from now, will make of a pastor whose sermons attacked the “fundamental right” of women to kill their children? How many churches and seminaries will face crippling civil judgements and have to close?

It can happen here. It is about to happen here.

Unless we obey our worthless officers, and fire on the mob. With all that in mind, I’m endorsing Tsar Nicholas II — er, John McCain — this November 4.”

The comparison is rather apt, especially at the level of moral implications.

McCain is little better on life issues, of course, but at least there is the reasonable probability that abortion law won’t be expanded under a McCain presidency (especially not with Palin in the VP’s seat). A lack of expansion is not the same as a reduction (and reduction is preferable), but perhaps it will have to do. But if McCain is essentially neutral on the issue of abortion, he is still supportive of stem cell research, which is morally problematic. And he’s also supportive — or, at least, will do nothing to abate — the “interrogation methods” used at places like Guantanamo Bay (read: torture).

So in a very real way, a vote for McCain is also, in its own way, a sinful act, not unlike the sin of a soldier obeying the order to fire on the advancing mob. And perhaps, for American Catholics, the trip to the polls will have to be followed up with a trip to the confessional; were I in the position to have to make the decision myself, that would probably be my course of action. It might seem best to do as Mark Shea often proposes, and cast a vote for a quixotic candidate, but I think Zmirak nails this option to the wall only too well when he notes that this is rather like firing into the air rather than at the mob; in the end, the mob may still win because the responses of the soldiers facing them are divided — given the implications of an Obama victory, there is every reason to avoid subjecting the Republicans to a form of “the Nader effect.”

I haven’t blogged all that much about the coming presidential elections, and perhaps I should be doing it more. Okay, I’ve had a fair bit to say about Sarah Palin, given the tone and quantity of hateful vitriol being directed at her. But in the end, she’s still just a VP pick; the race is not between her and her counterpart, but between her boss, and Joe Biden’s boss. That latter boss, Barack Hussein Obama, is actually a rather…concerning individual (I won’t say ’scary,’ because I don’t want to sound too much like a Lefty).

It’s not just Obama’s record of support for abortion, which is somewhere in the vicinity of 100% (he even, apparently, voted against the partial-birth abortion ban). Indeed, such is the depth of Obama’s support for a woman’s “right” to terminate the life of her unborn child that he won out at Planned Parenthood’s favoured candidate during the primaries, beating out Hillary Rodham Clinton!

That’s saying something, and not a good thing either.

But in addition to that, there’s his complicity in voter fraud — in this current election, as well as in previous ones! — perpetrated by