Posted on by Californiacontrarian

A, B, C vs d


Last week I overheard the following: “I didn’t vote for Trump the last time, and I could never vote for him again, because he is such a “mean tweeter.” I bit my tongue, and thought to myself, “how shallow you are.”However, I didn’t say a word because here in California, ‘shallowness’ is practically endemic, especially when it comes to something that requires some thought, like voting. 

Nonetheless, I thought about this frame of mind for a bit. When one votes for a candidate, is it reasonable to vote for or against him/her based on one single thing? If, in a voter’s opinion a candidate has good ideas or has done a good job on A, B, and C, but has done a poor job on d, should that voter place undo emphasis on d, and basically ignore A,B, and C? This obviously is a rhetorical question, and the answer is going to depend on the relative weight that that specific voter gives to A,B,C, and d. Back in 2016, I voted for Donald Trump because of his feelings on the education of minorities (A), his views on the economy (B), and who he would appoint to the Supreme Court (C), and parenthetically, he didn’t disappoint. I did not especially like his gruff personality, and how he had treated certain people in the past (d), but in my mind, A, B, and C far outweighed (d). 

What I have stated thus far not only points out the asininity of not voting for someone because he is “mean tweeter,” (which to a rational thinking person rates a ‘d minus’, at best), as contrasted with voting for a candidate despite the fact that he is a ‘mean tweeter’ … as A,B, and C are more important.

More importantly it serves as a lead-in to the present political soup de jour which is ‘abortion,’ and how it relates to one’s Catholic faith. Here I am not going to address our “devout,” (according to the NYT) President Biden and his ‘if I just wave my magic wand’ way of thinking on this issue, but rather to the subject of voting for candidates who are emphatically pro-abortion.

For those of you non-Catholics, I am encouraging you to read on as although initially it might appear that I am specifically relating ‘abortion’ to only Catholicism (because that is how the Mainstream Media is phrasing it), I am not. In actuality the principle, is not related solely to Catholics, but to anyone that potentially has some moral fabric. If a person feels that a fifteen week old fetus with a heartbeat is a living thing, or if one believes the science that a fetus can feel pain as early as twelve weeks gestational age, but certainly at twenty weeks, then to me it is not important if one identifies as a Catholic or not.  

For the moral voter it comes down to whether that individual regards ‘abortion’ as an A, B, C, or d-issue. Each individual has his/her own system of weighting different issues. For some ‘abortion’ may be an A issue, and for others it may be a d-issue, and to me this explains why some Catholics as well as other moral non-Catholics can rationalize voting for candidates who are obviously and often aggressively pro-abortion. 

The thinking might go something like this: “Since I am only one voter among thousands, my one vote does not actually elect that pro-abortion candidate, and besides, I do like the other things that he/she stands for, and thus it is not amoral to vote for that candidate.”

It is interesting that the data show that in 2020, about 50% of Catholic voters supported the pro-abortion candidate, Joe Biden. Either these 50% did not think about ‘abortion’ when voting or they put ‘abortion’ into that same category as ‘mean tweeting’ …  “I will vote for that pro-abortion candidate despite his feelings on abortion, which I consider a d-issue. (As an aside, I suppose that is why my local bishop cannot seem to muster the courage to say that Biden’s position is wrong here. To him, I say, “Certainly, for a bishop, ‘abortion’ deserves better than a d-rating.”)

6/28/21

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