Wednesday, October 13, 2004

More on Election 2004

I was asked to put into writing an analogy that I used in an oral conversation recently, an analogy that may help shed light on the Bush-or-Kerry conundrum.

What are the facts? To use Fr. Smith's apt phrase, "Kerry never met an abortion he didn't like; but Bush never met an abortion he couldn't rationalize."

Kerry will be in favor of partial-birth abortions and sodomite marriages; Bush will be in favor of partial-birth abortions under certain circumstances (which prohibitions are really governed by entirely subjective criteria and are therefore useless), and will continue to support "same-sex civil unions," even if he won't call them "marriages."

Under Kerry's leadership, we will no doubt see an increase in the number of barbaric baby-butcherings; under Bush, we will not see a decrease, because he is not interested in overturning Roe v. Wade - he explicitly compromises on the issue of killing babies. If the baby was conceived because of rape, then it's ok to kill it.

Are you hearing that? That baby is still going to die, still going to have its innocent life snuffed out, just because it was conceived in an act of rape - and our President will give his thumbs up.

So in reality, we're looking at the prospect of a) Millions of infant executions in the next 4 years, or b) Thousands and thousands of infant executions in the next 4 years.

Those are your choices. That's what is on the ballot this year.

The analogy I used is this:

Suppose an armed gunman breaks into your house and says, "It's your choice: give your assent to let me kill one of your family members, and only they will die; or give me your assent to let me kill all of your family members; but if you tell me not to kill any of them, I'm going to kill all of them."

Well, Mr. or Mrs. American Voter, what's it going to be? Or rather, who is it going to be? Which of your family members would you willingly sacrifice?

Can you honestly say you would give your assent to let the gunman kill any of your children?

I wouldn't. I'd fight him, kick him, bite him, scream at him, and do anything I could to disable him, knowing full well that my entire family would probably die in the process - in other words, my pitiful efforts to stop him may be entirely in vain, but at least I died fighting.

In contrast to that, how could I live with myself if I surrendered to his entirely unacceptable "choice?" Yes, Mr. Gunman, here's my daughter - kill her, I give you my permission.

No way.

I may have saved the rest of my family by that choice, but then I have to live with the knowledge (and the guilt) that I willingly and without a fight gave my explicit permission and assent to the murder of my daughter. I couldn't even press charges later, because I said "ok." In fact, if anyone is going to trial to be judged, it's me, because I gave my fiat. If he kills my entire family without my consent, you better believe I have a right to seek judgment and retribution - but only if I fought him tooth and nail in the process.

Likewise, when you stand before God, you want to be able to seek just retribution: God, I tried everything in my power to keep both of these men out of office, but I didn't have the strength, so now I'm asking you to judge them and repay their wickedness.

But you can't say that if you voted for either one of them, now can you?

There is another candidate out there who seems to be pretty solid.

Michael Peroutka is running under the Constitution Party banner, and is 100% pro-life. In fact, he's promising to end abortion the very day he gets into office. Now, whether he can pull that off is a question for debate, but at least he's got the right attitude.

Maybe he won't win the election. But I guarantee you that he will not win if he doesn't get your vote; people keep saying that to vote for a 3rd party is to "waste" your vote. No, voting for an evil Republican party or an evil Democrat party and helping those two parties to maintain the "status quo" until the next election - that's a "wasted vote." You want to make sure that in four years we're stuck again with a choice between a wicked Republican and an even-more-wicked Democrat? Then waste your vote on one of those two parties and send them the message that, no matter how rotten become the two choices they give us, we'll still pick one of them.

(BTW, if you're a Catholic and you still think you can in good conscience vote for a man who, as part of his initiation into Skull and Bones, was required to thrash an effigy of the pope, I don't know what to tell you)