A person wrote in and asked a very honest question about why I voted for President-elect Obama. His concern was about voting for someone who supports abortion. The person who wrote me is pro-life in the widest of ways, since he is also against the death penalty in general. He gently asked me about my conscience and how it played into my decision. Below I reproduce my answer to him, although I have cut out two phrases that he felt were not fully appropriate. I thank him for pointing them out to me. I have also included a couple of notes where he made some good points. Of course, I have cut out any identifying references.
I appreciate questions of the type he asked, with the respect that he asked it. That type of question in that type of way always forces me to examine myself, which is something required of us in Scripture, 2 Corinthians 13:5, “Examine yourselves to see whether you are in the faith; test yourselves.”
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My decision to vote for Sen. Obama instead of Sen. McCain was a “lesser of two evils” decision. No, I am not referring to either man. I agree with what Sen. McCain said when answering one of the persons at his rally that Sen. Obama is a good and honorable man. And, I agree with Sen. Obama when he said of Sen. McCain that we must honor the service of a true hero among us. Rather, I am referring to a constellation of events that led to my choice. BTW, the Orthodox Church is strongly against abortion and has made pronouncements to that effect more than once.
It may, perhaps, be more fruitful for me to start with some post-election statistics, and then ask a question. Go to http://www.cnn.com/ELECTION/2008/results/polls/#USP00p1 for some post-election statistics. There are a couple of statistics to which I want to draw your attention. Sen. McCain overwhelmingly lost the votes of those of us with an ethnic background. Another way to put it is that the only demographic that Sen. McCain won across the board was white people over 30 years of age. It is interesting to note that if they are under 30 they went with Sen. Obama. Though not shown on this chart, Christianity Today has a chart that shows that Sen. McCain won 60 some percent of all white evangelicals. He did not, however, win the ethnic evangelicals. And, please note that among Latinos and African-Americans, the number of us who are morally conservative (regarding abortion, etc.) is quite high.
The proof that non-white conservative believers did vote for Sen. Obama was that all the defense of marriage legislation passed. The most surprising result was in California, where Proposition 8 was passed with the support of the conservative African-American vote, which had gone for Sen. Obama in the presidential race. (Note: Latinos also voted in favor of Proposition 8.) In other words, where given a choice non-white believers voted in support of Biblical morality.
So, here is my question. Why did the Republican party overwhelmingly lose the ethnic religious conservative?
The answer has to do with the different views that whites and non-whites have as to what is happening in this country, what the priorities ought to be, and in voting for an actual event rather than a hypothetical event. With the different view that whites and non-whites have about things like opportunity, education, glass ceilings, etc., and given the campaign in which Gov. Palin consistently appealed to Joe Sixpack and the Real America, we quickly voted to protect our children and grandchildren. Joe Sixpack and the Real America is our nightmare story for we saw them as a blatant appeal to that part of this country which has caused us so much pain. [Note: the person with whom I corresponded pointed out that I need to be careful lest I impugn many innocent people with the prior actions of a few “boneheads.” He is correct in calling me on that.] You need to understand that, for us, our actual children and grandchildren, giving them an opportunity, protecting them, and seeing them grow up with no ceilings is a much much higher priority. In all the statistics our children and grandchildren have the lowest educational possibilities, the lowest paying jobs, the highest unemployment, the highest prison statistics, etc. The Bill Cosbys and Bill Richardsons among us are pushing us to change, but they are also pushing the society to change. We voted for hope and a future for our children.
The second part of that answer has to do with hypotheticals versus reality. The reality is that while the Republican Party has been campaigning on an anti-abortion platform, they only nibbled around the edges of banning abortion, with a fight or two about late trimester abortion. President Bush, by himself, did more to try to limit abortion than the entire Congress, and even he did not take the fight on fully and directly when he was at his peak approval. [Note: the person with whom I corresponded pointed out that a President cannot approve legislation but can appoint judges, and that President Bush did much in his judicial appointments. Again, he is correct, which leaves the Congress hanging, in my view.] Not one plausible constitutional amendment was reported out of any committee during the several years that the Congress was Republican. In other words, the reality was that the promise was not kept. Had the Republican Party kept its anti-abortion promise, in other words, had they seriously tried, then, even if they had failed, I, and many others, would have been more likely to have voted for Sen. McCain and he may have been more likely to win the election. It may very well be true that the Republican Party lost the election as much as Sen. Obama won the election.
The other side is that many claims were made about Sen. Obama. But, many of us saw those more as scare tactics than as reality. In particular, the attempts to portray Sen. Obama as a radical and a socialist backfired big time in the ethnic community. Many of us have been accused of being radicals for stances we have taken on social issues (not abortion, by and large, a majority of ethnics are against it). Remember that the Rev. Martin Luther King was regularly accused of being a radical and a Communist (look at the news tapes). For us, to be accused of being a radical can be a badge of honor. It means that we have hit a nerve and someone has reacted by trying to sideline us. Look at what happened in the African-American community when they hit Sen. Obama on his “associations.” His support actually went up and the community closed ranks. Even among us Latinos, support for Sen. Obama went up after those charges.
Finally, as you may have guessed, we see abortion as one of a constellation of issues with which we need to deal. While it is one of the most important issues, it is not the only one we need to consider, nor does all my morality hinge on that one issue. I said at the beginning that I voted on the basis of the “lesser of two evils.” To be more accurate, I looked at a constellation of issues, not all of which were “ethnic” issues, including the failure of the Republican Party to keep its promises. However, many of them were “life” issues. Most of us ethnics see the future of our children and grandchildren as a significant “life” issue. Neither man was going to address the entire constellation in the way in which I thought they ought to be addressed. So, I had to make a choice as to who could bring the most change to the largest number of issues in that constellation. Then I made a choice.
[Finally, we both agreed that the election of Obama has already gone a long way towards erasing the “perception gap” that exists between minorities and the majority. If President-elect Obama turns out to be a bad President, he will probably have no one to blame but himself.
Please also note that I did not address all the issues that went into my decision, only the one that had been brought up in the email to me in contrast with some of our ethnic life experiences.]
Social Conservatives seeking to use government to legislate morality to the masses have been poisoning the well for too long by destroying the practical and ideological consistency of negative rights, thus opening the door to government cooptation by demagogues with various agendas and malignant vested interests from all sides of the political spectrum. Their religiously inspired diatribes against full American freedoms continue to alienate people in droves, particularly because most Americans today are rightfully oversensitive regarding matters of conscience, religion, social institutions, and private behavior.
Until it extirpates this reactionary faction, the Conservative movement’s defense of free markets is hopelessly doomed to intellectual impotence. Economic self-reliance through free proud enterprise on the one hand, but moral paternalism in matters confined to the bedroom or uterus on the other hand, are ideologically irreconcilable positions both of which sound hypocritical when preached by the same political voice.
Judeo-Christian values are neither sufficient nor even necessary components of Americanism. Conservatives with a mental blind spot to this reality often try to justify the institutionalization of Judeo-Christianity by deeming it to be the only absolute ideological shelter for freedom. Plato alone has spoken with more clarity and conviction about absolute transcendental values such as Justice and Goodness, than there can be found throughout the entire Bible. Natural Law has enjoyed a fertile tradition in Western Philosophy, originated by Protagoras, Socrates, Plato, Aristotle, carried out by the Stoics, and augmented by many great thinkers up to the present day.
Not only is the firm binding of natural law with religion not dictated by any philosophical necessity, it is also a strategically self-defeating position for Conservatives to take in the ongoing battle for hearts and minds. I cannot think of a more dangerous proposition for the future of American cultural institutions than the prospect that their desirability and justification depend on the dubious existence of Abraham’s God.
Why would a person with kejda’s obvious antipathy for Christianity even bother to look in on this blog unless it is to just be a flame thrower.
You are certainly entitled to be wrong but why do it here?
I have no interest whatsoever in legislating morality. Sleep with whomever and however many you please.
Well, there is that little matter of murder. Especially of the most defenseless among us.
Until someone can show me without one iota of doubt either scientifically or spiritually that fertilized zygotes are not humans then I am compelled to give the the fetus the benefit of doubt which is the minimum that every jury in America is asked to do.
I just read about kejda on her web site and agree with about 99% of what she says.
Go figure.
I do respect you, Fr. Ernesto, but I still don’t understand this. Granted, I’m not an ethnic minority (unless one still sees the Irish as oppressed) ;), but I tried to look at all the issues and I just couldn’t come up with one that was proportionately in favor of Obama that overrides literal life and death situations that we are dealing with when it comes to abortion. Even if McCain did nothing but maintain the status quo, I could name numerous ways in which Obama would make decisions that would result in even more babies dying from abortion, from FOCA, to his stance on partial birth abortion, to his pledge to defund crisis pregnancy centers, to his intent to reverse the Hyde Amendment and Mexico City policies. These are real ways he intends to move the battle lines decidedly toward death rather than life.
In truth, there are several of Obama’s policies that would benefit me and my kids personally, even as a white guy, over what any GOP candidate was proposing. But when I stand before God, I couldn’t imagine telling Him that I subordinated the killing of innocent children to these other concerns. Maybe if Obama had been running against an complete maniac whose foreign policy threatened to bring about World War III or something. But my options were no where near that stark.
Hey all, I promise to post tomorrow. I have the flu today. I just tried to think so I could respond and realized my “thinker” is not functional right now.
There are often no easy answers in the field of politics, Ragamuffin. I simply wanted to point out that for a white moral conservative, abortion ranks as a top issue, while for ethnic moral conservatives, other “life” issues (or at least the constellation of them) may rank higher, or at least as high.
In fact, abortion ranks fairly high among moral conservatives of all backgrounds. President Bush increased the number of morally conservative ethnics voting for him by significant percentages during his first term. However, by his second term, the failure to address abortion with a coherent strategy (even if it would have failed) seemed to say that we were being misled on that issue. By the mid-term elections of his second term, erosion in the percentage of the ethnic vote going Republican was beginning to set in.
Add to that the bruising fights over affirmative action and over how to solve the presence of the vast number of undocumented immigrants in this country illegally, as well as the fights over Guantanamo and how the relationship between civil rights and anti-terrorism could be managed, and the 2008 election showed that ethnics no longer trusted the promises of the Republican party.
Finally, it seemed that the issues important to ethnics were not simply being shuffled into the background but continually denigrated by many in the Republican camp, as though we were wild-eyed liberals for bringing them up. And many of those issues are life issues. So, it seemed as though we were being manipulated into voting for Republicans using a wedge issue that they had no intention of truly fighting for while we were told that our issues were simply the result of liberal propaganda that had infiltrated our ranks. So, this election we gave up. President-elect Obama cannot “enlarge” abortion much beyond its already quite loose limits, and may not try too hard to do so. But, he may be able to bring significant change to other life issues that have been ignored for too many years, in our viewpoint.
Could we be wrong? Sure, but, in our viewpoint, we have been wrong already. Sometimes the “devil” you do not know is indeed worth choosing over the “devil” you know.
Let me add what I hope will be a final comment. If you go to “Changing the Failed Strategy of the Religious Right Into a Winning Formula That Helps Heal Our Country” you can see a very angry post-election reply by Frank Schaeffer, the son of Francis Schaeffer, to those who accused him of being un-Christian by supporting President-elect Obama.
I do not agree with his anger or some of his critique. Nevertheless, it is a worthwhile read and a good analysis of many of the mistakes made by the Religious Right. It is not simply about abortion.