GOP: Don’t Ignore the Valuable Catholic Vote
On the debate stage, there could not be a starker contrast between Joe Biden and Donald Trump. The former is frail, incoherent, and frequently confused, while the latter is strong, almost bombastic, and pragmatic to a fault. However, thanks to the changes wrought by Trump and his campaign team to the GOP’s platform — if such it can still be called after its evisceration — the policy positions of the Democratic and Republican parties are harder to distinguish. If the Republican Party truly wishes to capitalize on Trump’s successes over the past eight years, it would do well to look to Catholic voters for direction.
Catholic voters have largely abandoned the Democratic Party which once so heavily relied on them.
Once predominantly staunch Democrats, American Catholics have been leaving the Democratic Party over the past several decades — at first in drips and drops, but in droves over the past decade in particular. A recent poll commissioned by CatholicVote has confirmed that Catholics have ditched the Dems. Among American Catholics in five swing states — Arizona, Michigan, Nevada, Pennsylvania, and Wisconsin — Trump was the favorite for President over Biden, by a staggering margin of nearly 20 points. (READ MORE from S.A. McCarthy: The Pernicious Persecution of Traditional Catholics)
Despite the implicit proclamations of Trump’s newly-emaciated Republican platform, immigration and inflation are not the issues which have driven so many voters, including Catholics, out of the Democratic Party and into the arms of the GOP. These are, at present, hot-button issues, and necessary to address, particularly given the damage done over the past four years by Biden and his regime. But they remain, in short, the bare necessities.
Abortion and the Catholic Vote
One of the chief factors that has driven Catholics out of the Democratic Party is that of abortion. Since the end of the 20th century, the Democrats have become increasingly, exponentially extreme on the issue, jettisoning Bill Clinton’s fabled mantra of “safe, legal, and rare.” Even restoring the provisions of Roe v. Wade — gutted, remember, by Catholics! — isn’t enough for Democrats today, who clamor for abortion on demand, funded by the federal government, through all nine months of pregnancy — and possibly even after birth, as Trump himself has reminded voters.
Abortion is condemned by the Catholic Church as an incontrovertible evil: it is the brutal ending of the life of an innocent child. While Catholic thinkers and leaders — from Augustine of Hippo and Thomas Aquinas to Popes John Paul II and Francis — may differ on such matters as the death penalty — that is, the justified execution of the most heinous of criminals — there is no room for differing in the Church on abortion.
Another issue which has driven Catholics away from the Democratic Party is the LGBT agenda. While some dissidents — such as Jesuit James Martin — have tried to soften the Church’s rhetoric on sexual sin to such an extent that it is little more than a polite whisper, the Church has long held that homosexual acts and relationships are inherently disordered and gravely evil, rejecting both the moral and physical order designed by God. The Democratic Party’s LGBT obsession extends far beyond homosexual unions, though. The rapid, practically-orchestrated embrace of transgenderism has proven a bridge too far for many of even the most liberal Catholics.
It has often been quipped that the Republican Party establishment is just the Democratic Party following the speed limit. The novel degeneracies heralded by Democrats today as new rights or civic necessities are picked up by Republicans ten or fifteen years down the road, when the Democrats have moved on to newer and more depraved sins.
Catholic author and staunch conservative Evelyn Waugh, disgusted with the ineffectiveness and capitulation of the Tories he had once backed, swore off ever voting again, notoriously saying, “The Conservative Party have never put the clock back a single second.” Although Waugh was English, the principle he articulated holds true in America, too.
While Trump’s recognition of the importance of economic concerns and the like is wholesome, the removing of a commitment to pro-life and pro-family principles from the GOP’s platform risks reducing Americans to little more than economic units. Furthermore, it risks alienating those who vote with their consciences.
The vision articulated by Trump’s platform is certainly a pragmatic one, but only in the short term. He addresses only the bare necessities, the most common pressing issues of the day. But the day will, inevitably, end. Where will the Republican party find itself when night falls?
The American nation is built on the family. As the Irish Dominican Fr. Vincent McNabb once so adroitly noted, the family is the basic unit of any society. While enabling families to grow and flourish financially is to be lauded, it is not to come at the expense of abandoning the most vulnerable of Americans — the unborn — and allowing the American family to crumble. (READ MORE: The Bogeyman: The Leftists’ Hatred of the Catholic Church)
Catholic voters have largely abandoned the Democratic Party which once so heavily relied on them because its principles were those of national suicide. If the Republican Party wishes to keep the Catholic voters it has worked so hard to earn over the years, it needs a vision that will last through the night; it needs to espouse an eternal moral code, protecting the family and the unborn, instead of just short-term political strategies.
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