On Voting
“Jesus wept.”
John 11 35
“And when he drew near and saw the city of Jerusalem,
He wept over it, saying, ‘Would that you, even you,
had known on this day the things that make for peace!’”
Luke 19:41-42
The first time I interviewed a victim of sexual abuse by a priest I wept. I sobbed. And I apologized, over and over. I apologized to the young man and for the Church I love and the good priests who serve the People of God.
Before the cowardly Cardinal Bernard Law declared, “By all means we call down God’s power on the media, particularly the [Boston] Globe” for exposing decades of abuse and his indifference to the suffering of victims and their families. Before Law’s resignation from Boston and his appointment to the cushy – undeserved and luxurious – post of “archpriest” at Rome’s Santa Maria Maggiore.
Before the scandals of sexual abuse were known worldwide or the Cardinal Archbishop of Washington, D.C. was exposed and laicized – “defrocked” in the parlance of the press.
Before all that, I was writing The Killing Secret: The Sexual Abuse of Boys and the Murder of American Men. It reflected my years as a prison chaplain working with adult male survivors of childhood sexual abuse. A number of publishers praised it as “necessary” and “important” but declared it “too hot to handle.”
In the process, I interviewed the young man from Texas who had been repeatedly assaulted by his parish priest. Years after the abuse, his pain was still too palpable, so overwhelming that I could only sob – for him and his family and his fellow victim who had committed suicide, with him, for my Church
I lost words. I “lost it.” I sobbed and apologized over and over.
Today I cry again for the Church – my Church, our Church – as, again, it alienates good men and women, young and old, of Faith and no faith, and across the entire spectrum of sexual identities and orientations.
Today, I am again lost for words when a New England bishop tweets “Biden-Harris. First time in awhile [sic] that the Democratic ticket hasn’t had a Catholic on it.” Or a venomous priest in a swing state preaches “Just quit pretending that you’re Catholic and vote Democrat. Repent of your support of that party and its platform or face the fires of hell,” and then receives the backing of a Texas bishop, who declared “I endorse” him.
What a minute.
This is the same priest who calls DACA – Delayed Action on Childhood Arrivals – children brought as infants to the United States by parents fleeing terror, persecution and poverty “criminal illegal aliens.” What would he have had three and four and ten-year-old children do? Scream and cry and fight with their parents, insisting on being left behind in their countries of origin? Or does he simply prefer to expel them from the only true home and country they have ever known – including those who gave years of service in America’s military?
He also decries the “climate change hoax” and praises the man who claimed COVID-19 would “go away” in “a few days,” all just “disappear” like “a miracle” as “one of the best pro-life presidents.”
The priest, to whom I give credit for having earned a law degree before entering seminary, is either certainly not a math wiz or he’s outright untruthful and has an incredible imagination when he claims to have “crunched the numbers” and “I came up with a pretty close approximation of how many Catholics voted for Obama in 2008 and 2012. Zero.”
Father and the bishops want – demand – to impose their politics, theology and morality on the issue of abortion on every American – actually every citizen of the world. On this issue – and maybe DACA kids and climate change and vaccinations and who knows what else – they want a theocracy. Not democracy.
Citizens who are genuinely “prolife” – as opposed to “pro-birth-but-after-that-forget-about-them” – will work through a democratic (deliberately small “d”) process of voting and legislation using science and reason.
Perhaps they might begin by looking at Colorado. Thirteen years ago, rates of unintended pregnancies among young women remained stubbornly high – six of every ten women, ages 15 to 24, who had a live birth that year reported their pregnancy was unintended.
Then, in 2008 the state began to expand family planning services and, for the first time, provide long-acting reversible contraception like IUDs and implants to low-income women at little or no cost. Over the next five years, the state’s teen birth and abortion rates were cut in half.
Between 2009 and 2017 the birth rate for those 15 to 19 dropped 57 percent – from 37.5 births per 1,000 teens to 16.1 – the steepest drop in the country. More importantly in today’s political climate, the state’s teen birth and abortion rates were cut in half.
In 2019, officials with the Colorado Department of Public Health and Environment predicted a continued downward trend in teen births and abortions, with a gradual tapering off of rates and numbers.
In addition, the quality of sex education is especially important in limiting the rates of unintended pregnancies and abortions. In many Southern states – often with the highest rates of unintended teen and young adult pregnancies - sex education is almost exclusively abstinence-based. These are also the states with the highest rates of rural poverty, lack of economic opportunities, and limited investment in family planning.
Public policy affects rates of unwanted pregnancies and that same public policy – not anti-abortion legislation – can affect abortion rates.
Colorado accomplished its reductions in rates of unintended pregnancies and abortion by expanding family planning services to federal Title X clients, many of whom are low-income and uninsured. They provide access to long-acting reversible contraception (LARC), including IUDs and subdermal (under the skin) hormonal implants. Because the devices can cost as much as $800 each, wide-spread use at federally funded clinics was prohibitively expensive. The extra funding removed those financial barriers – providing the same level of care as for women with insurance or Medicaid.
LARCs are 99 percent effective, last three to ten years, and require no additional action after insertion – making them the easiest form of birth control.
Colorado also normalized honest and science-based conversation around sex through a public awareness, multilingual campaign called BeforePlay with websites and billboards.
The political goal must become to make unwanted, unintended pregnancies at any age as rare as possible and abortion even more rare.
This is the “political” goal of thinking men and women of faith and no faith: To work to limit the numbers of unintended pregnancies nationwide and, in so doing, decrease the numbers of abortions.
Despite Father’s less-than-perfect “crunching the numbers,” in coming days and weeks hundreds of thousands of people of Faith will examine their well-formed consciences. Some may vote for
A thrice-divorced man who: reportedly cheated on his third wife just days after she gave birth; who has a history of more than 20,000 lies, falsehoods and misstatements; is determined to deprive many of the nation’s poorest of the poor of medical care; claims global warming and climate change are a fabrication of the Chinese and a “hoax”; who knew the “strenuous” Coronavirus was transmitted through the air and five times more deadly than the annual flu but chose to remain silent in order to protect the stock market and his investor friends; who, through his Department of Justice, executed five federal prisoners in the weeks surrounding his party’s convention – a contradiction to his self-proclaimed “pro-life” convictions; who repeatedly called for the execution of five Black and Hispanic youths before their trial and after they were exonerated on all charges – the opposite of a “pro-life” stand”; who denied the citizenship of a Black American who dared to present himself as a presidential candidate; has a history that includes four casino bankruptcies among his six trips to bankruptcy courts; and, three years into office still can’t get his own Internal Revenue Service to clear up his still on-going “tax audits.”
Millions of others – with well-informed and well-intentioned consciences – will vote for a candidate whose party platform continues to advocate a woman’s freedom to make her own reproductive decisions – decisions about birth control and abortion – and, in the long-term, will continue to work toward reducing the rates of unintended/unwanted pregnancies and abortions.
On November 4 or after their “early” or absentee or mail-in voting, all will still be Catholics. No matter what the bishops or the numbers-crunching Father say.
SPOILER ALERT: Watch the Trump campaign try to capture some desperately needed Catholic votes by trumpeting his wife’s “Catholic” background. Catholic? She married a twice-divorced Presbyterian in an Episcopal church, where she also baptized her son and, as FLOTUS, has twice attended Christmas Eve services; the couple marked Christmas Eve 2019 at a conservative/evangelical Baptist-affiliated church after an especially negative article about POTUS - “Trump Should Be Removed from Office: It’s time to say what we said 20 years ago when a president’s character was revealed for what it was” - appeared in an influential evangelical publication founded by Billy Graham. Neither of the bishops nor the numbers-crunching priest cited above would consider that “Catholic.” Nor would many other Catholics on either side of the line.