Catholic Bishops Wisely Let New Mexican Voters Decide this Election

In chastising Catholic bishops for not trying harder to influence our recent election, Louis Biad errs in several respects.

Biad scolds the New Mexico Conference of Bishops for choosing not to endorse anyone for governor – and for correcting a conservative group that, without permission, used a Conference statement on abortion in a Steve Pearce endorsement. 

Our country is founded on the separation of church and state. We have a secular government. When a church throws its weight around unduly, that offends others, may alienate church-members, and is divisive.

A church with sufficient power to change an election result should use that power with great reluctance. The church could further lose credibility even among its faithful. Biad himself concedes that a majority of Catholics voted this year for pro-choice candidates. Gotta figure they know the Church's official position. 

Not everyone worships the Christian God; and not all Christians, even all Catholics, interpret God's words identically. The Catholic Church may view abortion as murder; but Jews, some Christian faiths, and non-theists don't. If Biad lived in a state where Muslims were a majority, or large minority, would he appreciate them tipping the scales to make adultery a capital offense? 

Biad's assertion that the Church should have endorsed Mr. Pearce because of abortion presupposes that the Church is a one-issue entity: abortion outweighs the Church's positions on peace, climate change, refugees, caring for the poor . . . A reasonable Catholic might feel that a candidate's agreeable positions on those issues outweighed her being pro-choice.

Virtually all reputable scientists and a strong majority of U.S. citizens recognize the serious threats posed by climate-change. Likely plenty of Catholics do too – or trust their Pope on this one. Should the Church endorse someone who says it's nonsense? 

Biad complains of a bill to rescind a New Mexico criminal law penalizing folks who have or perform an abortion; but those laws can't be enforced anyway. Roe v Wade remains the law. Should the bishops endorse a candidate to the right of Donald Trump just to make a purely symbolic statement against abortion? Morally, is outlawing abortion more urgent than sounding the alarm to minimize deaths and damage from climate change? How should the Bishops assess the morality of weighing some lives against others? Childbirth and non-medical abortions both pose their dangers.

Following Biad's advice would hurt both Church and State.

Taking extreme positions increases divisiveness. A church's political involvement gives each side reason to dig in. (“God says I must fight to outlaw abortion,” and “I have to support free-choice because I support the church-state separation.”). This diminishes the already slim chance of compromise. 

But maybe Biad intends divisiveness. While pleasant and reasonable in person, he writes such lines as “abortion, a sacrament of the left.” That's an insult. Some voters hate abortion but also care about other issues; some would never have or approve an abortion but doubt the State should tell a woman what to do with her body; and some view abortions as necessary, though perhaps unfortunate. Mr. Biad must know that.

Too often he writes not of actual people but of “progressives.” He quotes something crazy that a progressive says, he builds it into a straw man, and lights it on fire. Maybe I should write “the capitalists” or “the plutocrats” in every paragraph – instead of addressing issues.

I'm glad the bishops' counsel decided to let voters decide.

                                                -30-

[The above column appeared this morning, Sunday, 30 December 2018, in the Las Cruces Sun-News, as well as on the newspaper's website and KRWG's website.  A spoken version will air during the week both on KRWG and on KTAL-LP, 101.5 FM (streamable at www.lccommunityradio.org)]

[For readers who live beyond Doña Ana County, Louis Biad is a local businessman who writes a regular guest column in the Sun-News, where my columns also appear.  As I mention in the column, he's a reasonable gentleman in conversation (which we've had on my radio show and I hope will have again), but his columns are sometimes not so reasonable.  Quite possibly, he'd say the same about me.  The column that sparked this response appeared in the newspaper on 20 December, headlined "Bishops Should Lead Fight against Ferrary Abortion Bill". 

Louis is one of us who have strong views on certain issues but enjoy a collegial discussion of our differences, and he and I will discuss the issues discussed in these columns, and likely others, on my weekly radio show on 23 January, on KTAL 101.5 FM, either at 8 a.m. or at 9 a.m.  The show airs weekly, Wednesday mornings from 8 to 10, and with co-host Walt Rubel we discuss various issues with various people.  (If you disagree with my columns and might want to do so on radio, feel free to let me know, by commenting on this post or emailing me care of the Sun-News.)] 

[Obviously I don't believe abortion should be criminalized.  Or that men should primarily be deciding that issue.  However, I also believe strongly that endorsing Pearce would have hurt the Church itself a bit.  The Church's moral authority is already somewhat limited: it advocates a lot of positions, including prohibiting birth control, that many of its own adherents don't follow, which estranges them slightly; and, obviously, it's in the news these days mostly for tolerating and even covering up priests' sexual misconduct with kids a huge abuse of authority and trust.  Non-Catholics already don't like the Church's tendency to influence our secular politics.  To the extent that the Church has moral authority with non-Catholics, that authority should not be squandered.  Using it to advocate a purely symbolic statement of an unpopular position, can be squandering it.  (Of course, I'd have loved to see the Church taking an unpopular position in favor of ethnic equality and against the huge and destructive U.S. mistake in Viet Nam, back in the day.)]  

[Each of these columns goes through a rigorous editing process, in which the smartest person in our house reads it and leaves it looking like a mediocre fourth-graders paper, with an abundance of red decoration.  Then the rewrite gets the same treatment.  One small paragraph that survived till the final draft, despite comments in each earlier draft that it was "Boo! - too extreme" or should be rethought, was this one:

Following Biadian logic, the Church could not have endorsed an electoral opponent to Adolph Hitler if that opponent were pro-choice. (No, I'm not likening Steve to Adolph.)

Maybe it is too extreme.  Or discourteous.  Maybe Adolph Hitler is now something one can't say in polite company, and will soon be replaced by "AH" -- just as folks say, "the N-word."  But both the N-word (which I agree we should generally avoid) and AH are or were important realities, and losing sight of their realness is the first step toward forgetting that they didn't happen by chance; that God-fearing Christians shouted "Nigger!" or muttered it semi-audibly or still think it in the privacy of their minds; and that God-fearing Germans voted AH into office.  
AH and his crew got a lot of votes by capitalizing on reasonable discontent felt by people getting the short end of the economic stick and experiencing their country's decline in word affairs.  DT -- whose mere name depresses many readers -- did the same.  DT, like AH, made effective use of scapegoats to distract voters; and each promised to improve voters' lot, appeared briefly to do so, but in fact did the opposite. Each also took "Nationalism" to the point of destroying (AH) or substantially weakening (DT) the nation he purported to be serving.
Yes, there's a vast difference between Hitler and Trump.  Hitler was cagier and had a truly ugly master plan, and committed genocide. Both are somewhat demented, but Hitler was more violently so (and likely insane, which I don't believe Trump is); and Trump probably doesn't hate anyone the way Hitler hated Jews; He's more of a casual racist. 
Anyway, I liked the line.  (Well, I wrote it.)  My point was simply that choosing a leader based on one narrow issue can have huge consequences, whether those consequences are the killing of six million Jews (and many more in a world war) or further failure to try to minimize climate-change's devastation of our world.  I certainly do not mean to say that Mr. Trump's motives (or Mr. Biad's) bear any resemblance to Hitler's, except that both AH and DT certainly are self-absorbed, readier than even most politicians to cause vast damage to further their ambitions and self-aggrandizement,  inclined to appeal (quite successfully) to the less healthy parts of us, and very wrong-headed.]