Why Catholics Should Vote for Bush

As a Catholic, I'm voting for President George W. Bush on Nov. 2. The reason is simple: Although Bush isn't a Catholic, and not all of his positions are always consistent with Catholic teaching, it is he, not his nominally Catholic opponent, John F. Kerry, who promises to foster and defend the Catholic ethic of life.

At the core of that ethic--and I'll say it bluntly--lies abortion, the life issue that most sharply divides Bush and Kerry. Bush supports at least some restrictions on abortion; Kerry supports almost none. Related to it are the Catholic Church's positions against euthanasia and embryonic stem cell research.

Opposition to these three practices is not an idiosyncratic Catholic "tenet" (as Kerry put in a speech this past weekend)--a specifically Catholic doctrine like the immaculate conception of Mary that Catholics might affirm in private but should refrain from imposing on their fellow citizens. Rather, the sacredness of each individual human life is a moral proposition: every human entity, no matter how small, unformed, weak, disabled, or decrepit, deserves to be treated with dignity as a member of the human family. We were all once "dots," as Sen. Thomas Harkin calls human embryos, and we are all destined to die in helplessness.

On the issue of embryonic stem cells, Kerry fails utterly. Not that Bush is perfect in this regard; far from it. It was Bush, for example, who in 2001 permitted federal funds for the first time to be used for limited embryonic stem cell research, on the dubious rationale that the embryos used for the authorized cell lines were already dead. That opened the floodgates for the current relentless pressure to increase such research funding exponentially.

Yet Bush is at least trying to hold the line on embryonic stem cell research. Kerry isn't. In his view, unrestrained scientific "progress" trumps all other concerns. And just as Kerry has caved without ethical qualms to the ESCR lobby, he has caved (all the while nodding perfunctorily to his "faith") to the most extreme demands of the abortionists' lobby and their radical feminist allies. Kerry supports the use of federal money to pay for abortions, opposes even the mildest restrictions on the procedure (not only the ban on the ghastly "partial-birth" procedure but even the law that makes it two crimes, not one, to murder a pregnant woman), and has vowed to appoint judges who will keep "Roe vs. Wade" the law of the land forever. Bush has done none of these things. When Bush declared during the second debate, "No tax dollars will be spent on abortion," Catholics should have cheered.

Bush's willingness to recognize the worth of unborn human life, at least to this extent, comports with the principle of solidarity--the belief that we are all family and have a duty to help our weakest members. This principle is fundamental to the Catholic social teaching articulated by a long line of popes culminating in John Paul II.

Bush's policies further the Catholic vision of society in other ways. His social policies may seem, on first glance, coldly individualistic. On closer examination, however, it is Bush, not Kerry, whose philosophy of government promises a broadly and genuinely pro-family society.

Continued on page 2: »