Perhaps the Republicans left their so-called voting base, but they didn’t leave their funding base. In the matter of spending, there is little difference between Republican and Democratic politicians. The question is, where are they spending? Republicans like to spend money by giving lucrative no-bid contracts with no oversight of accountability to corporations. Democrats like to spend money by providing government services to the people.
…like public funding of abortions, which is about the only service Democrats have provided for the poor in decades. I think you’re buying the images of both parties that the image makers create. The images are bogus. Only deeds count.
Neither party is properly identifiable with Catholicism. They’re political parties, identifiable with those who run them and those who support them.
When we think about voting for this person or that person, we need to decide, not on the basis of which party he or she belongs to, but, first, as to whether we have a moral obligation NOT to vote for him or her. If we vote for someone who does evil, we participate in that evil. Some moral issues, like abortion, are absolutes, and if we vote for one we know will support it, then we have blood on our own hands, no matter how we excuse it. If some candidate promises to yank the safety net out from under the truly needy (not the middle class who just want freebies paid for by somebody else), then we’re participating in yanking the bread from the mouth of the poor.
But, among current issues, and until the time comes when some candidate espouses machinegunning school children, the killing of the unborn trumps all. The poor will survive to the next election cycle, and have a chance. The aborted baby won’t, and doesn’t.
I’m not a Republican. Never was. But if a person wants to know about social justice, he or she needs to start with the social encyclicals, not some image of a political party the image makers create. If you want to know why, not being Republican, I supported Bush’s “partial privatization of social security” plan, and support a better safety net for the truly needy, and fewer for those who can afford services themselves, you need to read the encyclicals from “Rerum Novarum” on, and you won’t need to wonder at all. This country treats its truly needy shamefully. Both parties do, and they’re both too busy bribing the middle class with benefits and doing favors for their wealthy supporters to do what they really ought to be doing. It would actually be cheaper if they just cut taxes to the middle class and paid back their big supporters (and themselves) out of the public till openly. It’s wasteful to filter bribes through the zillion government agencies it takes to hide the truth of what they’re doing. And don’t be fooled, they both do the bribing and the payback in equal measure…often to the very same sources.
But abortion is first. If all Catholics voted based on that one criteria alone, just once in a national election, the abortion fortress would come tumbling down, because no national candidate (and few local ones) could stand a loss like that and would never risk it again. Then we could look at other, lesser, evils and duties. Catholics don’t do it, though, because some really do favor abortion, but most who vote for abortion by voting for its supporters, convince themselves (with a lot of duplicitous help) that they’re actually voting for something else, when they’re not.
