An A-PAUL-ing Idea … How the Catholic Vote Will Transform America

 

©2011, Randall A. Beeler

For so many election cycles, the most liberty-minded voting bloc in America--Catholics, 30% of the electorate--has yet to make its voice heard.

Instead of wooing this massive bloc, Democrats and Republicans alike have driven a wedge into the two-chambered heart of American Catholic political philosophy, the key tenets of which are:

• Subsidiarity--that is, the smallest unit of society administers all the responsibilities it can without the intervention of a larger entity. Thus, families--and not villages--are uniquely suited to birth and rear children. A village is uniquely equipped to deliver clean drinking water and to delineate property lines. A state is fashioned to govern the trade of a large geographic region, providing highways, airports, and boundary rights that connect municipalities. And so on. The Church's 2,000-year-old family/parish/diocese polity has weathered the decentralization of the Roman Empire through the depravities of the French Revolution, Naziism, and Communism.
  
• The Dignity of the Human Person--namely, that we are endowed with liberty to freely embrace the good and freely resist evil. Catholic Saints like Francis (who gave himself for the good of the poor) and Martyrs like Maximilian Kolbe (who gave his very life to resist evil) witness the core Catholic teaching: love thy neighbor as thyself.

Price Tag

Since the time of Teddy Roosevelt and Woodrow Wilson, both major American political parties' policies have eroded subsidiarity and the liberty of the individual, creating, domestically, a bloated nanny state interested only in its own expansion, and, internationally, an empire that stations our brave and self-sacrificing fighting men and women in 143 nations, far from safety, home, and family.

The price tag:

• an unsustainable economic system that rolls up debts for a middle class whose each succeeding generation is more enslaved to, and impoverished by, big government; and
  
• a military presence on other peoples' soils that directly contradicts our own cherished notions of sovereignty and liberty and rolls up trillions in debt.

Conversation Shift

When did the conversation change from whether taxes are constitutional to which party is going to "grant"  the biggest tax "break"?

When did we the people cede to presidents (of both parties) the power to wage "police actions" and ram rod a "patriot acts"?

Curiously, this tyrannical nanny-state/war-empire arose even as a once solidified Catholic voting bloc was effectively splintered. Remember the fear-mongering that Al Smith would obey the Pope in place the Constitution? Remember the questions about JFK's Catholicism? How about the 1970s and 80s fragmenting the Catholic consensus on the dignity of the human person into "social conservatives" (pro-life, pro-family) versus "social-justice liberals" (anti-death-penalty, anti-war, civil-rights devotees)?

Catholic DNA

The DNA of the Catholic social philosophy is truly a double-helix. Those who prize the sacredness of life from conception to natural death do so for the same reasons as those who advocate just war and just economies--subsidiarity and the dignity of the human person.

In short, Catholic political philosophy upholds the liberty of each and every individual to will and do the greatest good for all, especially on behalf of the weakest and most vulnerable:

Ron Paul A Sword of Division?

We now see this effort to divide the Catholic vote being spread to the entire American electorate. The status-quo of both parties want to fragment America's perception of Ron Paul, the first statesman since Ronald Reagan made his 1964 "Time for Choosing" speech to forthrightly proclaim an undivided Catholic sense of liberty.

The difference between Ron Paul and 1964's Ronald Reagan?

Ron Paul has been proclaiming these ideals for 35 years.

Only now, as the American people are embracing these ideals for the first time since the founding of our nation, have Congressman Paul's ideas gained enough of an audience to threaten the Demo-Publican hegemony.

Thus, Ron Paul is misleadingly portrayed by his opponents as

• both a pro-life activist who threatens Roe v. Wade and as a failed social conservative because he does not support a life-at-conception amendment to the Constitution;
  
• a radical anti-war protestor, even though he receives more contributions from military personnel than does any other candidate; and
  
• a libertine who wants to legalize drugs and prostitution despite the fact that he has been repeatedly re-elected by one of the most socially conservative Congressional districts in the nation.

Who was it who said that when you earn the enmity of opposing parties, you know you've hit a nerve?

An A-PAUL-ing Idea!

Finally, Catholics have a political leader who takes seriously Catholic political philosophy and whose ascendence will topple the nanny-state empire that the haters of Catholic polity have built.

Let's strike a blow for liberty, the human person, the family, and a government that will again seek to maximize rather than curtail the freedom to do good. Hear out Ron Paul, Catholics. Elect him to the Presidency.

Think of it as an a PAUL-ing idea … at least for the status quo who have so long lulled the Catholic giant asleep.