I'm also disgusted by the Novena put out by Priests for Life on our "solemn duty" to vote? What is this? Belgium or Greece?
Democracy is nothing but a recipe for tyranny by the volonte generale. What's particularly galling is the way Republicans are somehow framed as "pro-life" when in actuality they are the architects and prime movers of the population control programming and birth control mentality whose linchpin is abortion and whose strange fruit is the Artificials on whose Excess Manufacture siblings our Pro-Life president's associates are capitalizing big-time.
Sickening. I hate the way the Church is being co-opted. But, given the way key hierarchy have carried water for the eugnecists since Spellman and Roosevelt's day and given the free rein most radicals and homosexuals ... not to mention contracepting and artificially reproducing Catholics ... enjoy anymore, utterly understandable.
Just another, perhaps the prime, reason I'm delighted to be sticking to my convictions this year: Women shouldn't vote.
(Talk about your women's liberation ... =)
The last thing we need is that "mandate" of which Barbara Bush has been speaking when defending our "Lesser of the Same Evils" political system. If folks would just once have the moxie to vote FOR someone instead of AGAINST the greater of the same damned evils, we'd finally open this nation up. Third parties might still lose but NO CANDIDATE could then pretend the measly 30-40% by which he took the election (among those Americans actually still interested in elections) somehow translates to a "mandate."
Perhaps then Presidents wouldn't be so quick to gift themselves with brand new, strictly unconstitutional powers as done in the aftermath of 9/11's insta-Mandate where fearmongering and chest-beating made for nearly lockstep bipartisan support for the unthinkable.
Surely Catholics find "non-negotiable" the notion that the Powerful are entitled to profile as they please for purposes of political murder. I'm not sure that the strictly confidential (and even outsourced, if necessary) summary execution option our Executive Branch now enjoys is a step in the right direction either.
If we are going to have a republic (the Founding Fathers knew democracy didn't/wouldn't work), I think we should go back to the Founding Fathers idea that only property owners should vote. Was it de Tocqueville who said that the beginning of the end of a democracy was when the voters realized that they could vote themselves the riches of the public treasury? (Whoever said it, said it much better than I have.)