May I add a corollary for Congressional elections? Pro-life legislation cannot come to the floor for a vote of either the House or Senate unless it is first voted out of committee, and that can’t happen unless, respectively, the Chairman of the House/Senate Judiciary Committees (and subsequently the Speaker of the House/Majority Leader) are pro-life. Committee Chairs are members of the Majority Party in each body.

That means,effectively, that the first and most important pro-or-anti-life vote any Rep. or Senator casts in a new Congress is the vote for Speaker of the House/Senate Majority Leader, as that vote decides those positions and which party will chair the committees.

A person who tells you he/she is pro-life yet is willing to vote for (for example) Nancy Pelosi to be Speaker of the House and John Conyers to be head of the House Judiciary Committee, is misleading you (and possibly also himself) because whatever his personal views, he knows full well no pro-life legislation will ever make it to the floor if his candidate is Speaker/Majority Leader.

If, also for example, you hope the new Congress votes to de-fund Planned Parenthood, you might have to hold your nose and vote for a candidate odious to you in your own district in order to get Judiciary Committee Chairs and a Speaker/Majority leader who would let such a bill come up for a vote. (Would you rather have Patrick Leahy—11% pro-life voting record—chair the Senate Judiciary Committee or Charles Grassley—100% pro-life voting record?)

I would argue that if we keep our eye on the prizes of what hearings take place (investigating Planned Parenthood vs. investigating crisis pregnancy centers), what votes come to the floor and what kind of judges get approved to the federal bench, individual races are much less important than the question of who wins the Speakership/Committee heads.

sounds more like the “just vote” theory. ba dump bump

These are very important principles. We must use discernment and prudence, the utmost care, when great matter is at stake. Not to do so, is a sin of recklessness, at the least. The greater one’s knowledge and ability, the greater the moral matter at stake, the greater is the positive duty to act so as to minimise the evil and maximise the good.

When you write “the most anti-life, anti-religious liberty, anti-Catholic candidate in the history of candidates”, I suspect you are talking about Romney, depending on the day.

Would you please write a blog where you explain your calling him that?

Thanks in advance.
Rover.

These are very important principles. We must use discernment and prudence, the utmost care, when grave matter is at stake. Not to do so, is a sin of omission or recklessness, at the least. The greater one’s knowledge and ability, the greater the moral matter at stake, the greater is the positive duty to act so as to minimise the chance of evil and maximise the chance of good. I think, Proportional representation voting allows for greater scope in achieving this with one’s vote(s).

Rover, I’m pretty sure that “Candidate A” is the incumbent, and the “tall patrician” is Romney.

Pat, I think that your logic with 3rd parties and reasonable chance of success apply quite well to elections based on the overall popular vote-Congressional, gubernatorial, etc. But in presidential contests decided by the electoral college, if I’m hypothetically registered to vote in the home state of hypothetical candidate A, where candidate A has a virtual 100% chance of winning, there’s not much difference in voting for candidate B or someone from a 3rd party. I wasn’t 18 yet in ‘08, but I probably would have voted for Libertarian Bob Barr (who’s a social conservative from Georgia) over McCain. If I lived in Ohio, for instance, though, that would be another story. Just my opinion though.

The problem with this, is that it encourages people to vote for the likes of Romney in primaries- knowing conservatives will land up voting for him. In Great Britain- Catholics voted Conservative to Stop Labour. Now the Conservative party wants to ban Christian symbols, and force priests to perform “Gay Marriage”.

That said, based on a 7 issues analysis. I’d say it is acceptable to vote for Santorum or Romney when they face Obama, but I doubt Romney can win.

I guess it depends on your definition of anti-life, etc. To endorse a warmonger and call him pro-life is illogical. To endorse unjust wars, wars that do not meet the criteria of just war theory is not Catholic…forget about how Constitutional undeclared wars are. Voting for lesser evils is still voting for evil. Now you can just ditch all that and say neener, neener but you are NOT persuasive. You are making deals with the devil. Even the Pope is against this middle east warmongering for Israel.

Here in New York, rotten borough of the nation, any vote not for Obama will be “thrown away”. So, should we just throw up our hands?

You lost your argument when you said, “the lesser of 2 evils is good enough for me,” and “we’re not electing the pope.” Really? So if the moral terpitude of the USA reaches a point where the 2 candidates are Karl Marx ideologues, or one has the popular appeal of Hitler—which is the lesser evil for you? Is that even a choice? So you won’t stay home and pray for a moral candidate to help us take back America from the Culture of Death. You’d dutifully cast a vote and cooperate with material evil. This message tells the Republican party it’s okay to abandon a traditional moral platform in favor of pro-choice, anti-family, pro-homosexual candidates with socialist goals; that these are the only electable candidates. Just remember Archbold, if you wake up one day and realize America has become a modern version of the USSR, it was you who voted to make it happen.

You may not go to hell for voting for A but he sure will make your life hell on earth.

Hat Lady, please check your Catechism (and your common sense). We are allowed to vote for the lesser of two evils if those are our only choices. Indeed, we have a RESPONSIBILITY to do that. To sit home and pray for a good candidate when the candidates have already been selected in insanity.

Besides, only an extremist would call any of the Republican candidates evil people. Like the rest of us, they have each taken, at various times, immoral or imprudent positions. That does not make them evil people. To be a sinner is not necessarily to be evil. 

To sit home and pray, and refuse to vote when we are offered a candidate who will do less moral harm, could itself be considered an immoral act. To refuse to vote Republican this November is essentially to vote for Obama. Pray on that.

“The lesser of two evils is good enough for me.” 

That pretty much explains everything we need to know about you, and it isn’t pretty.

Ah, no, Will. As a former NYer I think you should just hope and pray that all the drugees signing the fraudulent absentee ballot there are miss-spelled and go out to cast your vote! You might not win(probably won’t), but if the nation sees that NY itself goes to the incumbent by a much smaller margin than usual, it my rock thier confidence in the President of Hope. That and pray the Come Holy Spirit prayer every day till the election asking that the hearts of the nation be turned to truth. Now that I think about it, that is what I am gonna do.

And That Hat Lady, In that situation, the besting thing to do would be to run for president youself!

I am a pro-life, small government, strong national defense, free market conservative. I will vote for a bag of wet toast before I vote for Obama. But:

Do you think that someone can agree enthusiastically with all of Obama’s positions (except abortion) and still be a faithful (however wrongheaded) Catholic in good standing? If you think that, then why can’t that person use your own line of reasoning to justify his vote for Obama?

Why can’t someone say “No, I don’t support abortion, but Obama seems to me to be the best overall candidate and the lesser of two evils.”

In making the case for holding your nose and voting for Romney I think my leftist Catholic friends would read this article and find the cover they need to rationalize their vote for Obama.

A scandalous number of Catholics are just fine with Obama and we need to be making the case to them that it’s unacceptable to vote for him with something other than “yer goin’ straight to hell”.

You are the man, Mr. Archbold!  Or should I say: you are the Catholic
man!!!  We desparately need good, strong, well-informed Catholic voters
to place someone in the White House who is closer to God rather than
closer to Mr.Scratch. For those too squeamish for the term “the lesser
of two evils” you may prefer the way Father Pavone states it, and I
paraphrase: you should vote for the candidate who will have the better
chance of influencing the world toward more good rather than less.
In my book, anti-life, anti-religious liberty and anti-Catholic just
“ain’t” good.  Get real, people, and vote like it counts!  It does.

I agree with @greenlight.  I think all the candidates (except one) are evil enough that a left-leaning Catholic could use this to justify voting for Obama.  And a “Catholic” candidate whose stances are identical to Obama’s with the exception of abortion, is a very slight improvement.  Also, if Santorum is the nominee, in my ultra-liberal state a third party candidate would have a better shot of winning this state in Novemeber than Santorum would.  If one has to vote for a candidate who has a chance of winning, voting for Santorum in my state would be for losers.

If it was a sin against the Fifth Commandment (Thou shall not murder) in my 1958 published “Life in Christ - Instructions in the Catholic Faith” (imprimatur by Samuel, Cardinal Stritch, Archbishop of Chicago) to hold “religious and racial prejudice” against another “and PARTICULARLY TRUE in the case of JOINING AN ORGANIZATION which promotes segregation OR ANY OTHER DENIAL OF HUMAN RIGHTS (my emphasis), Then Why Is It Not A Sin To Join The Democrat Party, Let Alone Vote For It?

That teaching has helped me tremendously over the years.

Cheesy cooked grits rock. Will only vote for candidate who likes Cheesy Grits.  Got it.

Nice nod to Inigo Montoya in the closing line.  Nice post.

Cheesy grits are not Southern. They are an abomination developed to make real grits palatable to Yankees.

Its true, we have to vote for the candidate that will do the least harm.  There are non-negotiables:  abortion, euthenasia, basically life issues.  Things like war and the economy are prudential and we just have to make those decisions by reason not really knowing how they will turn out.  But most candidates are very clear on how they stand on abortion long before and up to the election.  Over 50,000,000 babies have been murdered in the last 50 years.  How do we feel as Catholics that Christ gives us this amazing gift and we give it back to Him mutilated because we supported a pro-death candidate.

Pro-abortion or half heartedly pro-life “Republicans don’t mind being called the “lesser evil” so long as they win. They have come to expect our willingness to vote for them just to avoid the Democrat. Your vote is worth more than that. And we owe it to explicitly pro-life candidates. They deserve our votes – all of them. We cannot honor their principle while allowing the Republican Party to strong arm us with “electable, lesser of two evils” logic. We do a great disservice to pro-life solidarity when we vote Republican instead of voting pro-life.”

A vote for a third party candidate is a vote for a third party candidate and a message to the Republican party that we will not accept the further deterioration of the pro-life platform.

The third party thing made me happy—voting third-party is the same as voting for whichever of the big two you support less. See also Perot ‘92 and Nader ‘00, i.e. Clinton and W getting elected, respectively.

Also, the web comic xkcd had a good gag about this sort of thinking: “Shall I compare thee to a summer’s day?...Frankly, I see no difference between thee and a summer’s day. Only Ron Paul offers a TRUE alternative!”

3rd Party !  Get REAL !  That’s exactly how we got stuck with the great fornicator.  Any co-operation with the party of death adds their sins to your soul, so vote like you do not want to live in eternal fire.  If you anti-war retreads had your way we would all be slaves of the Japs & Nazi’s.  Islam is just as bad as they were & we have a muslim-communist in the oval office perched to ruin this Country from the inside while bloggers argue their own points of view.

Eh.

Everybody knows, even if it’s Romney, he’s far better than Obama. Even Romney would not have pulled this HHS mandate crap, and would have appointed, at worst, a bunch of Anthony Kennedys to the Supreme Court.

Whereas Obama did pull the HHS mandate crap, not to mention that ObamaCare crap which (if it should happen pass Constitutional muster in the end) firmly establishes the government’s power to enact the HHS mandate and pretty much anything else through a wildly dishonest take on the meaning of the Commerce Clause. If that precedent is set, the future slide towards totalitarian nanny-statism is absolutely in the bag, and the HHS mandate will be one of our lesser concerns. Yes, seriously.

And let’s don’t get started on the Mexico City Policy crap, and the fact that with two more pro-lifers on the court we’d have likely achieved a rollback of Roe at least towards the states within this decade. Oops. Now, with the relatively youthful Sotomayor and Kagan firmly ensconced, it’ll be more like 20-30 years before the next opportunity is likely to arise.

Which means, conservatively, that there are several million more murdered children in our future, and why? Because a lot of Catholics decided that voting for That Articulate Young Man With The Politically Correct Complexion suited their self-image better than voting for irritable war hero Crotchety McGrumps.

So Romney’s a flip-flopper? Well y’know, given the choice between a serial killer who’s full-bore gung-ho, and one who’s a little conflicted and less-than-entirely dedicated to his work, give me the waffler.

So Romney’s annoyingly well-to-do? Well, poor folk can’t drop work to send their whole workforce searching for a friend’s missing daughter, y’know, and since when do non-millionaires run for president anyhow? (And have a snowball’s chance, I mean.)

So Romney’s a member of that funky religion with a past track-record of doctrinally supporting bigamy and racism and various faux-historical groaners, and the penchant for borrowing Christian terms and meaning wildly different things by them? Yes, I know. Even that very nice choir doesn’t quite make up for the silliness, does it? But look, it’s hardly as if Catholics on Capitol Hill are in the habit of setting a good example of sound doctrine and holy lives, is it? Or even coherent thought, some of them. You take what you can get. Give me Jesus for my good example, the Magisterium for my sound doctrine, and for defeating a really bad incumbent president, give me a well-funded presidential candidate.

So Romney’s kinda plastic-looking? Well, as Mr. McGuire told The Graduate: “I want to say just one word to you…just one word.”

Look, if you could travel back in time to kill Hitler, I think you would. Maybe not as a little boy, not the cute little Hansel look-alike, but if it was shortly after he got the Chancellorship? Already with the Mein Kampf and the irritating nostril-apron and the greasy black hair? Knowing what we know? C’mon, you’d plug that hole at point-blank range and sleep well. But what if you couldn’t kill Hitler? What if you could only send him into obscurity on a fat pension to be replaced with Sgt. Schultz from Hogan’s Heroes? Would you still do it?

Sure you would. Because Colonel Klink’s bumbling man-mountain is a marked improvement when compared to an ideologically-driven charismatic death-merchant.

So here’s Romney, ahead in delegates; looks like he probably has it.

We wish we could play Mr. Potato-Head with him: Take out his wishy-washiness and replace it with Gingrich’s debating skills and fearlessness, Herman Cain’s infectious happy-warrior attitude, Santorum’s pro-life credentials, and the more reasonable two-thirds of Ron Paul’s small-government principles. (Don’t you wish you could just fit Ron Paul with a restraining bolt? Leave him more or less the same but without the penchant for walking off ideological cliffs? But I digress.) We could mix-and-match pieces and parts until all that was left was Romney’s hair, smile, bankbook, and lack of a divorce. I’d be down with that, if it were medically possible.

But it isn’t. I’m sorry, gentlemen, but when it comes to the GOP frontrunner, we can’t rebuild him, we don’t have the technology. We wish we could play Mr. Potato-Head and assemble our own Bionic Frankencandidate who suited our every liking except for the neck-bolts and the 70’s television sound-effects, but it isn’t going to happen.

Don’t let the imaginary best get in the way of a realizable good. Okay, a realizable not-that-bad. Okay, a realizable improvement on Obama.

Eyes on the prize, people. Eyes on the prize.

I am tired of the Republican status quo & will be voting for Ron Paul—the candidate whom I find most closely aligned with my (conservative!) Catholic principles.

I love most of your article, it made a lot of good points, and since this is my first real opportunity to vote responsibly, it will be very useful for me in the coming election, as well as in future elections.

Having said that, however, please be careful with that “straight to hell” talk—if you DIE right after voting for Obama this year, with no opportunity for repentance beforehand, that might be the case.  I don’t know if your words count as taking God’s name in vain—I hope and pray not—but it’s too close for my comfort.

Besides, I made the mistake of voting for Obama in 2008.  I deeply regret and deplore that decision, but don’t tell me I’m going “straight to hell”.  It was AFTER that that God called me back to the Catholic Church.  If I were on an inevitable course to hell for what I did back then, that means I’m still on it now, and so my return to the Church is for nothing.  What’s the point of my returning to the Church if my having elected the man to office guarantees I will never see Heaven?  In which case what’s the point of my bothering to try to do God’s will as I understand it now, if it won’t save me?

Again, please watch your use of words.  I’m sure you were joking around, but your words sounded like you weren’t, and that’s a problem.

sometimes intrinsic evil is an oxymoron.

Michael, that is what confession is for.

Ron Paul has been for birth control for forever.  That is not a basic Catholic principal!  We are killing our women and children.
Abortifacients (the pill) is very harmful to women and marriage.

To Michael, if we know Catholic teaching and are disobedient to this teaching, this is a grave sin.  I believe you did not know this when you voted last. Now you know, WELCOME HOME!

@Sherry Weddell: Thank you very much!  It was the best thing that could have happened to me.  And thank you for trusting me—I actually knew the Catholic teaching but had strayed from the Church well before that, and I neither knew the anti-life positions Obama had supported at the time I voted for him, nor would I have cared at the time.  I thought voting for one issue like abortion was stupid.  Now I realize that’s the most significant issue there is, especially in this country.  I’ve changed my mind on a LOT I thought I never would.  And I have confessed it and been absolved.  And I won’t make the same mistake this year.

There is so much wrong with this post that it’s difficult to gather my thoughts enough to respond to it in full. But let’s start here:

Patrick, with this article, you have trashed your own credibility. This clearly contradicts an earlier article you wrote and proves it to have been disingenuous.  On March 7th, you posted this article which was disingenuously titled, “Romney Still Needs To Win Me”:

http://www.creativeminorityreport.com/2012/03/romney-still-needs-to-win-me.html

In that article, you futilely tried to explain that, “If he wants [you] and [your] ilk, he has a lot of convincing still to do.” In the comments section, you were called out on the credibility of your article and the fact that all Romney would really need to do to get your vote would be to win the nomination.

So now (and possibly because you know it’s only matter of time before you eat your words and come out in support of Romney), you post this above article, which completely proves the point. So before, it was “Romney Still Needs to Win Me,” which you were rightfully called out on, and now the truth comes out about how you will vote for Romney and how you apparently believe that any other choice is a bad one. This is pretty embarrassing for you. Your credibility took a bad hit on this one.

As far as the other issues with this article, your statement that “[t]he lesser of two evils is good enough for [you],” as well as, “[you are] pulling the lever for the other guy because he will not be as bad” are so pathetic that you should be ashamed for having posted this. Way to abandon any and all principle. As I believe another commenter pointed out, if the choice were between two candidates who were both utterly appalling, you apparently would think that picking the slightly-less-appalling candidate would be the right thing to do.

Your entire diatribe about how “[t]hird parties are for suckers” is utter garbage. You attempt to argue that voting third-party equates to “throwing your vote away.” In fact, folks like you who always support the GOP establishment’s lousy nominees are the ones who are abandoning your votes. While those of us who take a stand and vote third party are actually voting for someone based on our own judgment and values, you and all the rest who “hold your nose and pull the lever” are effectively surrendering your votes to the GOP establishment. You might as well let them vote for you, because that’s what you’re doing anyway by always supporting their nominees no matter what. In essence, THEY OWN YOUR VOTE. To the contrary, there is no party or group that owns mine.

Your statement about how voting third-party likely means “aiding the election Mr. A” is precisely the weak-minded (or sometimes elitist-pompous), appalling attitude that has crippled the Republican party and must be done away with. All these supposed “conservative” lemmings who always “obey” and support the GOP neocon nominees at all costs are the reason the GOP is in this mess. Every election now, the Republicans put up a lame, big-government, establishment, status-quo, neocon candidate, and every election, we are told that we must obey and support the party’s candidate lest we help the Democrat. And the vast majority of Republican lemmings get suckered into this trap, obey the party establishment, do what they’re told and support the worthless Republican neocon. The neocons pulling the strings know that they can always count on the majority of sheeple who may whine at first but always do what they are told in the end, no matter whom the nominee is or what he/she stands for. And so we continue to have one worthless nominee after another as the cycle continues. I could tell that Romney was going to be this year’s typical neocon pick from miles away. So folks like you are the ones who fuel this failing GOP system.

This attitude has rendered the Republican party useless. I am tired of being fed garbage every Presidential election and being told that I have to eat it or else I might get something worse. Shove it. The Dems just voted in one of the most liberal Presidents in history, yet the Republicans are too weak-minded to ever vote for a true conservative and always and only manage to nominate establishment candidates who are barely right-of-center, if that. And they still do this even in the wake of the ultra-liberal Dem president victory. It’s utterly pathetic.

The attitude that unless we support the Republican nominee, we’re essentially “helping” the Democrat is appalling and arrogant. It means that conservatives are expected to fall in line and compromise for the Republican establishment’s desires, but never the other way around. The better solution would be for Republicans to abandon their party’s establishment and support a true conservative third-party candidate. But the arrogance of these attitudes causes many Republicans to consider it blasphemy to ever question the establishment’s pick.

Until Republican voters reject the establishment, or until the conservative base splits from the Republican party and finds a new home with a third party, we are reduced to merely hoping that the “least worse” candidate wins and that the collapse of America will simply drag out at just a slightly slower pace.

Hey, Michael, welcome home!
Yes, he was joking. In all seriousness, though, you have to know and/or reasonably suspect you are commiting a grave evil in order for the sin to be mortal, and even then you still have to die unrepentent. Honestly, most voters don’t pay enough attention to know just how bad our president is. Do you know how many shocked expressions from liberals I get when I tell people he voted against a bill forbiding the abortion and mandating the protcetion of newborn babies as a Senitor?(Yes that is right. He believed that you should be able to leave pre-mature newborn babies to sufficate and die for the sake of the mother’s and the doctor’s convinence) He is an evil man and if someone is aware of this, unless there is something even more seriously demeted about the other canidate(nothing so far), then their they know enough that I suspect God will hold them accountable.

wouldn’t be refreshing to hear this from the pulpit, I think it’s comming, Obama’s attack on our church is waking up a lot of folks who haven’t been paying attention…

Michael, my heart is gushing and I’m crying a little.  Jesus so rejoices over one lost sheep.  He knew you would come back and now you need to learn everything you can and bring others home (and fight for life).  A really GREAT book is “Fatherless” by Brian Gail.  It is fiction and the first in a trilogy but sure opened my eyes to so much!

So, Karen, you’re going to vote for Rick Santorum?

You mean if it is between Santorum or Obama?

@Loud and Sherry: Thank you!  And yes, I do plan to do just that, Sherry.  I think I’ve started already, but I can definitely do more.  It was evidence and reason, of all things (I have Asperger’s Syndrome), jump-started by my learning of the cosmological argument, that inspired me to come back—and so I chose to be named for Saint Thomas Aquinas at my confirmation last year.  If that worked for me it can work for others too, I hope—as a start.  Even when I concluded Catholic Christianity it took going back to church, and this time really participating and listening, to get me rethinking things and hence changing how I behaved and how I treated other people, in ways I never could have foreseen.  It’s been the best thing that could have happened, and I wouldn’t have thought it was possible—but now I know better, God be thanked!  And thank you for the recommendation!

” ... the most anti-life, anti-religious liberty, anti-Catholic candidate in the history of candidates ...”

I admire your focus, bro.

I completely agree with your article Pat. Some catholic bloggers sound as if they are issuing “fatwas” at Catholics who support Santorum because evidently he’s not perfect enough.

Ron Paul is not “for” birth control.  He doesn’t believe that government should criminalize it, and neither does Santorum.

Guess which candidate (of the two) has actually voted to FUND birth control though?  Hint:  It’s not Ron Paul.

Check this out:

http://blog.catholicmumma.net/2012/02/13/if-i-told-you-a-guest-post/comment-page-1/

I’m tired of voting for “the least bad” candidate (both Bushes and now Romney/Santorum) and ending up getting NOTHING but lip service as far as ending abortion.  I’m with Patricia in voting for Ron Paul.

Every 4 years they run a carefully selected replacement that appears to be “not as bad” as the thug in office. He is voted in and turns out to be 10 times worse. How many times does this have to play out before people wise up and use their heads and select someone WITHOUT a record of lying, cheating and flip flopping. I want honesty, integrity, a 30 year consistent record of adherence to principle and allegiance to the people and the rule of law, NOT allegiance to the UN, Israel, or Goldman Sachs.

As Fr. Pavone says, “You are not voting for the lesser of two evils; you are voting to lessen the evil.”

The previous comment is my paraphrasing Fr. Pavone, but it is as close to the actual quote as I can recall.

Ellen, that makes some sense to me. But with the article in question they are saying…in effect, if Stalin was running against Hitler, but the Pope was running 3rd party with very little support from people and very little chance of winning, that we should vote for Stalin?

I know that’s very simplistic, and no Republican candidate is Stalin at all, but according to the article, we would be a sucker, and probably sinful if we were to vote for the pope.
Sorry, I’d vote on the slim chance that God would intervene and the Pope would be president

Also, to stillbelieve, am I voting for Santorum? I don’t know yet, ask me in November

PS. No 3rd party candidate who ever ran is even close to pope material, just sayin….)

Karen, I’m sure Pat would tweak his just voter theory if we were ever in the situation that you describe (would we even be voting in that situation?).  We are nowhere close to that now; there will be a clear choice in Nov.  I would have preferred if he hadn’t worded it as voting for the “lesser of two evils.”  But I get the gist of the point he was making, and I think you are being a bit too (what’s the word I’m looking for?)legalistic?

Yes, I suppose I am, but the “3rd party is for suckers” really stuck in my craw. We’ll never have change and always have to settle for “lesser” if we don’t start holding the Republican party candidates to higher values.

Karen is on the right track. When folks always support the GOP nominee no matter who it is, we will never have any real hope of a genuinely conservative and quality candidate. We will only continue to have nominees shoved down our throats who are barely right-of-center, if that, because the GOP establishment and string-pullers KNOW that the vast majority of Republican voters will always, always eat whatever garbage they’re served come November, without fail. That’s the simple fact of how it works. Also importantly, I don’t see how someone can write an article like this - in which he not only admits that he’ll vote for Romney, but disparages those who won’t - shortly after writing a previous article about how Romney supposedly “still needs to win” him and supposedly “has a lot of convincing still to do”. Talk about blowing smoke!

“Lessened evil” is still evil.

I think it’s interesting to listen to all of the discussion about what a right and “Catholic” view is and what it is not.  When thinking about social issues, one must dig deep under the surface rather than adopting the sound bites individuals on both sides are throwing out.  When considering what the Catholic Church thinks about social issues, especially those which are fairly recent, I always try to remember that the Catholic Church was also one of the institutions most vehemently opposed to women’s suffrage.

I think there’s one big thing missing here.  In any election, you aren’t just voting for a candidate, you are voting for a system.  So, when you vote for the lesser of two evils, you vote for a system that only offers you two evils as your choices. 

The one and only reason that we are now faced with voting between the lesser of two evils is because people for so long have been willing to vote for whatever slop their party dishes up.  If we had stopped this nonsense years ago, had long since proven that you cannot win with a crappy candidate, we wouldn’t be faced with the most anti-life president in history.  If the Republican party had not been allowed to put up such horrendous candidates and still get votes, we never would have been in a position where Obama or someone like him could have won.

We aren’t electing a saint here, but I don’t think it’s asking too much to ask for a candidate who doesn’t actively embrace things the Church teaches is intrinsically evil.  It’s like saying it’s asking too much when a woman looks for a husband who won’t hit her.

I’m sorry, but the only suckers are the voters who think that things are going to get better by voting for the lesser of two evils.  Things will just get worse slower and in different ways.

As Fr. Pavone says, “You are not voting for the lesser of two evils; you are voting to lessen the evil.”

As someone else said (also a paraphrase) “We are called to be faithful, not successful.”  I think it was Bl. Mother Theresa.

And some ancient dude speaking to some Romans once said “Let us not say we should do evil that good may come of it.” or something to that effect.

Voting for the lesser vs. voting to lessen the evil.  That is an interesting proposition, but can you vote to lessen the evil by in fact choosing (or voting) for an evil?

Thanks for this article!
c matt, I disagree that voting for the less-bad one is ‘doing evil that good may come of it.’  I don’t see how it isn’t doing good that good may come of it, by taking a foreseeable outcome (one of these people will win and some are more likely than others) and limiting the harm that is within our control to limit.  My Bible also says ‘a house divided against itself cannot stand’—which if you recall, was Christ’s response to the accusation of casting out demons in the name of the Devil—and ‘he who is not against us is for us.’  If I fight evil in general, when possible, Satan is going to figure out whose side I am on and is not going to like it.  You do not have to accept my rationale, but it’s my story and I am sticking to it.
And I don’t believe Mother Teresa was saying that faith and success were absolutely mutually exclusive—after all, one Patroness is Our Lady of Victory.  If or when it is possible to be both, I’ll take it.

That said, as long as somebody is in a competitive second place, I am comfortable with writing him in.

Wise words in the general points made, much needed sanity in this crazy and false dichotomy between As for some specific points you make, I will disagree with respect:
a) I am not sure “electing the Pope” is a good reference here. After all, he is also an imperfect man, elected by a bunch of imperfect men (notice, no women involved so far)and his election is nothing like the democratic elections you are addressing.
c) I am amazed how one so wise and balanced in many ways would actually believe candidate A to be “anti-life, anti-religious liberty, anti-Catholic.” Really! It seems your sanity on other points is just being used to buttress your bias against candidate A. He may indeed be less committed to your idea of how to preserve life,your idea of how to balance the demands of religion and secular society, and the fact that he may not be as partial to the Catholic church. Really, could he be perhaps just a little bit not so far out as you declare? I wonder if you had an opportunity to meet privately with him and listened to his explanations for his positions, whether you would come out insisting on the same extreme statements.