Saturday, November 15, 2008

Election’s Meaning for Catholics, Part 1

An excellent analysis from The Catholic Thing of what Catholics may have to deal with now that the election is over, and one hopes that sound voices within the political arena, the focused work of Catholic apostolates, and the consistent prayers of the faithful, will be able to ensure that these rather dire warnings do not come to pass.

An excerpt.

“On the bright side, exit polls indicate America is still a center-right nation. Thirty-four percent of voters consider themselves conservatives, 22 percent liberal –unchanged from the 2004 election, and essentially the same breakdown as has existed since Reagan recentered the electorate to the right.

“Four out of five Green ballot issues went down to defeat – two of them in California. In Arizona, California, and Florida, same-sex marriage bans passed with the overwhelming support of African-Americans and Hispanics.

“On the dark side, Democrats who will control on January 20, 2009, the White House, the Senate, and the House of Representatives, will be positioned to implement their extreme leftist social agenda. In their new social order, rights will be the weapons of self-interest; responsibility based on a moral hierarchy will be anathema…

“For forty years, radical groups promoting secular ideologies such as Marxism, Darwinism, Freudianism, and behaviorism – all of which deny man’s spirituality and declare him free of all moral constraints – have been plotting to get their hands on the wheels of the federal government. Well, on November 4, they and their fellow travelers finally succeeded.

“Catholics must realize that for these ideologues man is an individual without intrinsic value; he is not a person in the traditional sense, just the highest animal on the evolutionary scale. For these ideologues the human person is irrelevant. Universal ideas and absolute values are meaningless because man’s existence has no spiritual dimension. The concept of liberty as freedom to do what one ought to do is, in this view, absurd; freedom means license to do whatever is desired. Values are merely a matter of taste; the common good is disregarded in favor of the collective good or individual good.”