The Ripple Effect

For the past 60 years around voting time, it’s become popular for pundits to say, “Voting for a candidate should not be based on one issue.”  What is that one, resounding “issue?”  The right to life.  Even the term “abortion” is all too easy to pass off as a commonplace term; even though it’s a hot-button topic, somehow that descriptive word makes its way into the background of our lives.

If one said, “baby killing” or “manslaughter” or “homicide,” we’d have a fully different view, guaranteed.  A gentleman I know just outrightly calls it “baby killing.”  Even the term “unborn baby” gets tossed aside.  For example, how often do we say “born baby,” or “born man or woman?”  Even the now scientific term “fetus” clouds the reality of this as a child.  Fetus, ironically, in its Latin origins meant “offspring.”  Maybe we should start saying “offspring”.  People commonly say “that man,” “that woman,” or “that baby” but “that fetus?”  In the words of a famous, baptized, Catholic president, “C’mon man”!

This all-encompassing problem of the one-issue voting deal breaker is just that, a “deal breaker.”  The Lord Jesus Christ tells us through his Church, the ultimate authority on earth, “it is a big issue.”  One that is so grave that priests authorized by the bishop (who’s acting on behalf of the Pope) can remove the excommunication and grant absolution. cf, Catechism, 1463.  Why would someone being “pro-choice” be such a deal breaker for an otherwise fit candidate? Well, those with that view answer this, “Why is favoring a candidate who happens to be pro-abortion the one issue?”  Interesting, isn’t it, when we flip the script?  To answer this question plainly, it’s simply because no one on Earth is more important than an unborn child.

Let’s use the argument of “that abortion may have protected us from a dictator or serial killer, etc” the other way around; who is your favorite person?  Your parent(s)?  A movie star?  A mentor? You?  What if they were never born due to an abortion?  What if you were never born due to an abortion (try answering that one, seeing you made it to term and beyond)?  We call it a “right,” or more nicely a “choice,” but as that famous abolitionist-martyr, Abraham Lincoln stated, “No one has the right to do what is wrong.” As St Paul says, “We destroy arguments and every proud obstacle to the knowledge of God and take every thought captive to obey Christ” (2 Cor. 10:5).

The real question is,” Why shouldn’t it be an all-encompassing issue?”  As a friend of mine who’s an Army veteran always says,

If someone is willing to participate directly or indirectly in killing this most innocent and most precious life form, there is no telling what they are capable of.

This statement is directed primarily at those in positions of power and persuasion, not so much the common person, who is often duped and blinded from day one by the “culture of death” that St John Paul II spoke of.  Just an opinion, right?  What if an “opinion” is an absolute?  If one is willing to be involved in an abortion, whether directly or indirectly what else could they be involved in, proving this “ripple effect?”

How about physician-assisted suicides?  How about those that prey on the poor and middle class, often in debt, squeezing them like an orange with ridiculous interest rates for credit cards/loans (aka, usury)?  Oh, just at a sidelight, the term “usury” now has a more neutral/positive understanding nowadays, truly the culture of death is doing its job.  John Paul the Great dubbed a society that revolves around sensuality and greed, ultimately rooted in fear, this type of culture, hence the poisonous fruit of abortion.  Another example of the ripple effect, prioritizing higher education as a “necessity” in order to be married and have children – to the point of sacrificing an unborn baby to placate this hungry god of society.

Man can create an atom bomb and has patents to alter seismic waves and weather but God created The Earth itself we tinker around on with such things, like children in a schoolyard flipping jax and tossing marbles for fun, inadvertent to the consequences of our deadly games.  The common man is at the point of despair with everything from these stressors on his mind and nerves, enough to make the mouth water of any personal injury attorney.

I’m sure there are hundreds of thousands of rebuttals to the ripple effect we speak of here.  As always, our enemy Satan has been promulgating rebuttals for us to run with from day one, starting with the first recorded argument in the history of humankind: did God really say that you shouldn’t eat from this tree?” cf, Gen 3:1.  May the Holy Cross be our light this election season.