Voting Your Conscience When Everyone Stinks

Voting has never been easy for me. As a Pro-Life, Pro-LGBTQ, Pro-Reform Catholic, I can guarantee that every major candidate will violate my fundamental values in some way. It’s not a matter of small disagreements. It’s the sort of non-negotiable things that have to be, well, negotiated every time I go to the ballot box. I’ve voted for major party candidates and regretted it, I’ve voted for third party candidates and regretted it. I’ve voted for people I really liked only to be disappointed later, and I’ve cast votes that made me sick only to be pleasantly surprised. (This happened only once, and I don’t expect it again.) I’m also certain that many of my fellow Catholics feel the same.

The presidential election looming on the horizon feels to many people, myself included, like a crossroads in the future of our country. We probably always say this, but the stakes have never felt higher. Not surprisingly, there has been a lot of discourse online about how Catholics ought to vote. The reality though, is that the problem is complex enough that good, moral Catholics with well-developed consciences can and will make very different decisions.

Pro-Life or Whole Life?

Growing up, I was a very different type of pro-life activist. I was an absolutist who believed that, because abortion kills, we must pursue a legal solution to abortion. I know many Catholics who still believe this and will choose to vote for the Republicans for this reason alone, no matter what else they do. The stakes are that dire.

The alternative is the Seamless Garment theory of life, also called Whole-Life, to which the Catholic Church ascribes. It places many more issues under the pro-life umbrella, such as immigration and healthcare. And every one of those issues lies on the Democratic side of the political divide. Couple that with the fact that the Republican strategy of placing Conservative judges on the Supreme Court and staging the same March every year for half a century has been largely ineffective, and we have a conundrum here. Death on one side, death on the other. I’ve written before about why I think Catholics should leave the Republican Party. But I also know that if I gave my 16-year old self any of my current reasons I would not have listened. Because the stakes are so dire.

Voting Your Conscience or Throwing Your Vote Away?

I voted third party in the last presidential election, and boy were people angry. “A third party vote is a vote for Trump,” one acquaintance told me. “It’s your fault he won.” The big assumption here, of course, is that the Democrats owned my vote in the first place, that it was stolen from them. It’s common to say that a third-party vote is a wasted vote. As someone who opposes the two-party system outright, this has never been a convincing argument. A vote in the system is a vote for the system. However, what are our third-party options?

Many Catholics this cycle have become extremely excited about The American Solidarity Party. It’s a whole-life platform that also has a pro-LGBTQ stance. (Great for me, less great for other Catholics.) It seems like a no-brainer in a lot of ways. Unfortunately – and this is the honest truth – I’m not impressed with their candidate. I would not be comfortable with Brian Carroll being President of the United States based on his experience. Of course, one could argue that’s irrelevant given the inexperience of the current president and the fact that Carroll won’t be elected. But I think I should be voting for someone who can actually do the job.

Pray and Leave Space for Grace

There are a lot of ways in which a particular candidate is the only moral candidate for Catholic voters. We have to vote for Trump because he’s anti-abortion; vote for Carroll because he’s Whole-life; vote for Biden because he’s not Trump and Trump is bad. (The lesser of two evils isn’t a Catholic stance, but it’s also not not a Catholic stance.)

So what are we supposed to do? First and foremost, we need to stop beating up our brothers and sisters in Christ over their voting decisions. I’m guilty of this myself, and I’m sorry. Loved ones of mine are going to make decisions I don’t agree with, and they’re going to do them thinking they are making the Catholic choice. But there is no one Catholic choice. Not ever, and especially not in this election. So let’s give some grace to each other, please.

On the personal level, we have to decide which of our Catholic values are most urgent at this moment. They all matter.

What matters most right now?