Loyola law professor Charles Murdock takes his Catholicism seriously. But he won’t base his vote on a single issue when he casts his ballot come November’s presidential election.
Though Pope Benedict XVI has gone on record stating that abortion is a non-negotiable issue, some Catholics, like Murdock, take a more liberal approach.
Tuesday night at University Hall, in his talk called “Are Catholics Single-Issue Voters?” Murdock told an audience of about 25 to base their votes on more than just each candidate’s stance on abortion.
He said that Catholics should avoid drawing a false dichotomy between “life” issues – abortion, gay marriage and stem cell research – and “social” issues, which involve efforts like tackling poverty, ensuring every child gets an education and protecting the environment.
He discussed a document called “Forming Consciences for Faithful Citizenship,” created by the United States Conference of Catholic Bishops before the 2000 election and updated for 2008 . It urges voters to base their decision on “life” issues which are centered around the Catholic teaching that life and human dignity come first.
“The way they phrase it is that you cannot vote for a candidate because he’s pro-choice, but you can vote for a candidate who is pro-choice if there are other compelling reasons to vote for him,” Murdock said.
Murdock said the document is “fairly balanced” but that it still raises “life” issues to a higher level than social issues. To Murdock, these two sets of issues are on the same level.
“We shouldn’t have this tunnel vision on what a life issue is,” he said. “Providing health care is a life issue, trying to help people get out of poverty is a life issue, not starting a preemptive war is a life issue, not killing innocent civilians is a life issue.”
“A focus on trying to make abortions criminal has not been effective in the past, and I don’t think it will be effective in the future,” Murdock said.
However, Murdock does believe that the number of abortions should be reduced. One way to do that, he said, is by researching the social and economic policies of each candidate and deciding to support a candidate whose social and economic platforms might prevent a woman from feeling that abortion is the only option.
He hopes voters in the coming election will carefully weigh each candidate’s stance on other issues that deserve attention.
“If a candidate is very strong on the social issues – for example, against unjust war, wanting to provide health care to citizens, deal with issues of poverty and immigration, you could vote for him on those grounds,” Murdock said.
Sheil Catholic Center pastoral associate Mary Deeley helped organize the talk. She said there’s a whole mosaic of issues on which a candidate should be evaluated.
“Someone might say they’re pro-life,” Deeley said, “but that doesn’t automatically exclude me from examining every other issue that pertains to the dignity of the human being.”
Examining how candidates’ platforms treat the closely linked social and life issues is just as important as examining their stance on the “hot-button” abortion issue, Deeley said.
Life is precious, said Deeley, and social issues help maintain the dignity of human beings at all stages. By failing to link the two categories of issues and only focusing on protecting life in the womb, she said, is equivalent to saying life is only precious at that one stage.
“If we are saying we want to bring these children into the world,” Deeley said, “we have a responsibility to make sure they can grow up with all the dignities of a human being … adequate health care, an opportunity for education, a right to work, a right to adjust wages.”
Murdock also spoke about other “life” issues, such as gay marriage. Promiscuity exists in both the homosexual and heterosexual community, Murdock said.
“Why should we want to take a stance against a male couple or a female couple that want to make a commitment?” he said.
Voting is a moral decision with moral implications, Murdock said.
“You need to be informed as a voter, part of being informed should be giving due attention to the moral and ethical aspects of the effect of your vote,” he said.
Murdock said there is no perfect candidate.
“None of us is perfect,” he said. “If we were perfect, we wouldn’t need to try to get heaven – we’d already be there.”
