Ted Carnahan

The issues of abortion, euthanasia, the war, and political and economic justice place myself and many other people in a trap between the two major political parties in the United States. Often times people like me have been derided as “single issue voters,” though that has never been true for me. The choices involved, presented from a Roman Catholic perspective but holding universal application, are well presented in this article from the First Things blog.

Certainly, a Catholic elected to public office must make prudential judgments on how to best advance the rights and the dignity of the human person. There are many issues, in fact most issues, where Catholic politicians may disagree and adopt different policy positions—a just immigration policy, for example, or public-assistance programs for the poor, or health-care policy, or military engagement, or taxation policies.

At the same time, there are circumstances where to support a particular policy involves approval of an intrinsic evil.

Well, I went to vote in Boone County, Missouri this morning at the Hawthorne Suites in Columbia, MO, and had some trouble. I called Boone County yesterday and changed my address, and I was told that Jennifer and I’s names would be in the “black book” instead of the “blue book”. All of that went okay until I went to turn in my ballot. One of the election judges came over and insisted that I was casting a provisional ballot, and another actually took hold of my ballot and tried to take it away from me. When I didn’t let it slip out of my fingers, she let go. When Jennifer pointed out that she had cast her vote normally just a minute earlier, they finally let me feed the ballot into the scanner. If you are voting in Boone County, Missouri today and you changed your address as recently as yesterday, your ballot is NOT provisional.

They had one electronic voting machine at my polling place. It warmed my heart to hear no fewer than 10 people in a row turn down the “opportunity” to vote with an electronic voting machine. I guess they wanted their votes to actually be counted in this election or something. Some people are funny about that, I guess…