Breda O'Brien
President Donald Trump The View
The US election poses yet another difficult choice for Catholics. Yes, Joe Biden plays on his Catholic heritage to the extent that he has featured his 2016 meeting with Pope Francis in campaign advertisements.
However, in that same video, he also talked about meeting a group of nuns the same day, “lovely women” who reminded him of all his Catholic schooling had given them. That would be very touching, except that Biden approved of violating the consciences of the Little Sisters of the Poor by forcing them to pay for contraceptive coverage for their employees. He still holds that position.
Abortion is not the only moral test for a candidate but it is an essential one. And Mr Biden’s record on abortion is abysmal. He has clung to the ‘personally opposed but cannot legislate for other’s choices’ line for a very long time, the Pontius Pilate approach to politics.
Kamala Harris is his choice of running mate and she has a perfect 100% rating from Planned Parenthood. Along with other groups, Planned Parenthood has issued a warning to media outlets from a newly-formed organisation called We Have Her Back. Ostensibly, the aim is to prevent sexist and racist coverage of women candidates.
Valerie Jarrett, former senior advisor to Barack Obama and Cecile Richards, former president of Planned Parenthood, are two of the signatories. It is true that women are subjected to greater scrutiny than men when it comes to looks and likeability, whatever the latter is.
This is wrong. But there is also something odd about a group like We Have Her Back declaring “we will be watching you” to a media which quite often is already terrified of being out of step with the current zeitgeist.
Erratic
Mind you, there was no such backing for Sarah Palin from the same kind of people, and not because she was erratic and controversial. (The We Have Her Back group was formed to defend Democratic women candidates before Kamala Harris was announced and would have defended any Democratic female VP candidate.) Cecile Richards wrote a Huffington Post blog in 2012 about John McCain’s choice of running mate. She declared: “Women voting for McCain-Palin is like chickens voting for Col. Sanders. This is not a risk we can afford to take.” Not so much ‘we have her back’ as we will stab in the back any woman who does not share our views but we will unquestioningly support any woman who is pro-choice, no matter what her other failings.
Then there is Donald Trump and Mike Pence. No-one should write off ‘the Donald’ even though at the moment his chances are looking poor. However, Ronald Reagan was 77 when he retired from the presidency. Joe Biden is already older than that. If Mr Biden is elected, he will be 82 at the end of his first term and it is unlikely that he will run again. Will fear of a Kamala Harris presidency in four years work to Mr Trump’s advantage? Who knows?
The President’s attitudes towards women are repellent and his bullying ways sully everything that he touches”
If it does, for most voters it will not be racism or sexism that motivates them but disagreement with what Kamala Harris stands for.
On the one hand, you have Mr Trump, who is publicly pro-life but whose attitudes towards women are repellent and whose bullying ways sully everything that he touches. On the other hand, you have Mr Biden and Ms Harris, who have no concern for justice for human beings before birth and who as alleged left-wing candidates pose no threat to the worst ravages of capitalism.
Just as in Ireland, US voters are often reluctant to look beyond the dominant parties even when those parties have repeatedly given them many reasons not to trust them.
Candidate
There is one tiny party whose candidate is not even on the ballot in many states, although some states allow voters to write in the candidate of their choice. It is the American Solidarity Party (ASP) and their candidate, Brian Carroll, an Evangelical Christian, is completely in tune with Catholic teaching on everything from abortion to the environment.
A cynic might say that a candidate with no hope of election can be as Utopian as he or she pleases but reading his website, it is so refreshing to see someone asking questions like: Who is my neighbour? How can we help the most vulnerable? How can we reduce inequality in US society?
Amar Patel, vice-chair of the American Solidarity Party, whose parents emigrated to the US from India in the 1960s, is his running mate. People will see voting for this pair as wasting a vote, but if enough people voted for them, the big behemoths would have to pay attention.
Of course, a media truly interested in challenging the status quo would at least highlight the difference that the ASP represented, but what are the chances of that?