I want to go further and explain another implication of an Obama victory, one that should convince Catholic voters who despise McCain even more than I do to offer him their vote. Pardon me for quoting a piece I published elsewhere: I'll tell you one thing, just one, that will happen, if Obama is elected with a large congressional majority -- with perhaps enough votes in the Senate to quash a filibuster. And that one thing should be enough.
"Senator Obama has promised to sign the Freedom of Choice Act (FOCA), which would repeal every restriction on abortion in every American state, right up through the ninth month. But then, we knew that about Obama, the whole infanticide thing. But there's more. The FOCA raises abortion to (in its own words) a "fundamental right." According to legal analysts at the U.S. Council of Catholic Bishops, the act's language is so sweeping that it will snuff out any state's "conscience" clause -- the laws allowing hospitals, doctors, and nurses not to take part in abortions. To do so would amount to illegal discrimination, denying a citizen her fundamental right. Christian hospitals could no more decline to perform abortions than they can currently refuse to operate on black people.
"So President Obama and his congressional supermajority would force every Christian hospital, doctor, and nurse either to abandon their faith or go out of business. By federal law, believing Christians would be banned from a major industry (and apostolate). This is literally equivalent to a law banning faithful Jews from owning newspapers.
"History tells us that steps such as this aren't where religious persecutions end; it's where they begin. Things are already scary enough in neighboring Canada, where Christians are now routinely hauled up before human rights tribunals for repeating what the Bible teaches concerning sex. Who knows what some Obama-appointed judge, 20 years from now, will make of a pastor whose sermons attacked the "fundamental right" of women to kill their children? How many churches and seminaries will face crippling civil judgments and have to close?
"It can happen here. It is about to happen here."
(Column continues below)
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What should we make of Catholics who vote for the persecution of their Church and the ongoing killing of millions of unborn children? That's between them and God. I'll just offer this little catechetical reminder: Holy Communion received in a state of mortal sin is itself a still graver sin -- one of blasphemy. Perhaps when Obama Catholics see their local Catholic hospitals close, or their Catholic friends in nursing get jobs giving pedicures, they'll throng the confession lines. Let's pray that they do.
By this time tomorrow we will have a good idea of whether Christians have any lasting place in this country. In a few months -- if FOCA passes, and is applied as the bishops predict -- we'll know whether we should continue to participate as citizens, serve in America's armed forces, pay taxes except under protest, or think of our government as anything but an occupier -- like the Hungarian or Czech regimes from 1948-1989. We will know if the democracy our military exports to other countries is any better than the tyrannies it replaces. We will know if there is any future, however fraught and fragile, for pro-life laws -- or if the Berlin Wall constructed by Roe v. Wade will stand unchallenged for yet another guilty generation.
If the persecutors take power on the anger of voters rightly outraged by eight years of mismanagement, arrogance, constitutional abuse, and unjust wars, we must face the consequences -- as the Israelites did when God answered their sins with the Assyrians. Like the Israelites, we will have lost our country. Unlike them, we'll have no Covenant that promises we'll ever get it back. With God's grace, we'll be ignored and tolerated, like the Amish. To assume that we'll always be safe is, well . . . gratuitous.