The last week has demonstrated so much about the battle lines in America. In many ways, I suppose it makes so little sense to those outside of the United States. It barely makes sense to those of us here. We are simultaneously becoming more open and more tolerant of activities that might be considered on the edges of societal norms while others desperately pass laws to prevent those things.

Some people call these things victimless crimes. That designation obviously depends on multiple perspectives. Often times there are victims but they are not necessarily a victim of the crime itself, but all of the danger surrounding the so-called crime.

As everyone knows, we were settled by Puritans. I liken them to the Southern Baptists and non-denominational Evangelical Christians of today. Nearly everything pleasurable was a sin. Therefore, it was strictly prohibited. I don’t think most people have thought about how this played on our collective psyche even to the present day.

You cannot drink. You cannot dance. You cannot read strange books. You cannot partake of other substances. You certainly cannot have sex outside of marriage or participate in any activity that might nudge you down that road. Since this is the case, you cannot have access to anything that would promote safe sex, access to safe drugs, or allow anyone to make responsible choices.

What we understand today (and I imagine even then) is that when you deny someone anything pleasurable and tell them that doing that thing is a sin they will begin to crave it. They always joked that the best way to keep a Baptist from drinking your beer is to invite a second Baptist. As silly as the notion is, some people still think that if no one sees them do it then they never did it.

This has produced some widespread problems. I’m not sure how one measures such a thing, but it has been reported that the United States sits behind only Russia in the rate of alcoholics in society. That’s not total alcohol consumed. It’s not even alcohol consumed per capita. It is the percentage of people that have a problem with the amount of alcohol they consume.

We can extend this to other situations. One of my daughter’s friends nearly died from an overdose. It seems she bought some marijuana and still is not sure what it was laced with. Some dealers love to do that. I suppose that even if it were legal universally, some people would still try to find it cheaper or without the hassles of acquiring it legally.

All that being said, we can’t help but wonder how much making it legal and available through traditional means would prevent things like that. We can’t help but wonder how many fewer people would have addiction issues if our attitudes towards alcohol, tobacco, and marijuana were healthier. We can’t help but wonder how many fewer people would need abortions if they had access to birth control measures and helpful education about sexual activity in general.

Unfortunately, we can’t have these things because we are still stuck mentally in 17th century New England. These things are bad. You cannot have those things and we certainly can’t talk about them. Furthermore, if we allow those things then the slippery slope comes in and we would then see an increase in those other things that all of us find abhorrent.

Instead, we could discuss things like adults. Legalizing marijuana doesn’t necessarily mean a sharp increase in the use of harder drugs we all agree should be illegal. Allowing for and helping children understand safe sex doesn’t mean a sharp increase will definitely occur. If you give someone a bowl of ice cream they won’t devour the carton. If you show it to them and them tell them they can’t have any, you might wake up to find the carton empty. This is our collective American experience.

It started innocently enough. My daughter was attending a retreat at the church. As a part of the retreat the participants were encouraged to attend reconciliation. Before you attend confession you go through an examination of conscience. That’s a rabbit hole by itself.

She got hung up on several things that alarmed her and I can definitely see why. One of them alarmed me. The examination of conscience said that voting for pro abortion candidates was a sin. So, in other words, voting for Democrats is a sin. Where can I even get started on that?

Okay, I know where. There is no such position politically. I’ve never heard of any politician being pro-abortion. I’ve never met a single person that would classify themselves as pro-abortion. I can’t say the viewpoint doesn’t exist because it is impossible to prove a negative. However, I can assert that the Catholic Church is distorting the truth in a document about truth. The irony is palpable.

The truth is that some people are pro-choice and some people are anti-choice. Anti-choice is a negative term, so we can use the pro-life substitute. The point is that they believe in the sanctity of life. That is not a wrong viewpoint. However, the pro-choice viewpoint is not the 180 degree opposite. It is a belief in privacy and the rights of self-determination over each individual’s body. Most pro-choice people are privately against abortion in most circumstances, but simply leave it to the individual to decide.

That might seem like splitting hairs, but the truth is far different and one of the reasons why the distortion is so hurtful. Truth is a four letter word, but one of the things that pro-choice politicians do is seek other ways to lower abortion numbers. If we follow the facts then we would see that abortion rates have been lower under Democratic presidents than under Republican presidents.

Admittedly, one cannot directly attribute any of that to a single policy or decision. It is impossible to definitively say that Democratic policies had anything to do with it. However, it should be telling that when you go back to the Reagan administration you see rates remaining level while they went down under every Democratic president.

There is a difference between posturing and actually doing something. The best way to limit the number of abortions is to limit the demand for abortions. You do that with contraception. You do that with sex education. You do that by financially assisting young families to take off the financial pressure. The church even had a program called “The Gabriel Project” that did this very thing.

However, all of this is just a cursory irritation. The real problem is calling voting for a person a sin. Voting is a choice. It’s a decision that calls for hard choices for anyone that’s a committed Catholic or Christian. Sure, it is hard reconciling our church’s teaching on abortion with a pro-choice position. It should be hard reconciling the church’s stance on life in general with a party pushing the death penalty, wars of choice, and are more supportive of police departments that kill so many unarmed suspects. Wouldn’t that also be a sin?

Wouldn’t it be a sin to support candidates that call for treating refugees as less than human? Wouldn’t it be a sin to support a candidate that places children in cages? Wouldn’t it be a sin to support a candidate that so cavalierly handled a pandemic that over 600,000 Americans died on his watch? We can play this tit for tat game forever as I’m sure Republicans reading this can rattle off a similar list of sins.

The overwhelming point here is that if voting for any particular candidate is a sin then voting for any candidate is a sin. They all commit sins. We all commit sins. We either weigh which sins we can live with or we turn that part of our brain off and pull the lever. Either way, I’m not taking responsibility for what a politician does. Either way I vote they will do something objectionable. I choose to vote for the candidates with the least objectionable positions. That’s what responsible citizens do.