What's at Stake in This Election?

Published on October 27, 2000 in The Daily Oklahoman

With all the discussion of the length of Al Gore's Pinocchio nose and George W. Bush's garbled syllAbles, I sometimes wonder if Americans have forgotten what's really at stake in this election.

Flannery O'Connor said, 'In the absence of faith we govern by tenderness, and tenderness leads to the gas chamber.' Today I think she might have said 'compassion' -- in the way at least some people use that word -- instead of 'tenderness.'

Today's 'compassionate' liberalism leads to the abortion mill. And the suicide machine, and the euthanasia ward, and RU-486, partial birth abortion, human embryonic stem cell experimentation, and the outright infanticide 15 members of the House of Representatives recently voted for when they opposed the Born-Alive Infant Protection Act. We are well down the slippery slope.

Human beings have again taken into their own hands the question of who is to live and who is to die, based on subjective 'values' while rejecting any objective morality. Unless stopped, it can only continue with new euphemisms and 'plausible' excuses to kill new categories of people, which sooner or later will include you and me. Today's liberalism must necessarily rely on relativism, which rejects the notion of absolute truth. But moral relativism as a code of society inevitably sets the stage for totalitarianism. I have seen this at work at the United Nations, for example, with U.S. support.

Pope John Paul II sketches out very clearly how all this leads to totalitarianism in his encyclical Evangelium Vitae (The Gospel of Life) Nos. 17-23. It is so clear. For all the paranoia and conspiracy hysteria on the Internet, what is going on at the U.N. is very plain to see. As a colleague of mine, a woman Catholic journalist, said, 'What conspiracy? There's no conspiracy. Everything's right out in the open and they are proud of it.'

On my last New York trip I met a well- known and very savvy political commentator. She asked me, 'What do you think will happen if Al Gore and Hillary Clinton are elected? They very well could be.' I shot back, 'Then I guess we can kiss the Constitution goodbye.' She said, 'That's what all my friends are saying.'

Last fall Catholic Dossier magazine asked me to write reflections on the millennium. I called two well-known and respected Catholic scholars and asked their opinion on a recurrent thought I was having. I said, 'Unless there is some kind of intervention, divine or otherwise, to divert modern culture from the path it is on, within 20 years they will be putting evangelical Protestants and orthodox Roman Catholics in concentration camps in the United States.' Both responded, almost cutting me off: 'Oh, yes, absolutely!'

I felt an odd comfort with each of these three people. Each is well known, highly respected and well paid to give their opinions. I'm not sure they've said publicly what they said to me privately, so I won't name them. But I was reassured that I was not alone in my thoughts, and that I wasn't finally going off the rails.

At heart I'm a spiritual writer, but I have felt compelled to start applying that spiritual writing to political issues. Today everything is spiritual and everything is political because of the magnitude of what's at stake: Our freedoms, our lives -- our souls even, and the very soul of America. Don't underestimate it -- or your vote.

John Mallon is contributing editor for Inside the Vatican magazine and a member of The Daily Oklahoman's Opinion Board of Contributors. Reprinted with permission.