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Electing Genuine Leadership

Laws Must Protect Life and Religious Liberty

By Stu Nolan

In the wake of unprecedented attacks on the religious liberty of Americans by the current executive branch and its administrative agencies, and in the midst of a prolonged period of economic angst, most of us rightly perceive a need for genuine and effective leadership in the White House. Such leadership must respect the right to life and the religious liberty rights of the faithful.

The rights to life and to religious liberty are not born of government and thus are not subject to the whimsical agendas of any temporal power. Rather, they spring forth from the natural law. They are thus intrinsic to the ideas enshrined in our founding documents, the Declaration of Independence and the U.S. Constitution. In the face of unprecedented actions hostile to these rights, how can the outcome of this election be in doubt? Yet, we read and we hear the establishment prognosticators predicting a close election, or even a victory for the status quo. Some encouragement is in order.

My own reading of this electoral climate makes it impossible to see anything but a victory for the challenger. Whether the margin of victory will be greater, of course, to the extent that the fabled enthusiasm for the challenger actually produces disproportionate participation in the voting process -- that is, disproportionate relative to the predictive models of the pollsters, who predominantly assume party identification and turnout similar to (or in many cases, exceeding) levels that carried the current president to a victory in 2008.

The cumulative wisdom of every source that I respect suggests the challenger will secure a broader and more pronounced victory than the polls are predicting, and that his party will win control of the U.S. Senate, as well. Notwithstanding the hazards of making predictions, my gut tells me that the "swing states" of Florida, North Carolina, Virginia, New Hampshire, Colorado, Iowa, Ohio and Pennsylvania are going to reject the status quo. At a minimum, then, the electoral results will look something like this, with at least 316 electoral votes for the challenger.

However, I also believe that Nevada, Wisconsin, Michigan, and Minnesota are within reach. I would therefore not be surprised to see an electoral vote tally of 348 to 190. Such a Reaganesque landslide would produce an electoral map looking like this.

Either way, I fully expect to be celebrating after the voting stops. I do not mean to suggest here that the results of any election can produce perfection in this world. I fully expect to be disappointed in some ways by a new president. But we are clearly presented with an opportunity to receive much better leadership than we have been getting -- leadership consistent with the natural law mandate to protect the rights to life and religious liberty.

Let us pray that our fellow citizens exercise their citizenship rights in faithfulness to the teachings of the Magisterium. By God's grace, may the minds of many voters be opened to the need to protect the innocent unborn from the culture of death, to protect the Church from state incursion, and to protect each of us in our right to the free exercise of our faith not only in private but also in the public square.

Our Lady of Guadalupe, pray for us. St. Thomas Becket, pray for us. St. Thomas More, pray for us. Amen!