you may accuse me of being a one-issue voter. in my mind, if you don’t agree with me on abortion, then we don’t really have that much more to talk about, as far as your candidacy is concerned (we can still be friends, however).
but at the same time, i agree with Josh’s post (and those in his comments) that a lot of people, namely: Christians, make too much of the abortion issue.
i know, sounds like a contradiction. let me explain.
meeting the minimum
to me, this issue is intensely important. and while i understand that the president is not able to have much of a direct influence on the laws regarding abortion, the fact remains that the issue itself is of extreme personal importance (i could argue that it is of extreme importance societally as well, but for now we’ll keep it personal since that’s all i can actually prove).
the issue is so important to me that it serves as a baseline. its not “if you have the right view on abortion i will most assuredly vote for you”, but rather, “we need to agree on some really foundational issues before we can talk about you running my country”.
if you think about it, everybody does this. every single person in this country voted for someone that agreed with them on a foundational set of issues.
allow me to prove it.
a ridiculous example
back up to the campaign trail. imagine that Obama’s platform was exactly the same as it was, but for one minor difference: he believed that women should not be in leadership. in other words, a woman’s place is to serve the men, and thus she shouldn’t be in charge of anything larger than a classroom.
would you have voted for him?
ridiculous i know. but think about it! how much influence does the president really have over whether or not women are in charge of things across the country? and take it one step further: what if he said that he only “personally believed” that women were subservient, but that he would leave any actual gender-in-leadership decisions “up to the States”?
i’m guessing (hoping, even) that he wouldn’t have even gained any traction. and that you (probably) wouldn’t have voted for him. or even listened to him, at least after he said something so fundamentally demeaning.
but why not? you agree with him on practically everything else! and he’s the young candidate who can actually bring change!
doesn’t matter. you would disagree with him on something so foundationally important that he couldn’t sound like anything other than a lunatic.
i know the example is ludicrous. but it’s ludicrous for a reason. when a candidate looks me in the eyes and says “the life of an unborn child is the property of the mother, to do with as she wills”, it’s hard for me to listen to anything else they have to say. to me, that’s as ludicrous as saying “women should never leave the kitchen”.
more clarification
let me clarify, again, that agreeing with me on abortion absolutely does not guarantee you my vote. all it means is that you get to have a conversation with me about other issues over which i will be somewhat more negotiable. if we agree on abortion but disagree on just about everything else (taxes, environment, death penalty, foreign policy, etc), sorry, but i’m still not voting for you. being pro-life doesn’t get you into the People I Voted For club. it just gets you on the Potentials list.
we all do that exact same thing, just with different issues. we all expect our representatives to agree with us, fundamentally, on basic human rights. blacks, whites, women, everybody’s equal. we expect our representatives to agree that using their position solely to gain excessive wealth is wrong. we expect our representatives to agree that selling dope to 9 year olds is wrong.
if someone comes along that disagrees with any of those things (and for some reason decides to bring that up during their campaign), there’s no way we’re voting for them. we’re not even going to listen to them. if you think selling dope to 9 year olds is OK and you say it out loud, you can forget your presidential bid.
bottoms up!
what i’m talking about is a Bottom-Up approach to selecting a candidate. the candidate must meet a certain number of basic (personal) qualifications before we’ll even consider what they have to say on everything else.
the problem is when someone comes along with a Top-Down approach. a pastor says “because this candidate is pro-life, you MUST vote for them.” or a person goes down a ballot checking off names that have an R next to them, because they think the republicans are the pro-life party, and that’s all that matters.
this is the problem Josh (and the others) are actually so tired of. i think it’s important to make the distinction, though.
i think we (meaning Josh and myself and other “intellectually-enlightened” Christians) need to be careful of how we judge people that appear to be Top-Down voters. you cannot say with certainty that “most Christians (or right-wingers) vote with abortion as their only deciding factor”. note that the effect of the Top-Down voter and the Bottom-Up voter is the same: they both only vote for pro-lifers. so just because i’ve always voted for pro-lifers does not mean that is the only issue i consider. it just means its the first.
objections
“but if everybody voted Bottom-Up, there’s a lot of times we couldn’t even vote!” yes, exactly. which is why i didn’t, this election. i’m a Bottom-Up voter. but let’s think seriously about the mindset this objection creates. basically what you’re saying is that “you have to vote for somebody”. that is exactly the mindset that creates Top-Down voters. if you have to vote for somebody, every time, and one candidate out of the two sounds like a lunatic to you because of fundamental disagreements, then of course you are required to choose the other candidate. by raising this objection you are validating the very notion of Top-Down voting which you claim to hate.
“i don’t think the abortion issue is important enough to be part of the baseline. to me it’s more negotiable, like taxes.” OK, good. that’s a genuine disagreement that you and i have. my only request is that you be slow to judge people who happen to believe that abortion is important enough. disagreeing with you that abortion is fundamentally important is not the same as being a Top-Down voter, nor is it necessarily an indication of cultishness, religious irrationality, or anything of that nature. it is simply a disagreement.
“the president doesn’t have any control over abortion. who cares what he thinks?” take a step back and think about this for a moment. what does the president really have control over, exactly? can he actually lower your taxes, by himself? can he single-handedly implement healthcare reform? can he change the laws about emissions? can he change any current laws at all? does he control the stock market? can he really save social security? i think the answer to these questions is pretty much the same: not really at all. and yet Obama and McCain just spent how many millions of dollars explaining to you their stances on all these issues? just because the president doesn’t have direct power over it doesn’t mean his (or, eventually, her) opinion isn’t important.
in fact, when you’re talking about the person that you’re electing to be in charge of this country, i think their opinions on all these issues are quite important. we all do. the question we’re dealing with today is how you prioritize those issues.
wrapping it up
sorry this is so long. it’s just that i feel genuinely trapped. on the one hand, i think the apparent “Christian right-winger” Top-Down voting is at worst irresponsible and at best ignorant. on the other hand, i can’t in good conscience vote for any candidate that doesn’t agree with me on what i believe to be very fundamental issues (including the issue of abortion). its not worth fulfilling a “civic duty” at the price of my conscience. [side note at josh: this was the actual point of derek webb's article.]
let’s all be a little more careful to judge the people we disagree with. please?