YOU CATHOLIC? HERE'S HOW TO VOTE
McCarraher, Eugene
of large corporations. Moving beyond the "regulatory" ap- Eugene McCarraher proach to...
...Twenty Green insurgency...
...It tice, the litmus test of any serious "life ethic...
...Yet seldom has a clearer sign appeared that it is time to serve genetic diversity and to guarantee farmers' access to end the two-party regime of money, smugness, and con- seeds and other biotechnologies...
...But the understandable years of relative inaction, the prominence of focus on Nader has drawn attention away prochoice governors, and the prochoice senfrom the Green platform, an even more timents of many Republican voters are addidurable reason to abandon the mainstream...
...changeable figureheads...
...Why corporatist schemes of Jacques Maritain, John Ryan, and are you stealing support from the Greens by casting a vote for Raymond McGowan, as well as the ideals of Dorothy Day either Al Gore or George W. Bush, two essentially inter- and Robert Ludlow...
...Both Ralph Nader's moral integrity and intel- parties unequivocally endorse the death lectual caliber are unimpeachable, and he penalty...
...Commonweal 2 2 October 20, 2000...
...And by insisting on "worksensus that nullifies every ballot...
...major parties fail, in theory as well as in pracpublic financing of election campaigns...
...sitions taken by the consensus parties...
...endorses the repeal of the Taft-Hartley Act, (Yes, litmus tests are eminently proper-what one of the chief obstacles to a robust revival of the labor is real politics, folks, without pH levels of partisanship...
...and full and improved progress...
...between "the lesser of the evils" into the permanent condiIndeed, the Green conceptions of ecology and economics tion of the evil of the lessers...
...and not a minimum but a living wage, something the only antidote to the facile cynicism that makes the choice Catholics especially should endorse with historical pride...
...violated civil liberties, entangled the United States in a coun- This platform, while plainly more intelligent, republican, terinsurgency war in Colombia, and distracted attention and genuinely populist than the boilerplate of the consensus from urban poverty-as well as failed to stem the con- parties, contains demands that at this point can also be desumption of narcotics...
...I would argue that both year term limits on public officials...
...Moving beyond the "regulatory" apEugene McCarraher proach to corporations and an idea of civic virtue that does not extend much beyond recycling laws, the Green envif you want to live like a Republican," President ronmental program encourages bio-regionalist approaches Bill Clinton advised in his speech to the Demo- to ecology and production that used to be championed by I cratic National Convention, "then you better people as diverse as Peter Kropotkin, Lewis Mumford, the vote for a Democrat...
...And the best way to exer- place democracy"-meaning not only a reanimated union cise this urgent obligation is to vote this November for the movement but complete worker control of management, Green Party ticket of Ralph Nader and Winona LaDuke...
...But while the Democrats' advocacy demonstrated his populist credentials by of "choice" is adamantine, the Republicans' walking the picket lines with striking Veri- stated antithesis is, I strongly suspect, bogus, zon workers...
...I think the question is just the opposite...
...And that vision constitutes families...
...In genuinely "per- Eugene McCarraher is currently working on a study of corporate sonalist" fashion, the Greens call for an end to the legal business and the modern American moral imagination...
...It demands universal health care scribed as utopia-this moral and imaginative nadir through a single-payer system...
...a proportion- Thus, partly by default and partly by conviction, the Green al, single-chamber Congress...
...Indeed, seldom has the symbiosis of the two major sion of the "seamless garment" ethic, Greens call for the parties been expressed with such unself-conscious crass- prohibition of patents on life forms in order both to preness...
...1:1 recall some of the oft-forgotten but most desperately needed notions of Catholic social thought...
...I promise you not just tional reasons to suspect Republican integriIt calls for easing voter registration...
...twelve- progress, but new ty on this score...
...Thus did the Triangula- Catholic Workers, and the National Catholic Rural Life Contor-in-Chief confirm his party's ideological deference to the ference...
...movement...
...long-overdue cuts to the mili- platform is the ensemble of positions most palatable to tary budget, and an end to the "war on drugs" that has Catholics...
...a thirty-hour work week so of our political culture, they represent the only visionary that "working families" (a phrase that unwittingly ratifies the force in American politics, and vision becomes politically assimilation of family life to corporate designs) can be just legitimate only through support...
...the pun- only syndicalism and guild socialism, but the democratic dits insinuate...
...worker control of pension funds...
...Try to imagine Gore doing a rhetorical and even cynical ploy to attract this, and you'll appreciate the need for a Evangelical and Catholic voters...
...supervision, and technical design-the Greens revive not "But isn't voting for Nader wasting your vote...
...In what could be considered an imaginative extenGOP...
...I contend that the Green Party is While the Greens' support for unlimited abortion rights currently the most indispensable vehicle, not only for the should trouble Catholic voters, its conjunction with opposireclamation of our democracy from corpo- tion to capital punishment should also highrate power, but for the moral and imaginative light the contradiction and falsity of the porenovation of our political life...
...His Christian fiction of corporate personhood and the gradual breakup Critics (Cornell) has just been published...
Vol. 127 • October 2000 • No. 18
