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F r o n t i s p i e c e
A Political People
By Karl Keating
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This Rock
Volume 15, Number 8
 October 2004 
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Aristotle remarked that "man is a political animal." I guess the old guy was right.
At the beginning of the presidential primaries, I devoted an issue of my weekly E-Letter to Catholic Answers’ Voter’s Guide for Serious Catholics. The guide provides a way by which Catholics can apply their moral principles in the voting booth: Find out where each candidate stands on five "non-negotiable" issues (abortion, euthanasia, fetal stem cell research, human cloning, and homosexual "marriage"), and strike from consideration anyone who is wrong on any of them. Then choose from among the remaining candidates.
Several people wrote to me, complaining about the guide’s methodology and calling into question my civic intelligence. How could Catholic Answers put out something so "simplistic," so "incomplete," so "black and white"? In the next issue of the E-Letter I quoted their comments and replied to them.
Then came a flood of replies, but it was a good flood. Never had I received so many responses—about 150 of them in the first twenty-four hours—to anything I had written. All but three or four people enthusiastically endorsed the voter’s guide and my defense of it. Of course, I was gratified by the support, but I also was surprised at the intensity of many of the remarks. I mean "intensity" in a good way. No one writing in favor of the guide spoke rudely of those who opposed it, but they were vigorous in saying how wrong they thought their opponents were.
Why did my E-Letters generate so many responses? (At the end of each E-Letter I actually discourage responses, since I’m in no position to reply to them. Still, in they came.) I think it was the topic: politics. This is an election year, after all, and Americans are a political people.
Commentators mope about the low turnout for elections, but I wonder what other country has such a large proportion of its citizens involved in politics up and down the scale, from presidential races down to elections for water districts and school boards. Other countries may see a large majority of the electorate go to the polls for national elections, but is there as much participation at the local level as there is here? Probably not.
This interest in the political process demonstrates, once again, that Aristotle knew his stuff. It was his philosophical system that was "baptized" by Thomas Aquinas and became conjoined with the latter’s theology to form the basis of Catholic thought over the last millennium. Aquinas fine-tuned many of the moral principles that should underlie our voting.
I take those replies I received as a hopeful sign about the future of our country. It is a good thing that so many people take their faith seriously and do not hesitate to apply its principles to civic life. This is a start. The next step is to disseminate those principles, first to other Catholics and then to the rest of the populace.
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