Pope Francis pushes false claim that both presidential candidates are "against life"
Kamala Harris wants to protect women's bodies. The pope thinks that's evil.
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In a false equivalence worthy of a stereotypical New York Times headline, Pope Francis said Kamala Harris and Donald Trump were both “against life.”
No one expects the pope to be a political pundit, but the head of the Catholic Church is regularly seen as a moral authority—at least by members of his religion—and that moral authority said yesterday, during a news conference, that U.S. voters should choose the “lesser of two evils” in the upcoming election because they were both wrong on the only issues he cares about.
“Sending migrants away, not allowing them to grow, not letting them have life is something wrong; it is cruelty,” Francis said in a news conference on the plane as he returned to Rome after his long trip to Southeast Asia and Oceania. “Sending a child away from the womb of the mother is murder because there is life. And we must speak clearly about these things.”
…
… when asked whether it would be morally admissible to vote for someone who favored the right to abortion, he responded: “One must vote. And one must choose the lesser evil. Which is the lesser evil? That lady or that gentleman? I don’t know. Each person must think and decide according to his or her own conscience.”
How busted must your moral barometer be to not know the difference between a paper cut and a decapitation?
It was an unprepared remark to a reporter’s question, but it’s not like he hasn’t put thought into this. He offered the cowardly moral ambiguity we’ve come to expect from high-ranking Catholics who routinely treat Democrats as monsters because they think the government shouldn’t be in the business of forcing women to give birth against their will.
Let’s be very clear: It’s not hard to know who the “lesser evil” is. The Democrats support women’s rights, oppose gun violence, followed the science during the pandemic, and want to expand health care for as many people as possible. Republicans want to force rape and incest victims (including children) to bear their attackers’ kids, only offer thoughts and prayers after mass shootings while doing nothing to get guns out of the hands of people who shouldn’t have them, oppose life-saving vaccines, and pushed conspiracies that led to more COVID-related deaths.
As I write this, the leader of the Republican Party and his running mate are pushing a debunked conspiracy about Haitian immigrants in Ohio that has already lead to serious bomb threats—all because they know the lies will rile up their ignorant and racist base.
One side revels in evil.
The other side, while far from perfect and often deserving of criticism, works to oppose it—at least in those areas.
It takes religion to ignore those obvious differences.
The pope’s words might have carried more weight if he blamed Democrats for their awful stance permitting a genocide by the Israeli government against Palestinians—an issue that Republicans are even worse on—but he never did. He just offered meaningless platitudes about how war is bad. When it came to the political parties, though, he boiled it down to the bare minimum: “Both are against life: the one that throws out migrants and the one that kills children.”
One side hates migrants, yes.
The other side does not, by definition, kill children. They don’t kill toddlers either. Or babies. To say otherwise is to completely misunderstand why anyone might have an abortion so close to birth or why some newborns die shortly after birth.
In order for the pope’s comments to make any sense, you have to share both his warped belief that life begins at conception and that all “sins” are equivalent. And then you have to treat your brain like an Etch A Sketch and erase any memories you had between 2016 and 2020.
It’s almost bizarre that the Catholic Church has moved in a slightly more progressive direction when it comes to same-sex couples and trans people, and continues to rightly condemn war and torture and the death penalty, but it refuses to budge on women in Church leadership roles and idolizing sperm.
(Ironically, in a document released earlier this year called "Infinite Dignity," the pope reaffirmed his opposition to abortion, calling it an “extremely dangerous crisis of the moral sense” while simultaneously condemning “violence against women.” Does he not understand that forcing a woman to give birth against her will is indeed a form of violence against her?)
Still, none of this is surprising. This is the same pope who said, in 2019, that having an abortion was like hiring a hitman. That allegation was especially absurd when you consider how naturally occurring miscarriages also result in the “death” of a fetus. (By their logic, God must run the damn mafia.)
It’s also hard to take the pope seriously when he speaks about the sacredness of human life when he oversees the largest criminal enterprise in the world, responsible for sexually abusing or covering up the sexual abuse of thousands upon thousands of child victims. There are also the scandals and corpses associated with the Magdalene Laundries. And the irrational bans on birth control and other forms of contraception. (Their problem isn’t abortion. Their problem is sex.)
To put it in a way Sinéad O'Connor might appreciate, the Greatest Evil has no business telling us to choose the “lesser evil.”
If Pope Francis thinks abortion is murder, and pro-choice policies are on par with the anti-migrant cruelty of the Trump administration, he should start promoting sex education, birth control, condoms, and everything else the Church opposes that would actually reduce the number of abortions. When the refugee family separation crisis was occurring a few years ago, the pope rightly called it “cruelty of the highest form.” But there’s no equivalence between that actual evil and the pretend bogeyman of letting women control their bodies. There was a time when the pope said the lives of the poor, the living, the destitute, the abandoned, and the underprivileged were “equally sacred.” He’s now concerned primarily with the unborn even though Democrats’ policies for the “least of these” are far better than their opponents’. He’d rather see people suffering under Republican rule because they’re against abortion than consider the bigger picture.
In response to the pope’s thoughtless remarks, the group Catholics for Choice issued a statement saying, “To distill voters' choice down to abortion or immigration is categorically wrong… Catholic voters would do well to follow Pope Francis’s prior advice rather than his present advice and evaluate all candidates based on a justice-minded view of the world that looks beyond a singular issue.”
They’re right, of course. It’s bad enough that some voters only care about a single issue, meaning they’re willing to let the world burn if they don’t get exactly what they want. It’s arguably worse when you only care about a couple of issues, then throw your hands up in defeat while acting like both parties are the same. They’re not. They’re objectively different and one is better than the other on all these salient topics.
Pretending otherwise requires a strong dose of self-delusion. The pope is a master of it.
It’s also worth remembering that Catholics themselves are far better on this issue than the pope. A survey from the Pew Research Center in 2022 found that 56% of U.S. Catholics say abortion should be legal in all or most cases. That number jumps to 69% when the life or health of the woman is at risk. The people in the pews are far more compassionate when it comes to this issue than the man who functions as their leader. They have more nuance than he ever will. It should be easy for them to figure out who the “lesser evil” is because most of them don’t consider abortion to be evil regardless of what the Church teaches.
One last note: I doubt Taylor Swift agrees with Kamala Harris on all the issues. But she knows there’s a clear difference when it comes to who’s going to be better, overall, on the issues she cares about. It’s amazing that the “childless cat lady” had more courage, and more nuance, in her assessment of the election that the pope.
The Catholic church has been more than willing to stand idly by and allow women to die from tubal pregnancies rather than intervene to save a life. They put more value on a little cluster of nonviable cells than they do the life of the woman. Given the scale of child sexual abuse in the Catholic Church, there is simply no possible way the church hierarchy could have been unaware of it. Until these things began to be taken seriously by the media and civil authorities, the church circled the wagons, protected the priests, and blamed the victims. No thank you Mr. Pope. I don't care what you think about anything.
I’m glad you brought up the Magdalene scandal. Please don’t forget the Catholic Church’s role in kidnapping Indigenous children and then maltreating and sometimes killing those children in Canada. Residential schools operated into the 1990s. Just horrific.