We are now less than 50 days from the Nov. 3 election, and as Catholics take this time to discern which issues should be our priority when we vote, one issue always seems to come to the fore: abortion.
That should hardly be surprising, as abortion — among all of the issues in our country — is unique: both in its prevalence and in its taking of completely innocent lives.
Still, some Catholics try to downplay the importance of this issue.
Those who support pro-abortion candidates often point to the importance of other issues to justify that support. Some may reference the “seamless garment” approach, which looks at a basket of issues that affect human life, and then argue that abortion is just one of those important issues.
For example, sometimes Catholics who wish to conveniently overlook Joe Biden’s position on abortion will point to the resumption of the federal death penalty by the Trump administration as a sort of equivalence.
There are many issues that Catholics should be concerned about, but that does not mean that some issues are not more pressing than other ones.
In the United States in 2020, moral equivalence when it comes to abortion just does not hold up.