Thanks to Greg; and a Clarification

First, my thanks. I am very grateful, Greg, for your posting yesterday. I have great respect for your heartfelt decision--and the heartfelt decision of many other Catholics--to vote for President Bush. As I suggested in an earlier posting, it would be ridiculous to claim that a faithful Catholic could not in good conscience vote for Bush. Your impassioned plea makes it clear beyond any reasonable doubt that a faithful Catholic can indeed vote in good conscience for President Bush. (Not that there was any room for reasonable doubt!)

Now, my clarification. In your posting yesterday, in response to an earlier posting of mine, you wrote that you could not "judge a fellow Catholic who proclaims fealty to the cause of life and yet casts a vote for Kerry as, on the basis of that act alone, having committed grave sin or removed him or herself from communion with the Church. Would I see such a vote as imprudent and foolish? Yes. Mendacious? Presumably no (as only God can read the heart)." My fundamental point, however, had nothing to do with whether one was committing a grave sin. My point was not about sin, but about charity.

Assume that a Catholic, like Father Langan, or Dean Roche, or Ms. Steinfels, or Professor Kaveny, explains in some detail why, after deliberation, she has decided to vote for Senator Kerry. It is one thing to try to persuade her not to do so--to explain to her why, in one's judgment, neither she nor any other faithful Catholic should do so. But it is another thing altogether to insist to her that neither she nor any other faithful Catholic can in good conscience vote for Kerry, that her decision to do so is, for a faithful Catholic, beyond the pale of reason. As I read their National Review Online piece, this is the gravamen of what Gerry Bradley and Robbie George have argued. As I said in an earlier posting, I find this position breathtakingly arrogant.

So arrogant, in fact, that I am left to wonder: Are they who press such an argument unwittingly blinded by their passion into inculpable ignorance of the daunting complexity of the "for whom do I vote" question? Or have they permitted themselves to be goaded by their passion into forsaking the charity we owe one another in favor of rhetorical overkill--the kind of overkill that, as Cathy Kaveny has pointed out, can destroy relationships and alliances?