The Election is causing a great deal of anxiety in my patients and even friends and family.
This is the best explanation on how to think about this election. Give it a chance and do not let the priest scar you away to hearing the truth in his words.
Sandra Lora Cremers, MD, FACS
This is how I would discuss the below video:
Happiness depends on how much Mercy and Love we can show others. Often, though, we need to experience Mercy and Love first to be able to show Mercy and Love to others.
What happens if you grew up in a terrible situation. What if your parents abandoned you when you were a baby or if your mom and dad were alcoholics and did not take care of you and never showed you love and mercy? What if your mom and/or dad always screamed at you and put you down and never had time for you to show you Mercy and Love? How will you be able to show Mercy and Love if you really never experienced it.
It can be very difficult but it is not impossible. We need to each one of us know, remember, and truly realize that God loves you. He loves you very much and He loved you first. We need to experience his Love and Mercy as much as possible to be able to give Love and Mercy to others. By doing so, you will find a deep happiness that will lead you to eternal happiness.
But many have asked me, how can I show Love and Mercy to Trump or to Clinton or to any of the political candidates who I disagree with completely? How can I be happy in this election year which such difficult choices?
We need to always remember that there is a negative force always trying to make you unhappy, always trying to make you scared and live in fear and hate others who disagree with us. It can attack us directly and it can attack our family and it can attack our country. We have to be on the winning team that will not give into sadness, fear, anger, unhappiness.
This negative force is desperately trying to bring hatred between people, between different races, religions, and beliefs. For many who are Christian, we call it the devil who has always been a divider and murderer. This devil would never say, out loud, “Deny Jesus Christ!” because he knows that someone who loves Jesus would immediately reject the suggestion. So, he tends to use more subtle means and subtle words.
Look at the 2016 presidential election. This election is bringing out hatred and anger on all sides. This evil force would love to make all Democrats hate Repubicans and vice versa. This evil force will not stop until as many people hate as many other people as possible.
Many have asked me who I am going to vote for.
It is a very controversial issue, but there are a few things everyone who is listening to this radio show can agree on in regards to all political parties, so if you will open your heart and mind and give truth a chance, please listen on. First let me say that there has never been a political party in the United States that is perfectly aligned with teachings that will increase happiness on every issue. For that matter, there is no partido perfectly aligned with all Christian teaching teachings.
Thus we have to discerning which party and which policies are most in line with truth, beauty, the protection of innocent life and the pursuit of happiness, and which ones aren’t.
We can disagree on many issues and still be happy friends. Issues such as racial injustice, education, the economy, immigration and healthcare can be very controversial.
There are other issues, however, which touch on matters of intrinsic evil—actions that can never, at any time, under any circumstances be committed, promoted or even enabled.
If we look at Affirmative Action. This program aims to eliminate disadvantages that minorities face when competing, for example, for admission to college. In our nation, one party favors Affirmative Action to bring justice and balance in our multiracial society. The other party holds that it penalizes high achievers by giving limited spots in the college classroom to less qualified candidates, while denying more qualified students access. One party sees affirmative action as a matter of justice…while the other party sees it as injustice.
But, suppose a candidate for president promoted a policy that would make it legal for someone to kill a Hispanic person if that Hispanic person created a hardship for them getting the education they desired. How many of you would be comfortable voting for that candidate?
Or let’s look at immigration. One of the major political parties seeks to allow immigration with very little restriction. The other party is concerned that unrestricted immigration leads to, among other things, non-citizens taking jobs that could be worked by citizens. One party favors open borders—the other favors “law and order”.
Now, suppose a candidate for president promoted a policy that would make it legal for someone to kill a Hispanic person if the presence of that Hispanic person made it more difficult to pursue one’s career of choice. How many of you would be comfortable voting for that candidate?
Thank God we don’t have a candidate from either party who says that they condone such policies. Nobody in their right mind would say such a thing—that we could kill Hispanics or blacks —or anyone else—just for the sake of protecting personal economic or educational interests.
Nobody would say it, but There is a candidate, in this 2016 race for president, who along with that candidate’s political party does, in fact, sanction the killing of Hispanics and black in the situations previously described…under one…particular…condition: That the Hispanic and blacks person is still in his or her mother’s womb. Now, this candidate and party certainly won’t say it that way, not publicly anyway. Instead, they use words like “choice” or “reproductive rights” or “women’s health” or other sanitized statements in order to cover up what abortion is and what abortion does.
Many hate talking about abortion. It is too scary. It is too painful to truly think about the truth here. Many of us have had an abortion or know someone close to us who have had an abortion. I know many women who have had an abortion and regret it every day of their life. There are many women who are depressed because of their abortion and do not know how to get out of this sadness.
There are many who just think it is silly issue. They want to believe it is a woman’s choice because they do not know medically that the baby is actually external to the mother. What do I mean? In medical school at Harvard and Dartmouth and in every medical school, doctors learn that our skin is a protective layer to the outside world. Our skin or epidermis makes us separate from other people. Inside every mother’s womb, there is an epidermal lining that technically makes everything inside the womb external to the mother. This is the reason why women menstruate every month, because this epidermal lining sloughs off every month just like our skins cells do. Thus technically speaking the baby is not truly inside the woman’s person, but external to the mother: she is just carrying the baby like you could do by embracing a baby in your arms.
Now, before we go any further in discussing the extremely sensitive issue of abortion we have to remember that God’s mercy is like an ocean of mercy, never ending, and God’s mercy is bigger than our sin and our pain, our decisions.
Let us never forget that the act of saying “I am sorry,” in Confession, pours down God’s mercy and brings us eternal happiness. We do not have to hide from God and feel depressed because of a mistake. We do not need to pretend the pain is not real or hide our wounds and cancer from true healing.
When we experience God’s mercy even after an abortion or a terrible crime, we begin to feel and know God’s love in forgiving our most serious sins is even greater than his love in creating us. True happiness is around the corner waiting for us in the loving embrace of our true Father God.
When we consider that a woman can walk into Planned Parenthood and have her baby put to death because she doesn’t want to jeopardize her education or career, we must acknowlege that the shocking scenarios described previously are not only possible…not only real…but also among the most common reasons for abortion in America. Even the word “abortion” has been drained of its meaning—we treat it like nothing more than a term that starts a heated debate rather than a procedure that stops a heartbeat. Many want to treat abortion as merely one issue among many—but that requires that a person pretend not to know what abortion is and what abortion does.
Do you know which candidate and party in this election promotes abortion and even promises to expand its availability here at home as well as abroad?
Do you know that this candidate and party intend to make you and me pay for other people’s abortions with our tax dollars—something that has always been illegal?
Are you aware that this candidate and party, which until recently, said that abortion should be “safe, legal and rare” no longer even bothers to say that it should be rare—but rather, that it must be available any time, any place, even up to the last moment that the fully formed, full-term baby remains in the womb?
If you do not know which candidate and party I’m referring to, then you should not even consider voting until you do know! Ignorance in this area is unacceptable, because ignorance in this area costs millions of babies their lives.
Another of the Devil’s tactics is to encourage us to make excuses for our participation in really bad things by appealing to other good things that we support, which we try to convince ourselves somehow “cancel out” the grave evil we enable. Take capital punishment, for example. If you bring up abortion, some people will say, “I’m against capital punishment…and if you’re against abortion, then you should be against capital punishment!” Fair enough. What is the biggest objection to capital punishment? That innocent people might be mistakenly put to death. And it must be acknowledged that innocent people very well could be unjustly executed due to the many flaws in our legal system.
And this very reason for opposing capital punishment is precisely the reason that we must never willingly support or even enable abortion with our vote. Because, while some innocent people have no doubt been put to death mistakenly through capital punishment, in abortion an innocent person is always put to death, and never by mistake. It’s always chosen…always intended. If a person is against capital punishment, then, they necessarily must be against abortion because the intention of abortion is to knowingly and deliberately kill an innocent boy or girl—each and every time.
What about war? People who vigorously oppose the wars in the Middle East, for example, often quote statistics on the great number of innocent people accidently killed in the crossfire. “Collateral damage”—the innocent people killed in war—is, perhaps the greatest tragedy of war. But if a person opposes the accidental killing of innocent people in war, while enabling the intentional killing of the most innocent human beings on the planet with their vote—well…this is hypocrisy of the most extreme kind. If a person opposes war because of the accidental, unintended deaths of innocent people, they necessarily must oppose abortion because the killing in abortion is neither accidental nor unintended, but always directly willed.
Sometimes we hear the stupendously deceptive claim that a candidate or party will reduce abortions by improving economic or social conditions, while simultaneously promoting abortion as a right worth protecting.
But let’s face facts: Abortion is not caused by economics or social conditions. Economic and social factors are, no doubt, circumstances that affect a mother’s decision in some cases, but they are not causes. After all, if eliminating abortion were merely a matter of economics, or access to healthcare, or other socioeconomic factors, then why do wealthy mothers also abort their babies?
There are plenty of Christian who, quite rightly, have criticized bishops and priests in recent years for not having spoken out more forcefully against the sexual abuse of children by priests. Why, then, do many of these same Christians want to silence bishops and priests who speak out forcefully against killing innocent children? Why is opposing sexual abuse of children a matter of justice, but opposing the murder of children a matter of “preaching politics”?
Each one of us to be truly happy must at some point ask for forgiveness to God for anything that has been destructive to ourselves and to our brothers and sisters. And we must oppose the threats to innocent life that are most real and most urgent. There is no single issue that threatens innocent human life more directly, consistently and urgently than the deliberate killing of baby boys and baby girls in their mother’s womb. No…issue! In the time since this radio program started, 30 children have been deliberately executed in the womb in the United States—and that’s just the ones that are reported.
We have a serious obligation to protect human life, and especially the lives of the most innocent and vulnerable among us. Whoever fails to do this, when otherwise able to do so, commits a serious error of omission.
Within these controversial issues and in the issues that cause us pain, we have to show mercy and love to those who do not agree with us.