Washington D.C., Jun 17, 2020 / 03:19 am (CNA).- Republicans and Democrats aren’t the only political parties finding their 2020 campaigning efforts hampered by the COVID-19 pandemic.
Brian Carroll, an evangelical Christian, is the 2020 presidential nominee for the American Solidarity Party, a small-but-growing political party whose platform is based largely on Catholic social teaching.
Carroll told CNA June 15 that he hopes to be recognized as a write-in candidate for president in several states come November.
In most states, smaller parties depend on volunteers to circulate petitions in order to get on the general election ballot.
With many states still imposing restrictions related to the pandemic, volunteers have been hard to come by, Carroll said.
“Some states have recognized the problem and reduced or eliminated their requirements. For example, Vermont. We expect to be on the ballot in Vermont simply because Vermont changed the rules,” he said.
Carroll’s in-person campaigning has been on hold for several months. He said before the pandemic hit, he had planned a lot of travel, making campaign stops throughout the country. California, New York, Ohio and Texas already have fairly active ASP chapters.
Despite being stuck at home in California, he’s been active on his campaign Facebook page, offering his thoughts on recent world events and dialoguing with people in the comment sections.
‘Subsidiarity is well designed for a problem like this’
For Carroll, a retired history teacher, the pandemic and the recent protests for racial justice following the death of George Floyd are best viewed through the lens of ASP’s pro-life ethic.
The party began in 2011 as the Christian Democracy Party USA, and Mike Maturen, a Catholic, ran for president on the party ticket in the 2016 election.
Though the American Solidarity Party of today is not explicitly religious, its platform rests on several principles which the Church has developed as part of Catholic social teaching.
Subsidiarity— the Catholic idea that local authorities are best suited to tackle local issues— is a tenet of the ASP’s platform.
Carroll said he supports more local solutions rather than one-size-fits-all pandemic restrictions, because what is needed in places like Florida, where many seniors live, will be different than in a college town. Similarly, a greater emphasis on subsidiarity would allow urban and rural areas to impose whatever restrictions are appropriate for them.
“Giving the local people the ability to make some of the decisions, that’s better than having one central decision. They could make the wrong decision, and then you’ve lost the chance to see what might work. So I think subsidiarity is a strength there,” Carroll said.
“By giving local authorities more power to make the decisions, you’re more likely to craft a policy that meets that particular local area. So, in that sense, subsidiarity is well designed for a problem like this.”
As the virus spread earlier this year, politicians, including President Trump, were in uncharted territory in many ways, Carroll said.
“Once it got started, you can’t fault [Trump] in a situation where even the doctors didn’t know how this was going to behave. It was new, and it was the first time they’d seen it. And so there’s going to be some errors expected. You have to give them a little bit of grace and mercy on that part of it.”
That being said, Carroll criticized what he sees as “inconsistencies” in how COVID-19 restrictions have been applied in some places, and emphasized that government leaders “need to try and minimize the inconsistencies and then, by all means, live by their own rules.”
Carroll also commented on the economic impact of the pandemic. Distributism, the favored economic theory for the party platform, is a model championed by notable Catholics such as G.K. Chesterton and Hillair Belloc. The model calls for a broader system of ownership to create a more “local, responsible, and sustainable” economy.
The ASP favors a rewrite of regulations and tax incentives to favor small businesses and family farms, rather than major corporations.
Carroll said the pandemic has exacerbated the divide between large corporations, such as Amazon, which have profited greatly since the start of the crisis, and small businesses which have struggled to stay afloat or have already had to close.
“If we had a Congress that was more sympathetic to distributism, the [relief] bills that they put together would have favored the little guy,” he said.
The ASP’s party platform is strongly anti-abortion and supports care for pregnant mothers, as well as a system of universal healthcare. It opposes capital punishment, euthanasia, assisted suicide, and embryonic stem cell research.
“We’re pro-life, but pro-life, obviously, is more than just abortion. It’s, ‘Are we taking care of our elderly who are threatened by a virus?’ That’s a pro-life question,” he said.
Advocating for greater racial equality also is a pro-life issue for the party, Carroll said. Victims of COVID-19 have been overwhelmingly poor, and disproportionately of minority races, such as African Americans and Native Americans.
Many minorities in the United States live in close quarters, do not have the freedom to work from home, rely on public transportation, and are more likely to have preexisting conditions, he said.
“All of those things make them more vulnerable, and that’s a life issue,” he said.
“The American Solidarity Party looks at so many different things as being intertwined, and they all feed back into the question of life and making our communities more friendly to quality of life, encouraging families. All of those kinds of things are where our party is.”
Carroll said he suspects that the pandemic will lead people to the understanding that tying healthcare to employment is a “basic flaw.”
“A lot of people had put faith in their healthcare through their employer, and suddenly realized that they had misplaced their faith, because it was very easy to lose their jobs,” he said.
“And so from that point of view, I think this is going to make the country much more open to the kind of healthcare that we’re looking for, where everybody gets covered.”
In addition, the principle of subsidiarity also applies to policing, he said. Police ought to come from the communities they serve, and not be seen as outside threats.
“We need to demilitarize the police and do everything we can to lower the tensions between police and the communities that they serve in,” Carroll said.
‘A specifically pro-life vote’
Even before the pandemic, turnout at ASP meetings across the country was low, but growing.
Though Carroll and his running mate, Amar Patel, are not sanguine about their chances of actually winning the presidency, their goals remain the same as when they first set out: to build up their party, and raise awareness that there is an alternative for people of faith who do not want to vote Republican or Democrat.
Carroll said he hopes the party will be able to field candidates for local offices across the country, and possibly even congressional candidates, in 2022.
Even if they don’t win offices, Carroll said, their party can affect policy by influencing the national conversation or drawing attention to specific issues.
Carroll pointed to Ross Perot, who ran for president as an independent in the 1990s, while pushing for a balanced federal budget. Though Perot did not come close to winning, the major parties discussed a balanced budget for years after that, Carroll contended.
In Carroll’s mind, if enough pro-life Democrats switch to the ASP, then the Democratic Party may consider softening its position on abortion.
Also, he said, if enough Republicans who “don’t like to see kids in cages at the border,” or who support a more universalized healthcare system, switch to ASP, the Republican Party might also begin to rethink their positions.
“My personal goal is for everyone, whether they love us, they hate us, or are completely indifferent and think we’re a joke, at least will have heard of us by November 3, and that the people who want to vote their conscience have at least that opportunity,” Patel, a Catholic who serves as ASP’s Chairman, told CNA in March.
He said he suspects that many Christians and Catholics end up voting for a candidate who they believe will defend one specific aspect of Christian morality, rather than looking for “ideal candidates who will actually defend the Christian message in total.”
“They can actually put in ‘Brian Carroll’ if they want a write-in vote that is significant, is meaningful, and counts specifically FOR something, as opposed to against something, which I think a lot of people are ending up doing.”
Patel said he hears a lot about “wasted votes” when it comes to third parties. But he has a different view.
In states where a Republican or Democratic victory is all but assured, such as California, even if millions of voters switched to a third party, it would be unlikely to change the outcome of the race, he said. However, the “entire face of American politics would have changed,” because people would be talking about the third-party candidate who garnered millions of votes.
“If you’re strongly pro-life and you vote for Trump in a state he’s going to lose, THAT’S a throwaway vote, because not everyone who votes for Trump is pro-life,” Patel argued.
“But if you change your pro-life vote to Brian Carroll, that will be a specifically pro-life vote that will be counted as such,” he added.
[…]
Nope, nope, nope. There cannot be any “incarnational plurality”. There cannot be “many christs”.
I am sure, that’s heresy.
Even St. Thomas Aquinas agreed that the Son could incarnate a second time in another human nature. See ST III.Q3.A7. Incarnating in an alien rational nature would pose no obstacle to the divine power nor to Catholic faith or theology.
Dr Christopher Baglow is not speculating theologically on intelligent life, actually he implies aliens with reasonable capacity, since June Bugs have some degree of intelligence, and how such rational aliens might be culturally developed liturgy and all. Rather he’s speculating philosophically. Theology as we possess it centered on Christ’s revelation would have us understand that Christ’s incarnation in our world is entirely unique to Mankind, created in his image, nowhere else alluded to in the Cosmos. No one else saves but Christ. Nowhere else has he been crucified and risen. There cannot be others in his image [if they are rational they are in his image and created by him]. If alleged sightings of UFOs excite the creative imagination of Dr Baglow that’s fine. Although he mistakenly confuses theology centered on the Deposit of Faith as open to dreamland. Notre Dame, once a true Catholic University has gone the way of Fr Hesburgh’s distancing from Catholic doctrinal principles. Aside from a handful of orthodox staff, any sort of nonsense can result from the Hesburghian Illuminati.
As known Aquinas does admit to the possibility of the Divinity assuming two different human natures since matter is divisible though not the divine nature (ST 3 7 Ad 1). Although I would add that what is conceded within the realm of possibility doesn’t always correspond to the realm of plausibility.
For those interested in reading Aquinas on the issue the precise location is
ST III Q3 Article 7 Whether One Divine Person Can Assume Two Human Natures Ad 1 [reply to objection 1].
We read: “These species would have ‘some history’ where God made Himself accessible to them, said Baglow.” How might this be true, or not? In an earlier posting (June 26, 2020), your truly proposed such as the following:
(1) Have any possible and technologically advanced civilizations in the cosmos also been GIVEN, by the transcendent God, a very different washroom key—-for the Beatific Vision? Is there a glass-ceiling threshold for this kind of “intelligence,” gifted and governed more from above, than from below (wrap-around “evolution” across the cosmos)? And personal, rather than the “species” (a preoccupation of post-Christian historicism)?
(2) How might any implied cosmically-multiple sort of polygenesis square with terrestrial Original Sin (just a quaint local narrative?) plus the SINGULAR redemptive act of Christ—-a “person” both human and divine, fully both—-on Calvary? Is our familiar and universal capacity to sin (!) against God (!) a unique and more-than-technical endowment, inseparable from a freely given, alarming, and unique Redemption by the Creator (!)?
(3) Or, is any such Redemption both multiple across space and time and still ONE ACTION (not mass produced) just as every Mass (capital M!) around the world is both the unbloody renewal/extension of the SINGULAR Calvary, while also “numerically distinct”? Or, does the heart of God expose itself only here in backwater Jerusalem perhaps because none of those other hypothetical intelligences ever “fell”?
(4) Or, instead and with Blessed Duns Scotus, might Christ have become incarnate here (and even elsewhere?) ABSENT our particular need for salvation history, by an action of overflowing divine charity that includes, but is not limited to our need for damage control?
(5) Or, despite hypothetical technical superiority elsewhere, is our access toward beatitude still a most singular gift into the cosmos? Pope Francis would readily baptize a Martian, he once said, but Pope St. John Paul II proposed a distinctive “ONTOLOGICAL LEAP” (sometimes fatally mistranslated [cross-dressed?] as only an “evolutionary” leap?):
“The moment of transition to the SPIRITUAL cannot be the object of this kind of observation [meaning the natural sciences], which nevertheless can discover at the experimental level a series of very valuable signs indicating what is specific to the human being. But the experience of metaphysical knowledge, of self-awareness and self-reflection, of moral conscience, freedom, or again of aesthetic and religious experience fall within the competence of philosophical analysis and reflection, while theology brings out its ultimate meaning according to the Creator’s plans” (“Message on Evolution to the Pontifical Academy of Sciences.” Oct. 1996).
Just a few opening questions about possible ETI—what it might be and what it might not be. With Hamlet: “. . . that is the question.”
It stands to reason that if there are intelligent beings on other planets that Jesus Christ died once for all.
How are they going to know and love Him? Are they all going to be saved as “invencible ignorant”?