Denver, Colo., Oct 10, 2020 / 12:00 pm (CNA).-
Pro-life third-party candidate Brian Carroll squared-off with other third-party presidential candidates in a debate Thursday evening in Denver, with much of the discourse focusing around the difficulties that third-parties often face in gaining traction in U.S. presidential races, as well as issues surrounding education, surveillance, and drug policy.
Carroll is the presidential nominee of the American Solidarity Party, a third-party founded in 2011 and based largely on Catholic social teaching.
Carroll, an evangelical Christian and a retired history teacher from California, told CNA ahead of the debate that in his view, many Christians prioritize politics over faith, looking for a political messiah in the major parties instead of looking to Christ as savior.
“We also have to keep in mind that the political outlet is not the ultimate outlet. The goal is not to elect a president, the goal is not even to eliminate specific ills in our society. The goal is to give testimony to the part that Jesus plays in our life on a daily basis,” he told CNA.
The American Solidarity Party has attracted attention among some Catholics since a 2016 essay in First Things by philosopher David McPherson. During the 2020 election season, moral theologian Charlie Camosy, who was once a board member of Democrats for Life but quit the Democratic Party because of its abortion extremism, has been a proponent of the party.
The Free and Equal Elections Foundation, which hosted the Oct. 8 debate, is a non-profit non-partisan organization founded in 2008. Thursday’s debate is the second that the group has hosted for third-party candidates this year.
In the debate, Carroll advocated protection for investigative journalists against large corporations, mentioning the case of David Daleiden, a pro-life investigative journalist who last year was ordered to pay Planned Parenthood $870,000 in punitive damages for secretly recording meetings with abortion doctors and staff to expose their business practices.
Several of the candidates, including Carroll, decried the death penalty and called for its repeal. One candidate mentioned the recent case of Lezmond Mitchell, a Navajo man who was federally executed in August despite the objections of his tribe.
In responding to a question about mandatory vaccinations, Carroll said he supports vaccines, but not vaccine mandates. He also noted that some vaccine research does involve aborted fetal tissue, sometimes curated and sold by abortion providers, which is an issue that pro-life people ought to speak about.
“Once you’re killing one human being for the health and safety of another human being, you’ve got enormous ethical problems,” he said during the debate.
The American Solidarity Party began in 2011 as the Christian Democracy Party USA. Mike Maturen, a Catholic, ran for president on the party ticket in the 2016 election.
Though the American Solidarity Party 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 emphasizes the importance of local authorities in decision-making— is a tenet of the ASP’s platform. Carroll told CNA in June that he believes smaller scale, local approaches to handling the pandemic are best, rather than one-size-fits-all pandemic restrictions.
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.
Abortion is a key issue for members of the ASP. The party platform calls for an end to legal protection for abortion, and it supports social services for mothers in need.
The party says pro-life convictions must also include opposition to euthanasia, assisted suicide, embryonic stem cell research and the death penalty. Carroll said if he is elected, he would push for a constitutional amendment to define “personhood” as beginning at conception.
In addition, Carroll and the ASP consider steps to address climate change and pollution, as well as racial justice and reconciliation, to be a part of their pro-life convictions.
Distributism, the favored economic theory of the party platform, is a model championed by notable Catholics such as G.K. Chesterton and Hilaire 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.
The party describes distributism as “an economic system which focuses on creating a society of wide-spread ownership…rather than having the effect of degrading the human person as a cog in the machine.”
Carroll says he had never heard the word “distributism” until he joined the ASP, but as soon as he read the description, it clicked for him.
He said he encounters many people, particularly non-Catholics, who like him were not familiar with the vocabulary of the ASP, but who appreciate the platform once they understand the principles behind it.
“All those things are things people everywhere want to see. They may not understand our vocabulary, they may not understand our immediate logic, but everybody, I think, is going to be in favor of the general goals.”
Like most political candidates, Carroll’s in-person campaigning efforts have been severely curtailed by the coronavirus pandemic. But he says he has engaged with potential voters and those interested in the party via social media.
As a historian, Carroll said he appreciates that the ASP platform is rooted not just in history, but also in political theory, theology, economics, and ecology.
“There’s an amazing amount of intellectual talent in the party, and all of it goes into the platform,” he commented.
Carroll admits that his chances of actually winning the presidency are remote. The ASP will be on the November ballot in eight states, and a certified write-in option in two dozen others.
He says he is excited by the party’s growth, and says party members are already eying local races for 2022, particularly in Texas.
Like any U.S. third party, Carroll said the ASP hopes to draw converts who typically vote Democrat, Republican, or neither.
“We hope to take an equal number from each party, and then even more so we hope to bring in a lot of people that have simply given up and stopped voting,” Carroll told CNA ahead of the debate.
Carroll said he frequently hears the criticism that a third-party vote in a U.S. presidential election is essentially wasted, or a vote “against” a pro-life candidate with a reasonable chance of winning.
But Carroll said he hopes to provide an opportunity for serious Christians to vote their consciences, rather than choosing between “the lesser of two evils.”
“If you vote for something that you don’t want and you win, have you really won? I don’t think so…Democracy works best when people identify what they want, and then vote for it,” he said.
Carroll said one accusation he hears frequently against the ASP is that it is a “debating society”— that it is made up of mostly well-educated people discussing impractical theory. But Carroll said many of the ASP’s positions have been tried in various places, including in Europe and in certain local areas of the United States.
Carroll said he suspects that the more people learn about the American Solidarity Party and its positions, a wide range of voters— Christian and otherwise— are likely to find it attractive.
“In the privacy of the voting booths, there will be some pro-life atheists and humanists that will vote for us, even if they won’t publicly endorse us,” he predicted.
“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,” Party chairman and vice presidential candidate Amar Patel told CNA in March.
He said he suspects that many Christians and Catholics often 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.”
Patel, like Carroll, said he hears a lot about “wasted votes” when it comes to third parties. But 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, he said.
If that happened, 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.
For his part, Carroll said that as a Christian he hopes to encourage people not only to vote their conscience, but to make their politics an outflow of their religious beliefs, rather than the other way around.
“We do have to be paying attention to national politics, but we also need to be protecting our own hearts. We have to be looking at advancing Christ’s Kingdom, not as a theocracy, but as in everybody looking out for their neighbor, and keeping our eyes up, because we don’t know when Jesus is coming back,” he said.
“We have to keep Christ front and center in our lives, or we’re lost.”
[…]
The party of death will not rest until every sweet, innocent little child is disposed of before he or she (yes, you heard me; *he* or *she*) has the chance to draw a breath.
Analogically we may compare Heinrich Himmler, former Catholic, chicken farmer who espoused the Gottgläubig movement [indeterminate belief in god] and driving force of the Holocaust, the murder of undesirables, thought a threat to German purity and burden to the economy, to Joseph ‘Joe’ Biden former Catholic, car salesman who espouses nominal Catholicism and the driving force of America’s Abortion industry for the murder undesirables, predominantly pre natal infants, but including post partum survivors who pose a threat to the economy [as argued by Party Treasury Secretary Janet Yellin] and an inconvenience to mothers, now in Party terminology called birthers.
Analogy is never a perfect comparison, but there are similarities. Would the reader not agree?
In terms of essence, yes, Fr. Peter, but not in terms of volume.
Himmler, the chicken farmer, and his quotidian murderers were responsible for the deaths of a mere 50 or 60 million civilians and combatants.
That’s approximately as many deaths as are recorded each *year* around the world now.
So Himmler, as thoroughly despicable as he was, wouldn’t be worthy to loose the sandal strap of chickens*** Biden or Pelosi — or Obama or Schumer or any of the rest of the murder-glutted Democratic ilk — when it comes to slaughtering innocent people.
And, needless to say, there’s enough blood guilt to spill over onto all the Catholics who have voted for the great Democratic holocaust, the most horrific scourge to beset humanity in all of our sordid history.
Bidencalls himself Catholic?He is committing Mortal sin by going to Communion while by agreeing on abortion!He dosn’t seem to care one iota about this and keeps going to Holy Mass!He is in mortal sin and I guess, agrees with it.He needs prayers.
It won’t stop with the unborn; imagine three or four orderlies who have been given their instructions regarding your future; you struggle in your aged and/or diseased ridden state but you cannot overpower against them as they hold down your limbs and insert the pill under your tongue.
The state has decided.
I agree with Fr. Morello’s statement.
I pray for this man since he is closing in on the eventual day when his natural life here on earth will be over. I pray that he will meet a most merciful God but I know that this same God is all Just as well. I suspect that God will ask him, “Where was your mercy toward those lives I had created?”.
What more does Biden have to do before Rome says enough!. There is no point in the pope condemning abortion in an obscure speech but then publicly support Biden and Pelosi. Actions speek louder than words.
Why is it that, when the Biden White House gives us a “photo op” of his signing an executive order to kill the unborn, there never are any children in the picture to witness this historic event? Just asking.
Right on!!!
The almost complete lack of any meaningful response, even rhetorical, from the hierarchy of the Church to this all-out war on Christian morality, led partly by self-professed Catholics, does not merely indict, but convicts those who have completely abdicated their responsibility. The judgement of history will be justifiably severe. It will pale in comparison to judgement of God. Perhaps the best thing we can do is to remind the incredibly complacent bureaucrats who hold positions of authority in the Church that they will soon have to give an account for what they did and did not do during their lives. Perhaps, some are for all practical purposes out of reach, but others could be jolted out of their slumber.
Good points, and this absence of appropriate leadership and response exposes the deep rot of corruption in the hierarchy. I honestly don’t know how the church will move forward in the faith with leaders who have no spiritual insight into themselves or the great issues of the day. Is there hope for renewal and restoration or will we need to abandon ship and salvage what we can?
Tony W. – your 7/9/22 @6:17 – well said.
All that you say is true. Reflect for a moment on what consequences that entails. The “lack of any meaningful response” from the “hierarchy of the Church” over the past 50 years renders them guilty of formal cooperation in the horrendous mortal sin and crime of the murder of 60 million innocent babies in the United States alone by their silence and refusal to act. Their sin and crime invokes their latae sententiae excommunication from the Church, including loss of their episcopal offices. On what basis, therefore, can they be obeyed since they are no longer members of the Church?
Friday July 8 – “Biden to sign abortion executive order in response to Dobbs.”
And on Sunday, July 10, if he’s in D.C., he will receive Holy Communion with the blessing of Cardinal Gregory (and the Pope) – WHEREVER he is he will go to Communion.
Meanwhile – efforts to abolish the Latin Mass are ongoing from Rome with the blessing of the Pope, the Pope grants a public audience to one of the must virulent American ‘catholic’ supporters of abortion, House Speaker Nancy Pelosi, the Pope has a very public sit-down with fellow Jesuit Fr. James Martin, patron saint of the lgbtq folks,
yada yada yada.
And at some point when we regular Catholics – including us ‘restorationists’ go to Sunday Mass, there will be a 2nd collection for ‘Peter’s Pence’, aka the Pope.
Speaking for JUST MYSELF – Forget it.
I will continue to go to Holy Mass either at the Novus Ordo Service in Augusta or the Latin Mass in Lewiston every week and Holy days, and hopefully a few extra days per week, I will be as generous as I can be in the weekly collection, I will give to ‘Wounded Warriors’ and to the Edmundites in Selma Alabama, where they have been since 1937, but to ‘Peter’s Pence’ – forget it.
History teaches us that reform in the Catholic Church starts at the very lowest level – us common every-day church goers, and we start with fasting and prayer.
At what point does Biden’s archbishop in DC create scandal by not cracking down on him?
“Biden, a self-proclaimed catholic……”.
Reads better CWR, no?
There’s your “man of character,” Cardinal Tobin; the one you “can really talk with,” Cardinal Gregory; the one who “is seamlessly pro-life,” Cardinal Cupich. Nice job, Cardinals. Well done, your eminences. Way to go, you who wear red to signify that you are willing to suffer martyrdom for the faith.