A brief, and admittedly partial, review of an election scorecard

This post started out as a response to a Facebook friend's post of an election scorecard by an organization called "Network." My response quickly grew larger than the average Facebook response, so as an act of mercy to my friend and her followers 😊, I decided to move it to my blog.

Whenever I see an election scorecard, the first thing I do is look at who produced it. This one was produced by Network, an organization that describes itself as "Advocates for Justice, Inspired by Catholic Sisters." As it states on its "About Us" page, it was "[f]ounded by Catholic Sisters in the progressive spirit of Vatican II." While its list of values on that page includes a number of issues important to Catholics, it makes no mention at all of some very important issues affecting life and the family, including abortion and euthanasia. 

It's worth noting that in its 2012 "Doctrinal Assessment of the Leadership Conference of Women Religious," the Vatican's Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith explicitly mentioned Network as an organization associated with the LCWR. The CDF wrote that "while there has been a great deal of work on the part of LCWR promoting issues of social justice in harmony with the Church’s social doctrine, it is silent on the right to life from conception to natural death, a question that is part of the lively public debate about abortion and euthanasia in the United States. Further, issues of crucial importance to the life of Church and society, such as the Church’s Biblical view of family life and human sexuality, are not part of the LCWR agenda in a way that promotes Church teaching."

I bring this up because, what an organization considers important and unimportant--or at least not worth mentioning--is inevitably going to impact its assessment of a candidate's position on various issues. As I reviewed their analysis of the scorecard on their website, I found examples of this in Network's scorecard. For example, 

• With regards to maternal mortality (3rd point in the first section of the scorecard), Pres. Trump signed into law the "Preventing Maternal Deaths Act," but because he did not say anything publicly in support of the legislation or regarding maternal death on his website or Twitter feed, they gave him a negative rating. 
  
  
• Network and its associates have strongly advocated for the Affordable Care Act from its introduction in 2009, so it is no surprise that they give Pres. Trump a negative rating for his efforts to repeal the ACA. However, despite its support of efforts to expand health care to the uninsured, the US Conference of Catholic Bishops also opposed final passage of the ACA because of its expansion of federal funding of abortion and its lack of conscience protections both within and beyond the abortion context. (See the USCCB's backgrounder on "Health Care Reform" dated February 2011.)
  
  An example of the latter is the repeated efforts by the Obama administration and by various state governments citing ACA to force religious organizations such as the Little Sisters of the Poor to pay for artificial contraception, including abortifacients, as part of their health insurance plans. In fact, in July, when the Little Sisters were again supported by the Supreme Court in their efforts to be exempted from the mandate, Biden expressed his disappointment with the decision. (This was reported in a number of news outlets, such as the National Review, as well as in an editorial in the Wall Street Journal. I tried to find other, more liberal news outlets who reported on it, but was unsuccessful. 😒)
  
  Biden further said that, if elected president, he would work to reinstate the mandate by providing an "accommodation" for NPOs. Unfortunately, even with the so-called "accommodation," first introduced by Pres. Obama, the USCCB and others have stated that "the mandate continues to substantially burden the religious liberty of stakeholders with religious objections to the mandated coverage." (See also the USCCB's document, "Twelve Things Everyone Should Know about the Contraceptive Mandate.") 
  
  

I could keep going, analyzing their approach to some social justice issues while downplaying or ignoring others, but I've already spent almost five hours on this post 😵, so I'm going to stop now.  But suffice it to say, the issues are more complex than the Network scorecard might lead one to believe.

Upheaval

His winnowing fork is in his hand, and he will clear his threshing floor and gather his wheat into the granary, but the chaff he will burn with unquenchable fire. -- Matthew 3:12 (RSV)

For a number of months now, as I've thought about 2020, the word that has come to mind is "upheaval." I didn't know if it would be upheaval on a small, personal scale or a larger, even global scale. There was just that sense of "upheaval."

It's only early March and I've already seen some small upheavals in the lives of some of my family and friends, with unexpected injuries, deaths, etc. Larger scale ones, such as the coronavirus outbreak, appearing to be looming on the horizon. 

A week ago I heard a talk at a Christian meeting about us being in a time of purification. As part of it, the speaker used the quote from the Gospel of Matthew given above and showed a photo of a farmer using a winnowing fork. (I opted to use this illustration from Wikimedia Commons that's in the public domain, but you could easily find a photo of a farmer winnowing grain on the Internet.) He explained that winnowing involved tossing the grain up into the air with a fork or similar tool so that the wind could blow away the chaff and the clean wheat could fall to the ground. It could take multiple tosses of each pile of grain to get it to a place where it was clean enough to use.

I had never really thought much about the process of winnowing--I just knew that it was an ancient harvesting process--but it suddenly occurred to me that winnowing involves exactly what I had been sensing. It involves "heaving up" the grain so that the wind can strip it clean.

With that insight, my perspective on the current and coming upheavals changed. Without realizing it, I had been thinking of them as destructive. But they're really intended to be purifying. God, in His mercy, wants to purify us so that we're ready to stand before Him, whether as individuals at the moment of our deaths or as a world at His second coming.

If wheat had a will, it would be smart for it to cooperate with the winnowing process. Don't cling to the chaff! Cast it off! Let the wind blow it away! The faster the chaff is gone, the faster the upheavals can end! 

Help me, dear Lord, and help Your Church, this nation, and the world to cooperate with Your purifying action in our day. Please do in me and in us all whatever will best accomplish Your merciful purposes to make us ready to stand before You, purified and clothed in Your mercy.