Voting

I'm perfectly in step with the Church on the issues of peace, affordable and accessible health care, living wages, life, nuclear weapons and land mines, the death penalty, reducing poverty, sustainable agriculture, undocumented immigrants but I don't feel alienated from the church at all in the way that Rebecca says she feels.

I hope that McCain will continue to oppose radicals in the Middle East that want nothing except to see the world burn. I think of McCain as Commissioner Gordon and the leader of the terrorists as the Joker in the recent movie The Dark Knight. Unless we defend the innocent from the Joker there will never be peace. We can't abandon people their fate in Darfur and Iraq just because it would be easier. We are the hero they need, not the hero they deserve. We have a moral imperative as declared in the catechism to defend the weak and enslaved.

Under the last 8 years, 23 million additional Americans have gained healthcare coverage. Under McCain we can cover another 23 million over the next 8 years. Every American has access to better healthcare today than the best healthcare available to anyone in the world 50 years ago. We should continue to advance the science of medicine and continue to reward those who make those advances to ensure a better future.

McCain wants net wages to increase and costs of goods to decrease so that Americans and our trading partners can all have increased standards of living. The United States has helped in a major way to lift 2,000,000,000 people (2 billion) out of poverty in the last decade. If we can sustain that, then the poverty of tomorrow won't even be comparable to what was considered poverty in the past. Free and fair trade benefits all parties.

We have made major reductions in our nuclear arsenal and world nuclear stockpiles in the past 8 years and hopefully we can continue this progress by taking a tough stance with rogue nations and helping to promote and monitor peaceful uses of nuclear technology. I hope that the actions of Iran and North Korea will not force a pre-emptive nuclear strike, but if orbital or submarine strikes are required to save lives, which our advanced technology can do so with an absolute minimum of collateral damage, we can avoid situations like Hiroshima and Nagasaki.

McCain opposes the wasteful farm subsidies that give money to the rich and mandate using food to create ethanol, which contributes to world starvation. We deprive Mexico of water so we can grow crops in the desert, which we could instead import and give needed money to developing nations.

By using our local oil and natural gas reserves we can reduce the risk to the environment that shipping oil across the oceans presents and help ease the suffering of the poorest members of our society that suffer most from high energy costs.

McCain has the most comprehensive and compassionate immigration plan that allows the largest number of permanent citizenships and guest workers that we will need to work in nursing homes to care for the increasing number of elderly that most current Americans are unwilling to take. We will probably need another 15,000,000 workers to shift to providing health care for the elderly and be willing to work at minimum wage since we don't have the resources to pay huge salaries to feed and bathe the increasing number of elderly. We also need another 100,000,000 immigrants in the next 30-50 years to start contributing to social security and Medicare to help relieve the burden that having one person on social security for every three workers would present.

We are praying for candidates that will lead with God's wisdom.

Peace.