…where then will you go?”
– Saruman in the Fellowship of the Ring movie

I heard earlier this week that Sam Brownback was dropping out of the presidential race.
I’m disappointed because he is a man who believes in the sanctity of marriage and the sanctity of human life, which stems from his strong faith in God, and he doesn’t separate his beliefs from his public actions.

Where then do we go?

I do not know, though Ron Paul and Mike Huckabee, are promising to me.

Ron Paul voted against the Iraq war and against the Patriot Act, which obviously run counter to President Bush, and these actions are fine with me; I have never thought that going to war in Iraq was a good idea, but only, as is reasonable, now that we are there, we have to help them as much as is possible to form a just government.

The most important issues are the sanctity of life and of marriage. These are non-negotiable, and so, for example, if Rudy Giuliani becomes the Republican candidate, I would not vote for him.

I have had several discussions recently with my coworkers about the state of marriage in our country and its foundational role in the health of our nation. Just today, I read a portion of Casti Connubii, an encyclical by Pope Pius XI in 1930, which me and a group of other men are studying together in a program called FAMILIA.

Here is what the Pope said of the indissolubility of marriage and its effects on a country:

For experience has taught that unassailable stability in matrimony is a fruitful source of virtuous life and of habits of integrity. Where this order of things obtains, the happiness and well-being of the nation is safely guarded; what the families and individuals are, so also is the State, for a body is determined by its parts.

Pope John Paul II repeated this same truth: “As the family goes, so goes the nation and so goes the whole world in which we live.”
Our nation is facing a test of its soul in this coming presidential election. The President in our country has tremendous power. Democrats and others who dislike President Bush focus almost all efforts on pointing out how horrible the war in Iraq is and blame him indirectly for the murders committed by terrorists.

They ignore, however, the 4,000 babies who die everyday at the hands of abortionists in our nation alone. That’s right: more lives are lost in one day in this country than all the U.S. troops lost in the years of the Iraq war. I point this fact out because few people realize just how many lives are lost to abortion.

Why is this important? Well, remember several facts:

1. President Bush has appointed 2 Supreme Court Justices, men who vow to uphold the Constitution, not imagine rights into it; our next President will most likely get to appoint at least one Justice, and the Court is so split with regards to the sanctity of human life and the foundation of our great nation, that each Justice is vitally important.
2. Bill Clinton vetoed the ban on Partial Birth Abortion twice during his Presidency, stopping it from becoming law. Remember, partial birth abortion is where the baby is partially delivered from the mother’s womb, and then the abortionist punctures the baby’s skull and sucks out the baby’s brain so that the rest of the baby can be delivered from the womb.
3. Bill Clinton and his wife, Hillary, who is the Democratic front-runner, support this horrific practice. Barack Obama also supports it, in spite of his attempts in his political life to avoid the issue entirely and sit on the fence, along with many other evil things.

I don’t know what is going to happen in the upcoming election, but the consequences of it will be far-reaching and will either further put us on the path of a value-less, morally relative society, or of a society of virtue, founded on the truth of God.