Dear Friend,
If you’ve recently found your way here through one of my videos, welcome. I’m Father Rich Vitale, an Old Catholic priest, writer, and the person behind Message From the Margins. These longer letters give us room to explore the questions a short video can only introduce. Today’s reflection concerns political speech, but its deepest concern is the care we owe one another.
Before we begin, I want to ask you directly to help sustain what we are building here. Through our reflections, podcast, live Bible studies, and recent reporting from Rome, Message From the Margins is reaching people who are hungry for a compassionate, intellectually serious Christian faith. One reader, Elizabeth , described having felt she had lost the faith that once sustained her, then wrote,
“your posts have given me hope and a renewed faith.”
I receive words like those with gratitude and a considerable sense of responsibility.
But I need to be direct here for a moment, to continue this work and develop it further, we need more readers to become financial supporters. A growing audience brings wonderful opportunities for ministry, but the research, writing, production, and personal attention behind it require dependable support.
On October 27, we’ll gather for our live study of the Sermon on the Mount, and I’m preparing A Walk With Jesus of Nazareth, a 30-day experience of teaching, reflection, and prayer, alongside the continuing essays and podcast. I want to give these projects the care they deserve while keeping our public reflections available to people who cannot afford a subscription. If this ministry has become a meaningful part of your life, and you have the means, please become a paid supporter today. Your recurring support gives me the stability to plan, the time to prepare, and the ability to keep welcoming people who are still searching for a place where their faith can take root again. Thank you for helping carry this work forward.
Your Brother in Christ,
For what does it profit a man to gain the whole world and forfeit his soul?
What political attacks teach us about our neighbors, our obligations to God, and the people we are becoming.
I read a tremendous amount of news for the work we do here at Message from the Margins, and it isn’t always easy to tell what has become common knowledge and what is niche or local content being served algorithmically to a priest on Long Island who overconsumes the news. If you have been spared some of the utter depravity that has made its way into my newsfeed over the last 48 hours, God bless you. I’d love to swap places.
People are calling this election the most consequential in the last hundred years. That may well be true, though, to my memory, they’ve said something similar about the last ten or so. But when we believe something carries enormous consequences, we can begin giving ourselves permission to do things we would otherwise recognize as wrong. The stakes become our justification, and sometimes we barely notice how far we’ve allowed that justification to carry us.
That moral slippage is what I want to talk to you about today. I’m not here to tell you how to vote, though you may draw your own conclusions from what follows. I want to examine what we owe God and one another while we’re trying to win, especially what we owe the vulnerable people who have to live with the consequences of our political speech.
The lives behind the advertisements
In Ohio, Vivek Ramaswamy’s campaign has acknowledged producing an advertisement featuring Donna Arthur, the estranged mother of his opponent, Dr. Amy Acton. In the despicable ad, Arthur attacks her credibility.
What makes this advertisement so appalling is the history behind the woman the campaign has chosen to put before the camera. According to Acton’s account, her mother failed to protect her from sexual abuse by her stepfather; her brother has described their removal from their mother’s custody after their stepfather was indicted for raping Dr. Acton as a child. This estrangement arose from circumstances in which the adults responsible for protecting a little girl had profoundly failed her.
Knowing that history, consider the decision to give this woman a platform from which to attack her daughter again, this time with the resources of a political campaign carrying her accusations into homes across Ohio. There is something morally grotesque about reaching into a person’s childhood, finding the parent she says stood by while she was being harmed, and giving that parent a microphone because her words might help you win an election. The campaign has made a woman’s childhood suffering available for another public humiliation, with the person who should have protected her invited to deliver it.
I cannot imagine looking at that history and seeing an opportunity worth purchasing. Somewhere in the decisions that produced this advertisement, concern for the child Acton was, and for the woman who has had to live with what happened to her, should have imposed a limit. Someone should have recognized that there are wounds we have no right to reopen for our own advantage, however much we want the office and however strongly we oppose the person seeking it.
Ramaswamy has committed $4,000,000 to run this ad. No network should accept it.
Meanwhile, families in Texas have received mailers bearing the name “Texas Transgender Student Union” and invoking the Transgender Education Network of Texas, known as TENT. TENT denies involvement, and the Texas Tribune traced the named student union to a recently formed Wyoming company. The organization has reported threats and hostility following the circulation of the materials, while the identity of the operation’s ultimate backers remains unresolved in the reporting available as I write.
It is intuitively clear that someone, is using scare tactics to steer Texans into voting red.
But, what’s important to remember is that behind the name of an organization are people who answer its phones, read its messages, and return home to their families. Behind an argument about transgender students are young people trying to make their way through lives that adults can make considerably harder. Whatever disagreements we bring to questions of policy, we remain responsible for remembering that the people under discussion will have to live with what we say about them.
There have to be things we will not do
A person can care passionately about an election and still recognize that there are things they must not do to win it. We should expect that much of anyone asking to be entrusted with public power. Somewhere between deciding that you want to defeat your opponent for governor and sitting down to produce an advertisement, there ought to be a moment when conscience places a limit on ambition. The possibility that something might work cannot be sufficient reason to do it.
For Christians, that limit begins with the conviction that the person standing in our way bears the image of God. Their dignity belongs to them before we form an opinion about their policies, and it remains theirs after we decide that we will do everything morally permissible to defeat them. It should govern the choices made in campaign offices, where someone approves a script, authorizes an expenditure, or decides which parts of another person’s life can be used against them.
Desmond Tutu expressed something essential about this when he said, “Certainly, my enemies are not God’s enemies.” Our determination to defeat someone does not give us ownership of their humanity, or permission to treat their suffering as material we are entitled to use. However urgently we believe we need to win, there remains a person before us whose life carries a claim upon our conscience.
That is the restraint so horrifyingly absent from the advertisement targeting Amy Acton. Her campaign positions and public record are available for scrutiny. Every candidate should be vetted to the fullest degree. Yet the Ramaswamy campaign chose to reach into her childhood and give her estranged mother a platform from which to attack her again. Acton’s account of abuse and her brother’s account of their removal from their mother’s custody should have made the moral stakes of that choice unmistakable. Instead, the campaign committed substantial resources to amplifying the attack.
The Texas mailers expose another failure to observe the limits that decency requires. Materials invoking a transgender advocacy organization circulated without that organization’s authorization, and TENT reported receiving threats and hostility afterward. The ultimate responsibility for the operation remains unresolved, but the obligation is clear: no one is entitled to misrepresent other people and leave them to absorb the anger that follows. Concern about children makes accuracy more necessary, because frightened parents deserve to know who is actually speaking to them and whose position is being represented.
In both cases, the people placed at risk deserve more consideration than their usefulness to a public attack. A woman’s history of childhood abuse should have called forth restraint from those considering how to use it. The vulnerability of transgender young people, their families, and the people serving them should have demanded care from anyone preparing material that could direct hostility toward them. These are precisely the circumstances in which a functioning conscience should interrupt the work and require another course.
We have every right to expect that interruption from people seeking power or trying to influence how it is exercised. Their willingness to observe moral limits tells us something about the responsibility they are prepared to carry. Before they ask the public to trust their judgment, they should be able to demonstrate that they recognize a human being whose dignity places something beyond the reach of their ambition.
What happens when the message comes home?
The question that troubles me most is what happens after a political message leaves the people who created it and enters a home whose history they will never know.
The advertisement may have been produced to move a polling number. The mailer may be assessed according to how many people open it, discuss it, or pass it along. But it arrives among people who bring their own memories, fears, and unspoken questions to whatever they are watching. A campaign sees an audience; within that audience are people listening for clues about whether their own lives will be met with understanding.
Imagine, for a moment, a woman sitting with relatives who applaud the use of an estranged parent to discredit someone’s account of suffering. Perhaps she has never told them about what happened to her. Perhaps she has rehearsed the conversation a hundred times and abandoned it because she cannot bear the possibility of being disbelieved. As the people around her decide that a mother’s condemnation settles the matter, she may hear an answer to a question she has not yet found the courage to ask.
Or imagine a young person listening while adults react to a misleading mailer and speak about transgender people with disgust. The adults may believe they are discussing a policy dispute, while the young person is trying to understand whether affection in this household has conditions that have never been spoken aloud. Even a child who is not transgender may be learning how the family treats someone who is, and may carry that lesson into a classroom the following morning.
These are imagined situations, but the responsibility they ask us to consider is real. People do not hear political speech with the rest of their lives set aside. What is entertainment to one listener may reach another person in the place where they are most afraid.
There is also the parent who receives something alarming, shares it out of concern, and later discovers that the apparent source was misleading. By then, the claim has traveled through a family group chat and into conversations with neighbors. A correction is still possible, and still necessary, but it asks for the humility to tell people that something we helped make frightening was not what we believed it to be.
We cannot anticipate every consequence of our words. We can, however, consider the people likely to receive them, especially when those people already have reason to fear being misunderstood. The fact that harm was not the principal aim of a message does not make that harm irrelevant to the morality of sending it.
Pope Leo addressed the discipline of speech in his Lenten message this year, urging: “Let us begin by disarming our language, avoiding harsh words and rash judgement, refraining from slander.” He explicitly extended that responsibility to families, social media, political debates, and Christian communities.
There is something deeply important in his placing our language alongside the practices through which we hope to become more faithful. We understand that prayer, repeated over time, can teach us to attend to God. We trust that generosity can loosen our grip on what we possess. It follows that repeatedly giving ourselves permission to dismiss, suspect, or humiliate other people can also teach us a way of living.
The first time we excuse a falsehood because it serves our side, we may feel uncomfortable. After enough repetitions, we may barely notice the excuse. Eventually, we may become impatient with the person who asks whether the claim is true, because we have come to regard their concern for truth as an obstacle to something more urgent.
That is how a political habit can become a spiritual problem. We carry the permissions we have practiced into other relationships, where someone we love may one day need the patience, fairness, or willingness to listen that we have been training ourselves to withhold.
The vulnerable are entrusted to our care
When Christians speak of protecting the vulnerable, we ought to be willing to ask who receives that protection when offering it becomes inconvenient.
It is relatively easy to defend someone whose suffering strengthens an argument we already want to make. The harder test comes when defending a person requires us to interrupt our friends, question a useful accusation, or admit that someone we support has behaved badly. At that point, our professed concern for human dignity asks something of us, and we discover whether we meant it to have consequences.
St. John Chrysostom pressed a related question upon Christians who lavished attention on worship while neglecting people suffering outside the church. His immediate concern was material poverty: how could they claim to honor Christ while passing by Christ hungry and inadequately clothed? His preaching insisted that devotion had to reach the person in need, however beautiful the offerings made at the altar.
We should allow that question to reach our public life. What does our professed love of God require when someone’s wounds have become useful campaign material? What does it require when a frightened community receives anger that has been stirred by misleading claims?
At the very least, it requires us to restore the person to the center of our attention. A survivor deserves more consideration than whether their story helps our candidate. A transgender young person deserves a future in which adults have made an honest effort to understand and protect them. A worried parent deserves reliable information rather than material that exploits their concern for their child.
We can recognize these responsibilities while continuing to disagree about policy. In fact, taking them seriously should improve the disagreement, because we would be less willing to accept an argument that depends upon concealing, distorting, or disregarding the lives of the people affected.
Does God give us a pass?
I know that some readers will be thinking about what could happen if the the other party wins. They are worried about a whole host of issues, some legitimate, some less so. Those concerns deserve a hearing, and I have no interest in dismissing them with a pleasant appeal for everyone to be nicer.
Government can protect people, and government can harm them. Elections deserve our attention precisely because the consequences extend into actual lives. But that seriousness gives us greater reason to examine the means through which power is pursued, including what those means teach the people who will eventually exercise it.
Speaking to the NAACP in 1962, Martin Luther King Jr. said: “Immoral methods cannot achieve moral goals, and we must work to secure moral ends through moral means.” He understood that the conduct of a movement helps shape the future it is bringing into being.
That principle asks something difficult of us when we are frightened. It asks us to believe that truthfulness remains an obligation even when a lie might be effective, and that another person’s dignity continues to matter when respecting it might cost us an advantage. A moral standard that disappears whenever the stakes become serious would offer very little protection to anyone.
The Roman Catholic Catechism addresses this directly in paragraph 1753, explaining that a good intention cannot make lying or calumny right. Paul confronts the underlying reasoning in Romans 3:8, rejecting the suggestion that we should do evil so that good may result. Our tradition has encountered this temptation before, even if each generation manages to persuade itself that its own emergency is sufficiently exceptional.
Most of us will never commission a political advertisement, but we will decide what to pass along and what to excuse. We will decide whether to correct a claim after learning that it is misleading, and whether to object when someone we admire crosses a line. Those decisions are part of our participation in public life, and they belong within the same conscience we bring to prayer.
There is courage in telling people who share your convictions that a particular tactic is wrong. It may cost you a little approval, and you may be accused of helping the other side. Yet insisting upon honesty can also be an act of loyalty to the good you hoped your side would accomplish, especially when that good is being compromised by the methods used to pursue it.
What remains after the election
My hope is that we can become a community in which that kind of honesty is possible. We should be able to examine our conduct without assuming that every criticism demands the surrender of everything else we believe. We should be able to defend someone’s dignity without first checking whether they would vote as we do.
That begins close to home, in conversations where the people listening know far more about our character than they know about our politics. They notice when we are fair to someone we dislike. They notice when we acknowledge a mistake. They also notice whether the compassion we speak about in church remains available when someone’s life becomes complicated.
Somewhere, a political advertisement will finish, and the television will move on to another program. The people who watched it will still be sitting together, perhaps unaware of what someone beside them has heard. There may be an opportunity then for a gentle correction, an honest question, or a few words making clear that the person being discussed deserves more care than the conversation has offered.
I would like us to become attentive to those opportunities. We may never know that a child was listening from the next room, or that a friend was quietly deciding whether we could be trusted with something painful. We can still give them reason to believe that their life would be safe in our keeping.
Whatever the outcome of this election, the people God has entrusted to our care will need us afterward. They will need our courage, our honesty, and our willingness to recognize God’s image even when doing so asks more of us than we expected. It is my hope that, when they look toward this community, they will find people who have kept those promises through a difficult season, and who are ready to welcome them when the shouting has finally stopped.
And Let Us Pray….
God of truth and mercy,
You know the people whose suffering has become the subject of public argument. Be near to those who feel exposed, disbelieved, or afraid. Give them trustworthy companions and places where they can speak without fear.
Examine our hearts as we take part in the life of our country. Help us recognize the excuses we make for dishonesty and cruelty. Give us the courage to challenge wrongdoing, the humility to correct our mistakes, and the patience to learn what is true.
Keep us attentive to Your image in the people we find hardest to love. Let our homes and communities become places where those who are vulnerable receive protection and care.
Through Jesus Christ our Lord.
Amen.
AND NOW IT’S YOUR TURN
Have you ever challenged a political claim or tactic used by someone you otherwise supported? What helped you speak, and what made it difficult?
Please keep the conversation focused on conduct and conscience. You do not need to disclose painful personal experiences to contribute here.
If you know someone trying to remain faithful and humane through this election, would you send this reflection to them? Perhaps it can help begin a conversation you’ve been wanting to have.
Work like this takes time: reading beyond the headline, checking sources, and thinking carefully about the people affected. If these letters help you live your faith with greater clarity and compassion, and you can afford to contribute, please consider becoming a supporting subscriber to Message From the Margins.
Your support helps sustain the writing, Bible studies, and pastoral work of this ministry. If a paid subscription is beyond your budget, you are still welcome here. Thank you for reading, praying with us, and introducing this community to people who might need it.