With less than a month to go, I’m planning not to vote in this November’s presidential election. I’m not happy about this situation: it’s rare that a day goes by without the difficulty of my decision pressing itself upon me in one way or another. My children, for both of whom this election is the first they’re old enough to vote, find it puzzling, since I constantly encourage them to take their new civic status with all the seriousness they can muster. My wife, who belongs to the anything-but-Bush school (as do most of my colleagues), finds it reprehensible because she thinks that not voting only makes it more likely that our president will be reelected. And the U.S. Catholic bishops and the pope have clearly and repeatedly pressed upon me, as a Catholic, the importance of my civic duty to participate fully in the political life of my country-which certainly means voting. All this I take very seriously: it is my duty to vote, and yet I’m planning not to.

And it’s worse yet. I’m a naturalized American who was sworn in with all the usual pomp and circumstance in a ceremony ten years ago in South Bend, Indiana. I chose to pursue citizenship after some years of living in this country without it (I was born and raised in England) exactly because I wanted to participate fully in the civic and political life of the country in which I’d chosen to live, and couldn’t do so without a vote. I have voted in every election, local and national, for which I was eligible since I was naturalized (for Clinton in 1996 and for Bush in 2000), though with an increasingly bad conscience in presidential elections. But now, in 2004, I can no longer see my way to voting, because each of the two major candidates has committed deal-breaking offenses, which means that they’ve either done or advocated things which make it impossible to vote for them.

A deal is broken if one of the parties to it does something that makes it improper for the other party to continue in it no matter what the ancillary circumstances. If one spouse uses physical violence against another, this breaks the deal of living together: you don’t go on living with someone who hits you on a regular basis, no matter what other virtues they might have. If someone starts screaming insults at you during a conversation, that deal is broken: the conversation is at an end until they’ve calmed down. And in the case of voting (which is also a deal: I vote, as I hope you do, in response to what a candidate advocates and has done), there are also deal breakers, which is to say actions done or positions advocated sufficient to make voting for someone improper, no matter what other good policies that person may advocate and no matter what other good things he or she may have done.

So far as I can see, both John Kerry and George W. Bush have committed deal breakers. I think other Catholics ought to think so too. And if I’m right about this, the duty to vote is trumped by the duty not to continue with a deal that has been preemptively broken. But this requires an argument.

John Kerry represents his party with full vigor on the question of abortion. The Democrats’ position has hardened into dogma during the past two decades, and Kerry represents the dogma well: he voted against the law banning partial-birth abortion, for example, and he has consistently said that a woman’s right to choose is guaranteed by the Constitution and that he will oppose all efforts, judicial or legislative, to modify the position taken by the Supreme Court in Roe v. Wade. He thus advocates as nonnegotiable policy the unrestricted legality of the killing of our children, and he promises to act on that conviction in his federal judicial appointments among other things. This, in my judgment, is a deal breaker: I cannot vote for a man who advocates this, and I think no Catholic should. The church’s teaching on this question is clear, unequivocal, and exact. I hope that other Americans might also recognize the heinousness of Kerry’s advocacy on this matter, and certainly some do; but I know, too, that the consciences of many Americans, Catholic and otherwise, have been formed in ways that make it difficult for them to acknowledge the truth about this question, and so my hope is tempered with realism.

George W. Bush advocates a foreign policy that includes the doctrine of preemptive war. This is clear, for instance, in the introduction he signed to the 2002 document, The National Security Strategy of the United States of America, and in many of his public statements in the last two years. This is not yet a deal breaker, in my judgment, though I think it ill-advised and almost certainly incompatible with Catholic just-war doctrine. What is a deal breaker, however, is the fact that President Bush has acted upon the doctrine in such a way as to lead this country into war in Iraq on publicly stated grounds, all of which have turned out to be false. I don’t say that he lied: I haven’t the information to know. But I do know that the grounds I, as an American citizen, was given by my president for the invasion of Iraq in late 2002 and early 2003 (weapons of mass destruction, imminent threat to U.S. security, Iraqi cooperation with Al Qaeda) have all turned out to be false. Any president who has done such a thing has committed a deal breaker: you just don’t vote for someone who has authorized the killing of thousands of Iraqis and over a thousand U.S. soldiers on false grounds. Catholics have special reasons here, among the more important of which is the consistent opposition to U.S. policy by the pope. But all Americans should recognize that this president is not worthy of reelection, though here too I have to recognize with regret that many will not; our political culture is not as conducive to clarity of thought, as I’d wish.

You might object to this line of argument by saying that there are no deal breakers in politics, that we have to look at the whole picture and make prudential, calculative judgments about what will, on the whole, be best for the country. On good days, I find this line half persuasive. But it really won’t do: if the two candidates were Hitler and Stalin, would you feel that you had to vote for one of them?

You might also, I suppose, object to the idea that either of the things I’ve pointed to really is a deal breaker. Perhaps advocating the legality of killing children and authorizing preemptive wars on false grounds really aren’t so bad, you might say. But this also begins to sound implausible when put so bluntly. Indeed, it begins to sound disgusting.

And so my sad position is that, in this election at least, the United States is a country in which voting is not proper. I hope to be argued out of it. But I suspect that increasing numbers of Catholics are feeling an uneasiness of this kind, and if I’m right about this, it means that there is also increasing awareness that we Catholics aren’t as comfortable or as welcome in America as we have thought.