In an interview on a Catholic radio program earlier this month, Fr. Frank Pavone, the head of Priests for Life, made the case for Donald Trump to a skeptical listener by explaining that while Trump may have the potential to kill people as president—whether it be by deliberately murdering the family members of suspected terrorists or launching a nuclear war—such a fear should be outweighed by Hillary Clinton’s support for the “raging holocaust” of abortion.
A caller to the “The Drew Mariani Show” told Pavone that he wouldn’t vote for either Clinton or Trump in the presidential election, pointing to Clinton’s support for abortion rights and Trump’s “statements about going after families of suspected terrorists or known terrorists,” explaining that while he thought “protecting infants in the womb is probably the most important thing,” there are “other lives at stake, there’s other issues that do have to deal with life.”
Pavone said that he agreed that it was an important question, and that he’d approach it by first establishing that all “lives are of equal value,” then figuring out if he was fairly interpreting a statement from a candidate or if it had been skewed by the media, and then asking if the president actually has “the power to unilaterally do that or are there people around him that are going to rein him in or put boundaries on what he can do.” (Pavone made a similar argument while defending Trump at the National Right To Life Convention last month, saying we’re not “voting for a dictator.”)
Finally, Pavone said, you must compare the cost to human life that both candidates might cause. In this case, he said (without naming candidates), while Trump has indicated that he might kill innocent family members of suspected terrorists or might be quick to drop an atomic bomb, Clinton would definitely continue the “raging holocaust” of legal abortion, which is “like several atomic bombs have already gone off on our own soil”:
And then, of course, the final element of the analysis as far as I’m concerned is, are we talking about a potential destruction of the innocent or an actual destruction of the innocent and in what numbers? Right now, we have a raging holocaust going on, and it’s not ‘maybe’ and it’s not ‘potential’ and it’s not ‘maybe we’re going to kill these families’ or ‘maybe we’re going to drop an atomic bomb.’ It’s like several atomic bombs have already gone off on our own soil when it comes to just the sheer numbers. And so, with abortion we’re talking about an actual, daily killing of the innocent as opposed to something that maybe, if we’re analyzing properly what he said, could be a potential killing of the innocent.
