If a candidate is wrong on even one key moral issue, that candidate does not merit your vote by being right on lesser issues. One candidate may have a record of voting as you wish, except for votes in favor of abortion or human cloning. Such a candidate should not get your vote. Candidates need to learn that being wrong on even one of the non-negotiable issues is enough to exclude them from consideration.

Five issues are non-negotiable because they concern actions that are always morally wrong and must never be promoted by the law. It is sinful to endorse or promote any of these actions, and no candidate who really wants to advance the common good will support any of them. The five non-negotiables issues are:

1. Abortion

Abortion is the intentional and direct killing of an innocent human being, and therefore it is a form of homicide. The child is always an innocent party, and no law may permit the taking of his life. Even when a child is conceived through rape or incest, the fault is not the child’s, who should not suffer death for others’ sins.

2. Euthanasia (and Assisted Suicide)

Euthanasia also is a form of homicide. No one has a right to take the life of any innocent person. In euthanasia, the ill or elderly are killed out of a misplaced sense of compassion, but true compassion cannot include doing something intrinsically evil to another person.

3. Embryonic Stem Cell Research

Human embryos are human beings. Respect for the dignity of the human being excludes all experimental manipulation or exploitation of human embryos. Recent scientific advances show that any medical cure that might arise from experimentation on fetal stem cells can be developed by using adult stem cells instead.

4. Human Cloning

Attempts to obtain a human being without any connection with sexuality through somatic cell nuclear transfer are to be considered contrary to the moral law, since they are in opposition to the dignity both of human procreation and of the conjugal union. Human cloning also ends up being a form of homicide because the rejected or unsuccessful clones are destroyed, yet each clone is a human being.

5. Homosexual “Marriage”

True marriage is the union of one man and one woman. Legal recognition of any other form of “marriage” undermines true marriage, and legal recognition of homosexual unions actually does homosexual persons a disfavor by encouraging them to persist in what is an objectively immoral arrangement.