Glen Biegel: Why we vote

By GLEN BIEGEL

July 31, 2026 – This is my closing argument for why voting is your duty. Every election cycle, we’re told the stakes have never been higher. This time, that’s not hyperbole. It’s a description of what’s actually on the table. 

Look past the ads and the slogans, and you’ll find cultural questions underneath nearly every issue: What is a man, a woman, a marriage, a child, a family, a church, a nation?

The political left isn’t just proposing new policies. It’s proposing new definitions, or no definitions at all, for the things that have anchored human life for millennia. Sex is now fluid. The unborn are not persons. Marriage is one lifestyle option among many and a sad choice for women. Church is a private hobby, tolerated but irrelevant. Family is whatever arrangement an adult prefers. Once you see the pattern, you can’t unsee it: institution after institution, redefined, diminished, or dissolved into ideology.

Here is what’s really at stake: joy and purpose.

Joy comes from living out who we actually are. A man normally finds joy in leading, providing, protecting, building: being a source of order and strength for people who depend on him. A woman usually finds joy in being loved, cherished, and in being the heart of a home. Marriage brings joy because it’s the total gift of self to another: a covenant, not a contract, that meets our deepest need to be known and trusted. 

Church and faith bring joy because they give us something no politician can: eternal hope.

Purpose follows the same lines. Family gives purpose. Faith gives purpose. A community at peace, rooted in a shared culture of responsibility and excellence, gives purpose. Strip these away, or hollow them into ideology, and people don’t become free. They become adrift.

We’ve read this story before. In Brave New World, marriage was dissolved, children were manufactured and joyless, and citizens found their only comfort in entertainment and distraction, nightly doses of noise to numb the emptiness where family, faith, and meaning used to live. Sound familiar? Swap “soma” for five hours of streaming dystopias, and the picture is uncomfortably close to home.

This is the real dividing line between left and right. On the right, for all our disagreements, the door stays open to every source of joy and purpose God built into us: faith, family, marriage, fatherhood, motherhood, children, community. On the left, all of it increasingly funnels into one channel: the party, the ideology, the cause. 

Everything else is negotiable, revisable, or expendable.

That is why this election, like every election, is not just about policy. It’s about whether we preserve the conditions under which joy and purpose can still be found, or whether we let them be redefined out of existence, one institution at a time.

Vote for joy. Vote for purpose. Vote like the meaning of your life depends on it, because in a very real sense, it does.

Glen Biegel is a technology security professional, Catholic father of nine, husband to a saint, and politically active conservative.

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