Jimmy Carter, the 39th president of the United States, passed away on Sunday, December 29 in Plains, Georgia, the town where he was born. He was 100 years old, making him the longest-lived president in American history.
James Earl Carter, Jr. was elected president as a Democrat in 1976, narrowly defeating incumbent Republican Gerald Ford. He served a single term before losing in a landslide to Republican challenger Ronald Reagan in 1980.
Carter’s presidency was marked by controversies related to his progressive political priorities. Upon taking office, he pardoned all who had evaded the military draft during the Vietnam era. By the end of his term in the White House, the nation had faced a number of Cold War crises that critics claim stemmed from Carter’s shortcomings as a leader.
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Perhaps the most lasting legacy of Carter’s presidency was the high number of liberal judicial appointments he made while in office. Carter placed 262 federal judges, a record at the time.
In contrast to his turbulent four years in the White House, observers hold Carter’s activities in the 43 years after his presidency in much higher esteem. Along with his wife, Carter founded the Carter Center in 1982 to advocate for human rights.
Just a few years after its founding, the Center embarked on a successful campaign to wipe out the Guinea worm disease, which in the 1980s infected millions across Africa and Asia. Now, the disease is on the brink of becoming only the second in human history to be completely eradicated, with just over a dozen cases reported last year.
In 2002, Carter was awarded the Nobel Peace Prize “for his decades of untiring effort to find peaceful solutions to international conflicts, to advance democracy and human rights, and to promote economic and social development.”
Before the beginning of his political career, Carter served in the United States Navy submarine service shortly after World War II, then returned to Georgia and worked for his family’s peanut farming business.
A lifelong member of the Democratic Party, Carter was a vocal civil rights activist, even at a time when most other southern Democrats vociferously opposed the civil rights movement. He was an outspoken ally of black leaders such as Rev. Martin Luther King, Jr.
Carter served as Georgia’s governor from 1971 to 1975. At the time, the state’s governors were not permitted to seek consecutive terms. In 1976, he unexpectedly won the Democratic presidential nomination as a “dark horse” candidate, defeating several other more well-known rivals in the party’s primary.
Carter was a devout evangelical Baptist Christian throughout his life and often cited his faith as a major influence on his actions. He taught Sunday School and served as a Baptist deacon. He nonetheless supported a number of progressive social causes in opposition to Christian teaching, including legalized abortion and same-sex “marriage.”
In a 2018 interview with The Huffington Post, Carter said “gay marriage” was “no problem with me.” He argued that “everybody should have a right to get married, regardless of their sex,” while “drawing the line” at “government being able to force a local church congregation to perform gay marriages if they didn’t want to.”
He argued in the same interview, “I believe Jesus would approve gay marriage,” adding that Christ would “encourage any sort of love affair if it’s honest and sincere and was not damaging to anyone else, and I don’t see that gay marriage damages anyone else.”
On multiple occasions over the past decade, Carter had denounced the hundreds of millions of sex-selective abortions taking place around the world, including in China. In 2014, he called such abortions the “worst human rights abuse on earth.”
The following year, Carter stated, “I have never believed that Jesus would be in favor of abortion, unless it was the result of rape or incest, or the mother’s life was in danger.”
“That’s been the only conflict I’ve had in my career between political duties and Christian faith,” the 39th president added.
Carter is preceded in death by his wife of 77 years, Rosalynn Carter, who passed away last year at the age of 96. He is survived by their four children, 11 grandchildren, and 14 great-grandchildren.
LifeNews Note: Joshua Mercer writes for CatholicVote, where this column originally appeared.
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