I want to get this out there: I feel uncomfortable writing something so speculative but I think that there is a possible theological aspect to this case.

Colin Small, the young man who was caught throwing eight voter registration forms in a dumpster in Virginia, is a strong proponent of the Catholic Church's encyclicals Humanae Vitae and Caritas in Veritate.

Very briefly and with much oversimplification, Humanae Vitae is the Church's most restrictive teaching on the subject of birth control, while Caritas in Veritate discusses poverty and suggests that Catholics should work hard to alleviate poverty, a suggestion that some have criticized as being (gasp!) "Socialist" in nature.

The effort to follow these two doctrines taken together places any given Republican Christian squarely on a classic fault line in right-wing ideology--the spot where God meets Caesar--or as it might properly be described these days, where Christianity meets Cayman Capitalism.

In this context, it is entirely possible that the young and devout Mr. Small may have had no great love for his wealthy and amoral Republican overlords. And continuing from there, it's possible that when it came to the subject of abortion, he could have felt that the greater good was served by disposing of forms filled out by those he thought might be pro-abortion, without regard to their actual party status. It wouldn't take much to ask a few questions during the process of filling out the form, to determine whether it would end up in the "Caesar" pile or the "God" pile.

Ultimately, if this was only eight forms, it's not much of an assault on Democracy. But if it's more, well, that's a different thing.