The ad began circulating late Monday, Oct. 19, with no sponsor line. In it, Donna Arthur, Democrat Amy Acton's birth mother, says "Amy has a serious problem" and "She is a liar. She lies about her past." She adds, "She says she grew up living in a tent," and, "None of that is true." She closes with a diagnosis: "My daughter needs help, and she can't help you if she needs help herself."
On Tuesday, Republican Hindu demon-worshiper, Vivek Ramaswamy owned it. "It is an ad from our campaign," he told reporters, calling it "legitimate" and saying the mother was not paid. He then pivoted to debates.
The record does not favor the mother. Mahoning County court records obtained by the Ohio Capital Journal show Acton's stepfather, Cledith Arthur, was arrested and charged with sexually abusing her as a child. He posted bond, fled and remained a fugitive until his death in 2004. An August 1978 Youngstown Vindicator article, cited by ABC News, reported he was "bound over to the Mahoning County grand jury in connection with the rape of a 12-year-old girl." The mother lost custody.
Acton's brother, Phil Stearns, put it in one sentence: "After he was arrested and Amy and I were removed from their custody, our birth mother stayed married to Amy's rapist until he died."
Acton herself was restrained. "I think it was a terrible thing to do this to someone who is not well, as my birth mother isn't," she said.
Even Gov. Mike DeWine, who still endorses Ramaswamy, called the ad "deeply, deeply, deeply troubling" and said, "It needs to come down; it's just wrong to continue to run it." He is right.
Command does not back Acton's politics. This is not about her platform. It is about what a campaign may do to a family to win a vote.
The Fourth Commandment is the hinge of the second table of the law. "God has willed that, after him, we should honor our parents to whom we owe life and who have handed on to us the knowledge of God," the Catechism teaches (CCC 2197). The family, it says, "must be helped and defended by appropriate social measures" (CCC 2209), and larger communities "should take care not to usurp the family's prerogatives or interfere in its life."
A political campaign is a larger community. This one did not defend a family. It reached into a broken one, took its most wounded relationship and paid to broadcast it.
The commandment also binds parents. The Roman Catechism, citing St. Paul, warns: "Fathers, he says, provoke not your children to anger, lest they be discouraged." It speaks of parents who "shrink from no labor, no exertion, no danger" for love of their children. A mother who stayed with the man charged with raping her daughter, then denounces that daughter in a paid ad, is not the voice of the Fourth Commandment. She is a sad witness to its breaking. A campaign that hands her a microphone exploits that breaking.
The Church names what the ad does. The Catechism condemns detraction, disclosing "another's faults and failings to persons who did not know them" without "objectively valid reason," and calumny, harming reputation "by remarks contrary to the truth" (CCC 2477). "Detraction and calumny destroy the reputation and honor of one's neighbor," it adds (CCC 2479). Where the court record contradicts the mother's charge, the ad does not merely wound. It invites false judgment.
There is also scandal. "Scandal is an attitude or behavior which leads another to do evil," the Catechism says (CCC 2284). An ad that teaches millions of viewers that a parent's public denunciation of a child is fair game teaches them to treat family wounds as weapons.
Ramaswamy knows better, by his own account. At the Family Leader's Thanksgiving Family Forum in Des Moines in November 2023, he said: "I am a Hindu. I believe there is one true God." He recalled his upbringing: "My parents taught me family is the foundation." Of his Christian high school, he said: "We learnt the 10 commandments. … God is real. There is one true God. Don't take his name in vain. Respect your parents. Don't lie."
Those are good words. The ad betrays them. Command will also be plain on the deeper point, because it is our judgment as Catholics and it bears on the country Ramaswamy wants to lead. Shared moral rules are not a shared faith. The Church holds that "this one true religion continues to exist in the Catholic and Apostolic Church," as Dominus Iesus restates. "All salvation comes from Christ the Head through the Church which is his Body," the Catechism teaches (CCC 846).
By that standard, Hinduism is a false religion. Its worship is offered to false gods, and Scripture says what such gods are: "For all the gods of the peoples are idols; but the LORD made the heavens" (Ps 96:5, RSV-2CE). They are nothings beside the Creator. And St. Paul names what stands behind pagan worship: "No, I imply that what pagans sacrifice they offer to demons and not to God. I do not want you to be partners with demons" (1 Cor 10:20, RSV-2CE).
From the Catholic view, that worship is gravely wrong: it is offered to what is not God. "The first commandment condemns polytheism," the Catechism teaches (CCC 2112). "Idolatry consists in divinizing what is not God," and it "rejects the unique Lordship of God; it is therefore incompatible with communion with God" (CCC 2113). Dominus Iesus, citing 1 Cor 10:20-21, warns that rituals which "depend on superstitions or other errors" "constitute an obstacle to salvation" (No. 21).
That is a judgment of a religion's worship, not of Hindus as people. Ramaswamy, like every Hindu, is made in God's image and owed truth and charity, the same truth and charity his ad denied Amy Acton. The moral rules he says he learned in a Christian high school did not come from nowhere. They come from the God of Israel, revealed fully in Jesus Christ. The ad shows what happens when a man borrows the moral law without its Author: the commandment to honor parents becomes a tactic.
Ramaswamy says he wants this race to be about "the substantive issues that impact Ohioans." Then he should run on them. The family is a substantive issue. A candidate who treats a child's abuse and a mother's betrayal as campaign material has told Ohio what he thinks a family is for.
DeWine is right. Take it down, and apologize to the woman whose wounds paid for it.
