Like so many Americans, Michael
Gerson – former speech writer for George W. Bush, fellow Wheaton College alum
of the late Billy Graham – is not happy about what Donald J. Trump has done to
this country. He is also unhappy about the monkeys Trump is making of
conspicuous leaders of Evangelicalism,
of which Gerson is a proud but increasingly uncomfortable part.
In his email feed, Jim McCrea
called attention to Gerson’s current Atlantic
magazine article. It is long but worth it. It is both a
brief history of evangelicals in America and a cri de coeur from Gerson, who
hopes fellow evangelicals will find it in their hearts to renounce Trump and
all his works and all his empty promises.
He asks how evangelicals associate themselves with such revolting
lulus as this one (which I had missed) from the Rev. Jerry Falwell: “Complaining
about the temperament of the @POTUS or saying his behavior is not presidential
is no longer relevant. He has single-handedly changed the definition of what
behavior is ‘presidential’ from phony, failed & rehearsed to authentic,
successful & down to earth.” Somehow, Gerson doesn’t think that excuses Trump's
gutter language, the cringe-worthy comment about the bedableness of his
daughter and self-publicized infidelities.
Gerson is eminently readable, especially when he is as angry as he is
here, but I would like to call attention to a comment he makes about the
Catholic Church. As often happens, an
outsider sees us exemplifying what we can only wish were true.
“… Catholics developed a coherent, comprehensive tradition of social
and political reflection. Catholic social thought includes a commitment to
solidarity, whereby justice in a society is measured by the treatment of its
weakest and most vulnerable members. And it incorporates the principle of
subsidiarity—the idea that human needs are best met by small and local
institutions (though higher-order institutions have a moral responsibility to
intervene when local ones fail). In practice, this acts as an 'if, then'
requirement for Catholics, splendidly complicating their politics: If you want
to call yourself pro-life on abortion, then you have to oppose the
dehumanization of migrants. If you criticize the devaluation of life by
euthanasia, then you must criticize the devaluation of life by racism.”
He quickly adds (He’s no dummy): “Of course, American Catholics routinely
ignore Catholic social thought. But at least they have it.”
Falwell isn't he only evangelical leader cited by Gerson for putting Trump ahead of principled social thought. Franklin Graham, Richard Lamb, James Dobson and others take their lumps. Gerson also lists some prominent evangelicals who are less than awed by "@POTUS," but possibly the media doesn't have them on speed dial.
And nobody has Catholic bishops on speed dial for any matter Trumpian. On stage, screen and radio, Catholic bishops just love Justice Gorsuch, who almost amounts to Scalia on Quaaludes. And that is about that. The USCCB has issued pretty good press releases, attributed to appropriate spokesmiters, on specific issues like immigration. But they remind Trump of what he denies -- that immigrants have human dignity -- as if the reminder will being him to his senses. They are not speaking even in the same kind of universe as the one in which the president thinks. And they turn demurely aside when he does things like introducing penis length as a qualification for the presidency.
Trump's Catholic supporters explain, stridently, that the bishops have to pretend to defend immigrants because so many immigrants are Latinos, and they are all going to the Protestant churches anyway. That's what Catholics say about Catholic bishops in order to defend Trump. If the bishops can't even stir themselves to polite disagreement with that particular Alt-right talking point, Catholics should have at least as many problems with their bishops as Gerson is having with evangelical leaders.
“Of course, American Catholics routinely ignore Catholic social thought. But at least they have it.”
ReplyDeleteDo you think the common claim that it's the "best-kept secret" of Catholic teaching is true? I pepper my homilies with little grains and nuggets of social teaching, and people do notice and talk with me about it afterward. I think Catholics, or at least the ones who are willing to talk to me, aren't completely clueless about it.
Then, too, making the leap from having knowledge, or even a well-developed intuition/conscience, about social teaching, to how one votes, isn't always a short, straight line.
At any rate, I don't think you need to know a lot about Catholic Social Teaching to see Donald Trump for what he is, and isn't. Remember that book from about 30 years ago, "Everything I Need to Know, I Learned in Kindergarten"? If you've graduated from Kindergarten, you can take the measure of our prez pretty accurately.
Jim, You are, so far as I can tell (from study) an outlier. I believe I have even had to mea culpa privately with you about something you said while others were making pious noises. There are a couple of priests in this diocese who can get from the Assumption to the preferential option for the poor. But it ain't the usual run of things.
DeleteGerson's article includes this gem:
ReplyDelete"Pastor David Jeremiah has compared Jared Kushner and Ivanka Trump to Joseph and Mary: “It’s just like God to use a young Jewish couple to help Christians.”"
OMG (I am heartily sorry for having offended thee, because that's the only way I can figure that this royal couple is being thrust upon us as 2/3 of the Holy Family). I know I was planning to spend St. Joseph's Day next week contemplating Jared Kushner all day.
Catholic social teaching. It's what made at least a half a convert out of me.
ReplyDeleteI also like the idea that many Catholics have, that salvation is a "group thing." You can't get to heaven if you're not trying to take others with you. Possibly has had the most profound impact on my life than any other idea, though I don't pretend to be very good at it.
Going to read the article now.
Great article! I kept making snips, but like this one best:
DeleteFor a package of political benefits, these evangelical leaders have associated the Christian faith with racism and nativism. They have associated the Christian faith with misogyny and the mocking of the disabled. They have associated the Christian faith with lawlessness, corruption, and routine deception. They have associated the Christian faith with moral confusion about the surpassing evils of white supremacy and neo-Nazism. The world is full of tragic choices and compromises. But for this man? For this cause?
Tom, thanks for referring us to the Gerson article. I think it's an important article.
ReplyDeleteIt's helpful for Gerson, too, to have a longer form to elaborate his ideas and concerns. Our local newspaper frequently prints his columns. Since the accession of Trump, he rarely writes about anything other than the moral bankruptcy of the Trump Administration and its corrupting influence on conservativism. All very true, but on occasion he can come across as a bit of a scold, and constantly trying to assume a censorious expression, even as a reader, has become a little exhausting, as we are now into the second year of teetering on the brink of catastrophe. This Atlantic piece is much better.
Tom, regarding your critique of the bishops - I think there is something to your points. It causes me to reflect that the bishops have not quite found their voice in the public square. As you note, individual bishops and departments issue press releases with good content, but it's pretty unusual for a mainstream media outlet to pick up and report any of them. Their profile is pretty low right now.
ReplyDeleteI'm not sure that's all to the bad. I truly think it's our job, more than theirs, to be the public voice of Catholicism in our civic life. The risk of that is that there is a wide variety of organizations and advocacy groups that operate under the Catholic umbrella, and it's difficult to get a clear sense of where the church stands from any single one of them. Maybe the church doesn't always have a clear, single stand. We're too complicated :-).
Jim, I probably am too hard on the bishops, but I know, personally and well, too many people who voted for Donald J. Trump and are sticking with him, despite everything, because "the Church" didn't want them to vote for Hillary and Pelooooooooosi!" Incidentally, none of them can tell me anything about the last successful House speaker except that she is "pro-abortion."
DeleteMuch of this goes back to the early Obama administration. I was asked to sign a postcard (diocesan project) denouncing Kathleen Sibelius as the worst HHW secretary ever -- when she was still only a name "under consideration" for the job. Then came that regrettable Knights of Columbus (the Republican Party flipping flapjacks) movie about how the Mexicans took up arms and killed a lot of people in self-defense when socialists attacked the Church there (as the Church was assaulted here with abortion mandates). So, boy, Holy Mother was taking no crap from Democrats. Then came Trump, and no one minds when the sacristan wears his red MAGA cap as he goes about the Lord's business, "because that what the Church wants." And then, on top of that, the people who voted for Trump because the Church didn't want them to vote for Hillary and that other woman, think the bishops hate immigrants, too, but are saying nice things about them to keep them from becoming Protestants and to get the ones who don't get deported to give more money to the church. Paul Bannon couldn't say it better, but they must be getting it from Fox.
I'm sorry. That is what I hear all day.
Raber and I are the only Democrats in our parish. Thankfully, on behalf of Raber's blood pressure, the members of the Men's Club have, to a man, rejected Trumpism. We are still viewed with suspicion as hippie weirdos, but it's nice for Raber to feel at least partially "in the club." I told him to keep his trap shut about going to Pax Christi every year and enjoy the camaraderie while it lasts.
DeleteTom - that is really bad.
DeleteFWIW, the bishops do publish their quadrennial Faithful Citizenship document. Setting aside for a moment whatever may be problematic about that exercise, I guess nobody can force the Knights of Columbus to read it, understand it or rethink their biases in light of it.
The bishops could choose to hold the Knights accountable. If Knights everywhere are like they are around here, they profess to adore the local bishop. In fact, their most visible external activity seems to be to show up in their regalia at whatever parish the bishop is appearing and line the aisle for the processional.
Jim - The Knights give a lot of money to various Catholic causes. Some of it goes to aggrandizing various churchmen, but most of it goes to good places. They also sell a lot of insurance to members, and pay the Grand Knight a hefty salary, and he goes around posing for pictures with bishops. He began his adult career as an aide to Sen. Jesse Helms, last of the great Southern segregationists. If you read the Knights' magazine, there are many good words for Republican wedge issues that oppose abortion without every quite, um, stopping any. I suspect that's because the Republicans would rather run against abortion than legislate abortion out of being an issue. But I have a small and suspicious mind.
DeleteTom - yes. FWIW, the Knights happen to support one of my causes.
Deletehttps://www.restinhisarms.org/
... and by "support" I mean that some of their local Councils have donated money, and pretty regularly they show up for our funerals and burials of infants. There are quite a few Knights in our parish, and they're good guys.
Based on what you describe regarding their political activities, it seems those could be revisited and/or dialed back a notch or two without imperiling their core identity or mission.
"I truly think it's our job, more than theirs, to be the public voice of Catholicism in our civic life." I agree with you, Jim. They should lay down the moral principles, i.e. the Church is against torture, against abortion, for the preferential option for the poor. But trying to micromanage people's consciences as far as which candidate most embodies these principles doesn't work. Some of them tried it in the recent past with bad results that contributed to the present polarity. I can also remember years ago when a lot of bishops were on the other side of the political spectrum, and it was alienating then, too.
ReplyDeleteI understand what you're saying about advocacy groups that fall under the Catholic umbrella. I was annoyed in several previous elections by the "Catholic voter guides" that appeared under everyone's windshield wipers after Mass, and on a table in the adoration chapel. I don't blame the bishops for those, however. I blame the K of C.
Tom: I suspect that's because the Republicans would rather run against abortion than legislate abortion out of being an issue.
ReplyDeleteYou are right on the money on this, Tom. When my eldest sister on the RC side of the family ran out of excuses for voting for a totally immoral and amoral man for President, a man who was running on a platform of hate, and who promised to gut the social safety nets for the poor, she claimed it was because he was pro-life and Hillary was an extreme pro-abortionist. That was true of Hillary, but dead wrong of course about Trump AND the GOP.
Most of the pro-lifers have forgotten that for 6 years the US had a Republican President (who was a churchgoing christian before it was politically convenient), and a Republican Congress, plus a mostly conservative Supreme Court with five (or was it six?) Catholic justices. But, abortion was never legislated away, was it? When I pointed this out to my sister, and said that since it was highly unlikely that a Trump presidency and GOP congress would do any more than they did in the Bush era, and so other "life" issues (poverty, refugees, the promise to gut healthcare, the war against undocumented immigrants etc) should also be considered, she had no comment. We have only seen each other twice since the election because the feud between us about the election became quite bitter.
None of the people we know who voted for Trump are part of the stereotypical group who supposedly voted Trump because they lost their jobs in the rust belt, and were less educated. All of these family and friends are well-educated, many with advanced degrees, and very well off economically - what we call "upper middle class" in the US. Six figure incomes all. Not struggling financially (several with net worth well over a million, some with more millions than I know about, but a lot), and not uneducated. So they fell back on religion - the evangelical family members and friends claimed that Trump would fight abortion, and the "war against christians" and the Catholics focused on the abortion issue. My sister and I saw each other at a family wedding right after the election, and at a family funeral that involved a true tragedy in the family last winter, but that's it. My eldest sister and her husband, adult kids, and grown grandkids are all Trumpites, and they are all EWTN Catholics too.
The GOP simply uses the abortion issue to get votes, and the RC bishops play along. The Catholic bishops essentially tell the people in the pews that supporting a candidate who is not "pro-life" (unfortunately, that is almost all of them) is enabling mortal sin, and so they simply have to vote for the other guys - no matter how much their policies are anti-gospel.
Tom, Anne and all,
DeleteI agree that the GOP capitalizes on Catholic and Evangelical opposition to abortion. There is nothing wrong with that, any more than there is with the Democratic Party capitalizing on African American grievances.
I suppose that the ultimate litmus test for the GOP's commitment to genuine abortion reform would be if the opportunity presents itself, while the party controls both the White House and the Senate, to nominate a Supreme Court justice who could tip the court's balance in a pro-life direction. If I am not mistaken, the two oldest justices are Ginsberg and Kennedy, so this is not an unrealistic scenario. Personally I believe that Republicans would seize such an opportunity to change the court's balance. And my take is that many conservatives see this as the best path to shaking up the legal status quo with regard to abortion: (1) reconstitute the make-up of the Supreme Court; and then (2) pursue cases that would result in case law that would open up new avenues for legislative reform.
Beyond the Supreme Court, many conservatives see it as critical to have federal judges on the bench at all levels who are open to pro-life arguments. And my take is that, in this area at least, the Trump Administration has kept its promises. Many folks are scratching their heads regarding the support for Trump from Evangelicals and, to a lesser but still significant extent, Catholics. Personally, I think a large part of the explanation, perhaps the single most important factor, is what amounts to a tacit agreement: if those voters vote for Trump, he will return the favor by nominating judges to their liking.
Legislatively, I agree that it's difficult to point to many concrete items at the federal level that would make a difference on abortion. But at the state level, there is quite a bit of legislative activity in red states, for example in defining the age of viability for a fetus.
"Personally, I think a large part of the explanation, perhaps the single most important factor, is what amounts to a tacit agreement: if those voters vote for Trump, he will return the favor by nominating judges to their liking." Bingo. People I know who don't like Trump but voted for him anyway are motivated by by their desire to see conservative(including, but not limited to, abortion issues) judges nominated. Things are out of balance. People are basically voting for judges, what happened to a separation of powers, and checks and balances?
DeleteJim, should appointing conservative judges by the most important factor in choosing whom to vote for?
ReplyDeleteThe religious conservatives already have Gorsuch, but as a Scalias clone, so doesn't change the balance of power. Several judges are getting old, and if Trump stays in after 2020 (God help us), it is likely the extreme right wing will have the chance to get at least another couple of their ilk onto the court. This might help a bit on the abortion issue, but the harm that could be done to the country for years and years, even after Trump is gone, may greatly outweigh whatever good is done.
I expect that a couple of the more elderly judges will hang in there as long as they can, and at least until after 2020, assuming they don't die (literally) before then. But how long they can hang on after than ....
If new judges are seen to be likely to change abortion laws to suit evangelicals and Catholics (if not the majority of Americans), while also changing laws that harm the poor and also harm religious and racial minorities, is it still OK to be a one-issue voter when millions will be harmed?
Are there other issues that are as morally significant as abortion?
The court during Bush's era had many conservatives, including a majority of Catholics among the justices. The GOP ruled Congress and the White House.
Why should anyone assume that abortion law will change at the national level with the current administration and congress when it did not before?
At the state level, should abortion also "trump" ALL other moral issues?
"...should abortion also "trump" ALL other moral issues?" Short answer, no. I don't even think it is truly possible to be a one issue voter. Nothing happens in a vacuum, and if we let one issue dominate to the exclusion of all else, then the law of unintended consequences kicks in.
DeleteThe problem with the bishops is that they do not teach that being pro-life is about a lot more than abortion. The innuendo of the majority of US bishops in the last election was that if you voted for any candidate who did not profess to be pro-life (whether or not they really are, as long as they say so), then your vote is immoral. My sister sent me a letter from the former Catholic bishop of her diocese, one of the most conservative in the nation. She said that even though her bishop said - gave lip service to - the idea that we need to help the poor and the refugees and immigrants, the "right to life" is more important than these other issues, and so abortion is the overriding issue. Frankly, I think my sister and her extended family just latched on to that as an excuse for voting for Trump.
DeleteMy sister's bishop and most others did not take to heart what Pope Francis said to them in 2015 when he was in the US, and which really was also part of Catholic teaching in the Seamless Garment days.
Jim has said that in his parish, the church's social justice teachings seem to get through. Tom, who seems to know the Chicago area also, sees a different picture. Perhaps it is parish specific. Chicago now has a "good" bishop, but he was preceded by George as I recall.
In 2015, Pope Francis addressed the US bishops and made it clear that abortion is not the only pro-life issue to be considered.
"The innocent victims of abortion, children who die of hunger or from bombings, immigrants who drown in the search for a better tomorrow, the elderly or the sick who are considered a burden, the victims of terrorism, wars, violence and drug trafficking, the environment devastated by man's predatory relationship with nature – at stake in all of this is the gift of God, of which we are noble stewards but not masters. It is wrong, then, to look the other way or to remain silent."
Anne, you ask some good questions. FWIW, here are my thoughts on a couple of them.
Delete"should appointing conservative judges by the most important factor in choosing whom to vote for?"
Personally, I believe that many social conservatives would say that appointing conservative judges is among the most important things, and perhaps the single most important thing, that a president can do; and that this will continue to be the case so long as Roe v Wade and its successor case law continues to preempt legislation on abortion. If that case law could somehow be superseded or neutralized such that legislatures would be free to pursue abortion policy, I think you would see conservative focus shift from the courts to the legislatures. And perhaps that is as it should be.
"Are there other issues that are as morally significant as abortion? "
I am just speaking for myself here: I believe that it's the single most important issue in the United States. I accept the view that the right to life is the foundational right on which all other rights depend. I frequently make voting decisions on life issues.
As I've written many times on the old dotCommonweal blog, I would happily vote Democratic if Democrats would be a pro-life party. Well, I don't know about "happily" :-). But I would give their candidates a harder look. That fellow in PA 18 might have gotten my vote. Although I find it disappointing that he is a "personally opposed but ..." candidate.
"At the state level, should abortion also "trump" ALL other moral issues?"
I don't know that is the case. I think that each voter needs to think, discuss and pray about which issues are the most important. My own view is that state governments have to deal with many moral issues, and we shouldn't necessarily give a pass to state government on any of them. States are the primary funders for help for the poor. My state, Illinois, is failing in that regard, mostly because it is broke. In that sense, government indebtedness is a moral issue. State government should be able to help the poor, and pay its workers and its vendors, and pass laws that put rational limits on abortion, and support many other policies with a moral dimension, all at the same time.
Let me add this regarding Donald Trump: until he became the Republican nominee, I don't recall another presidential election in which a major party candidate's basic temperamental fitness for office was open to question. Even though Trump has curried favor with the pro-life segment of the electorate, I can't personally vote for him because I don't consider that he's qualified for the presidency. That criterion must be met before I can even think about specific issues. Let me repeat that I'm not speaking for the church in writing this; this is just the way I tend to think about it. But I could make an argument from Catholic teaching that we should pursue the vocations to which we're called. If that article from a few months ago is to be believed, not even Trump and his family really believed he had a genuine vocation to the presidency, and in fact may well have been hoping to lose.
Jim, you have answered one question. Let me see if I understand you correctly.
DeleteEven though Trump was allegedly pro-life and supported by the bishops and evangelicals, you chose not to vote for him because he is not fit for office. So you do have at least one priority that weighed more heavily in your vote than did his johnny-come-lately pro-life stance.
IF Trump had shown minimal fitness for office - if there were any hints at all that he had at least some knowledge and understanding of economic policy, foreign policy, etc, and had at least a bit of govt experience, and did not come across as both ignorant and mentally unbalanced, then his platform fomenting hate against refugees, fomenting hate against Muslims, fomenting hate against undocumented Latinos, his promise to gut health care for the poor, his promises to gut pretty much all safety nets, his debasement of women, etc, etc - would have been OK - simply because he belatedly decided to be pro-life?
Also, Jim, do you believe that it is right for one religious group to be able to impose their religious beliefs on the entire population when a majority of that population does not support those beliefs? If somehow an extreme branch of Islam was voted into office and decided to impose sharia law on everyone, would you support that because they firmly believe that which wish to impose on those who don't share their beliefs?
Anne - I probably wouldn't have voted for Trump regardless, in part because of the other issues you name, in part because I didn't believe he was actually pro-life. I don't like what he has done to conservatism and I don't like him, period.
DeleteI don't believe that religious groups should impose their beliefs on others in this country, and I don't believe the abortion issues we're talking about are an example of such imposition. As I've mentioned already, if Roe v Wade were somehow nullified, I believe the laws of the land would revert to whatever is on the books now. Those laws were enacted via the democratic process. In addition, the Constitution protects the free exercise of religion and prohibits the establishment of a national religion. I don't think the abortion issues have anything to do with one religious group imposing their religious beliefs on an entire population. There is no religion I'm aware of called "pro-life". There are pro-life adherents from virtually all denominations, religions and among the irreligious.
The Church itself is really inconsistent in practice about it's sanctity of human life teachings (not talking about what the CCC says), and it needs to come to terms with its own teachings.
DeleteI don't know of any Catholic woman who, in some kind of medical conundrum, hasn't been able to shop a priest who can square birth control, emergency contraception, and even an abortion.
The bishops can excommunicate nuns who allow a medical abortion at their hospitals or put Dick Durbin on notice all they want.
But what's happening in the confessionals isn't always so cut, dried, and pristine. And I think every single Catholic knows this.
Anne is right, Jim. Back in the Reagan administration, the appointment of Justice Kennedy allegedly had the pro-life organizations draped in black. That didn't work. At one time, the Court had six Catholics, including Kennedy, and that still didn't work. It had Scalia, a Catholic, who said he didn't think they should do something as political as reversing Roe (he was political enough about other things), and now it has Gorsuch as the Fifth Vote, and we don't know what he will do, but all the people who voted twice for Reagan and two Bushes and now Trump to get a Court that would reverse Roe are now demanding Six Votes, or one more than is necessary. And they don't care what other crappy decisions (and there have been a ton) they have to swallow to get it. Jim, the Republican hearts ain't really in it.
ReplyDeleteTom - depending on the criteria, there might be six Catholics on the Court now: Roberts, Thomas, Alito and Kennedy; apparently Sotomayor is a self-described lapsed Catholic; and Gorsuch went to Catholic schools K-12, then went to Oxford, married a British woman, and seems to have worshiped at Episcopal churches ever since.
DeleteAnd not one of them have been denied Communion for sitting there with Roe as the law of the land. Yet the politicians who have been denied Communion (in theory; I haven't heard of anyone being forcefully removed by ushers) over abortion do not have the power to reverse the Supreme Court.
DeleteWell, the justices can only rule on cases brought before them, and the courts have a fairly pro-lifers record on upholding state legislation that limits abortion.
DeleteThey have not been in a position I'm aware of to overturn Roe.
Congressional reps, of course, make the laws, so perhaps they are seen as more responsible for expanding abortion access.
I don't pretend to know what goes through a bishop's head. These are men, cipher enough to my woman's brain, and men who have never been wholly open to any woman, which makes them more deeply unfathomable. They can understand women's fears and concerns only in the theoretical and abstract.
No doubt they are following their informed consciences, as we all try to do. And their consciences and ours are limited by our human imperfections.
"They have not been in a position I'm aware of to overturn Roe."
ReplyDeleteJean - If I'm not mistaken, the last time the Court took the opportunity was 1992, in Planned Parenthood v. Casey. That ruling ended up re-affirming the constitutional right to abortion. The court's decision is really complicated (more complicated than I'm able to sort out in my own head, much less describe here), with different combinations of judges joining in majorities to rule on different sections of the case, but I believe the key majority decision that re-affirmed Roe v Wade included the concurrence of at least four Republican-nominated Justices in that particular majority: Kennedy, O'Connor, Souter and Stevens.
The court declines to hear a number of cases every term, and it's possible that it has declined to hear cases since 1992 that may have presented it with an opportunity to overturn or at least put more limits on the abortion license. But inasmuch as the Court is thought to have had a pro-choice majority for the last few decades, I think it's presumed that those cases wouldn't have changed anything. The swing guy in all this is Kennedy, whose track record, as I understand it, is pretty conservative overall but not on certain hot-button social issues. He's the guy for whom, when he gets called to heaven, there will be a lot of conservatives waiting in line to dance on his grave.
Stevens and Souter were considered, at least by conservatives, to be pretty reliably liberal. To a point that Tom has been making: Republican presidents have not always nominated judges likely to vote pro-life. Perhaps that is because Republicans aren't interested in actually changing the Roe v Wade status quo. Personally, I think it's more likely that there were Republicans in the White House who were more interested in nominating justices for reasons other than an abortion litmus test. And maybe that latter approach doesn't really contradict the claim about not wishing to shake up the abortion status quo.
I was really just trying to muse over why bishops pull legislators out of the communion line, but not justices, which Tom was thinking about.
DeleteDo you think conservative judges are in a special bind here? Most claim not to want to legislated from the bench but to interpret. So conservative justices might personally dislike abortion, but also might be hinky about taking an "activist" role in ditching Roe.
I don't know; I'm not a conservative, and I don't support criminalizing abortion or throwing itmnack on the states--not to say it's not an evil, generally--so it's hard for me to know how a conservative, pro-life, Catholic judge would think.
*throwing it back on
DeleteAppointing judges just to appease the pro-life evangelicals and Catholics without concern for other issues that might come before it at some point would seem a bad idea, especially when the polls consistently show that Americans support keeping abortion legal. They would also support some limits on it, primarily in terms of length of pregnancy. The GOP in the Senate put forth a phony bill already, limiting abortion to earlier than 20 weeks, knowing it wouldn't pass, simply to have ammunition against the Democrats who voted against it. It was a coldly cynical political ploy - let's them say they "tried" but the Democrats are still cold-blooded baby killers. I don't think the Congress would ever pass legislation to make abortion illegal in the US, but will let the states do what they want. Until a state bans it completely and it is forced up to the Supremes again.
ReplyDeleteNo state, no matter how red and how "christian", has tried to ban abortion completely as far as I know. Perhaps they could force a Supreme Court ruling on limiting to where it was in the 70s - "viability". Don't forget, it was a conservative Republican governor, a hero to the right, who first opened the door to abortion in his state - California. Now they try to spin this by saying he did it as a "favor" to someone, and didn't think it would pass and that he regretted it.
The RCC also tries to spin its own history of teachings on abortion, which focused on "quickening". The change to "moment of conception" is relatively recent. It is a religious understanding, and many don't believe that it is an understanding that should be imposed on everyone. If the pro-life movement would stop conflating birth control with abortion they might get more people on board to support limits.
The Democrat who defeated Moore in Alabama and the Democrat in PA ran to the "right" in terms of campaign rhetoric. The Democrats need to wise up, drop unlimited abortion rights as a litmus test.
The country right now has no center party, and there are many of we centrists out there - left high and dry by both political parties.
Gorsuch joined the Church of England when he married. The C of E and the ECUSA do not condemn abortion, but encourage prayerful discernment for those considering one. Who knows how he will vote when a test case comes up? I looked up his Denver parish - it is not among the uber-conservative Episcopal parishes that broke away to join ultra conservative dioceses in Africa and Latin America, nor the new versions of Episcopal in the US, no longer affiliated with ECUSA. The Gorsuch's parish stayed with the mainstream ECUSA.
"Appointing judges just to appease the pro-life evangelicals and Catholics without concern for other issues that might come before it at some point would seem a bad idea, especially when the polls consistently show that Americans support keeping abortion legal."
ReplyDeleteRight - my understanding is, that if Roe v Wade were somehow nullified (which is not the only possible outcome of a hypothetical Supreme Court decision), then the legal landscape would revert to whatever state laws would be in force of the Roe v Wade case law didn't supersede it. I believe that would result in a complicated patchwork of different laws - essentially, 51 different sets of laws regarding the legality of abortion. Perhaps there are folks who believe that "rolling back" Roe v Wade would make abortion illegal across the US - but they're wrong :-) (as I understand it).
I think that is correct. There have been efforts in some states -- Florida is one -- to preemptively pass a law making abortion illegal if the Supreme should reverse Roe. I am not aware that the idea has passed anywhere yet. In general, though, a straight reversal of Roe -- "it was wrongly decided, and it is void" or even a shifty one expanding the states' powers to "regulate" abortions would be Happy Days Are Here Again for the lobbying fraternity.
ReplyDelete