Are We Collaborators in the Culture of Death?

Abortion Good, Religion Bad?  

   I don’t like to get into partisan politics too much on this blog, although I do deal fairly often with moral or social issues that have become politicized.  There are times, however, when partisan politics forces itself upon us so insistently that it cannot be avoided (which is happening with greater frequency in recent years).  This is one of those times.   

     I’ll start with a speech delivered by Hillary Clinton last Thursday (story here) – if you read religious blogs or more conservative news outlets you’ve heard about it already (numerous times); if you rely on more established media, probably not. Mrs. Clinton is the (so far) unchallenged Democratic candidate for President of the United States, and she said something that would have been unthinkable just twenty years ago when her husband was president.  First, she opined that: 

Far too many women are still denied critical access to reproductive health care and safe childbirth.  All the laws we’ve passed don’t count for much if they’re not enforced. 

Safe childbirth is not really what she’s concerned about, as we shall see; she's really talking about  what she refers to as “reproductive health care”, which is newspeak for abortion.  The interesting part is what she sees as the obstacle to, ahem, "reproductive health care"; she said: "deep seated cultural codes, religious beliefs and structural biases have to be changed.”  Except for some tiny fringe groups,of course, religious beliefs etc. do not affect access to “safe childbirth”, the the issue is, obviously, abortion.  Allow me to translate from the pro-choice dialect into standard English: the right to destroy unborn human life in the womb is a fundamental good, and since religion tends to hinder the fullest realization of that good (after all, only about 1.3 million women are able to abort their babies every year in the U.S.), religion has to bow to the pro-abortion regime or be crushed. 

Not All Issues Are Equal

     Now, it’s not really news that she believes that, or that the leadership of her party believes it.  What is newsworthy is that she is comfortable putting the matter so bluntly. Such a thing, as I mentioned above, would have been unthinkable a couple decades ago.  Her husband, President Clinton, did not want to offend the religious or moral sensibilities of potential voters, so he often softened the message, saying that “abortion should be legal, safe, and rare”,  as if it were a sad, unfortunate necessity.  No longer.   Mrs. Clinton is convinced, apparently, that she can publicly promote abortion, upholding it as a blessing greater than  freedom of religion (the first item in the U.S. Constitution's Bill of Rights), and that tens of millions of voters will simply shrug and vote for her anyway . . . including about 50% of those voters who identify as Catholic.  Just as they did for Barack Obama, who as an Illinois state senator led the fight to keep it legal to “abort” babies even after they’ve been born.
      Can we agree that this is a problem?  If I may quote once more Cardinal Ratzinger’s letter to Cardinal McCarrick On The Worthiness To Receive Holy Communion: 

There may be a legitimate diversity of opinion even among Catholics about waging war and applying the death penalty, but not however with regard to abortion and euthanasia. 

According to the then Prefect of the Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith (and soon-to-be Pope) our preferred prudential judgments about economic or foreign policy cannot outweigh matters of intrinsic evil like abortion (and we can add to that  the dismantling of the institution of marriage).  It should not be that half of all Catholics are voting for candidates who actively promote these evils, whatever poverty programs they favor.  And it doesn’t have to be this way: if even a somewhat larger proportion, let's say 60%, of Catholic Democrats refused to vote for candidates who were not prolife, the party would change, because that’s what parties do (at least in the United States) when they keep losing elections.  Just look at the number of leading Democrats who were pro-life in the early seventies, but changed to pro-abortion as the party moved in that direction: Ted Kennedy, Mario Cuomo, Jesse Jackson, Al Gore.  One wonders whether such prominent party members might have prevented or slowed that anti-life slide if they had stood by their supposed principles? Instead, the party’s likeliest presidential candidate doesn’t even seem to think that directly attacking the teachings of their Church will drive Catholics away. 

Evil Is Never Satisfied

     As I said at the outset, I'm really not that interested in the partisan aspect of all this, because the real problem goes far deeper than a particular political party or candidate (my own state is represented in the U.S. Senate by a pro-abortion Catholic Republican).  Hillary Clinton is who she is, but she wouldn't be in a position to influence, much less make, public policy (or her own positions would be very different) if enough of us didn't allow her to do it, either by downplaying the seriousness of the evils involved, or even by promoting them.  
     We also see a real-life example of the nature of evil: it is never satisfied. If Christians tolerate abortion and the complex of other evils associated with it (pornography, prostitution, promiscuity, contraception, et.al.) the supporters of those things will not tolerate Christian morality in their turn, they will keep pushing until their views are all that remain.  We see a similar trajectory in the movement that started by seeking to end persecution of homosexuals, proceeded to demanding social acceptance, and now threatens to destroy the reputation and even the livelihood of any who disagree. 
     One last thing: supporters of abortion, same-sex marriage, etc. will try to dismiss all opposition as mere "politics", or as irrational "hatred"; they will not concede that there are any moral dimensions to these issues at all, or that opponents are motivated by any sincere concerns.  We can't let those assertions go unchallenged.  We need to be outspoken in our opposition, but also be clear that our position is rooted in love: love of God and his law, but also love of those, including those with whom we disagree, who will be harmed by the evils we oppose.  As St, Paul tells us: "Let us not grow weary in well-doing, for in due season we shall reap, if we do not lose heart." (Galatians 6:9)