Last week’s vice-presidential debate was less cringe-worthy than the VP match-up in 2008. In fact, there was one moment where substance won out, and a vast, yawning canyon opened between the candidates and their parties. That was when the moderator noted that each of the candidates is a Catholic, and asked them about abortion.
Their answers contained every point you might predict: Biden stood behind the Democrats’ even-further-expanded commitment to taxpayer funded abortion on demand without apology, while Ryan reiterated the Republican platform’s promise to try to outlaw most abortions.
Biden made matters starkly clear, promising almost explicitly that support for Roe v. Wade will be a litmus test for Democratic appointees to the Supreme Court. He warned that if Romney wins, the court might face more appointees like Antonin Scalia — and Ryan said nothing to contradict him. Ryan even defended his previous statement that he holds abortion wrong in cases of rape and incest — but bowed to the governing virtue of prudence in seeking the best pro-life law that’s possible.
What stuck with me — apart from a sick, gut sense of shame that his local bishop (unlike those in Colorado Springs and Scranton) permits a man like Biden to receive Communion — was the line of argument Biden used. Ryan made clear that his opposition to abortion is based not first on faith, but on “reason and science,” which tell him the same person you see on the ultrasound is the one who pops out of the womb. Here he invoked natural law — the only proper ground for public discourse in a pluralist country.
But Biden took refuge in a lie. He said that as a Catholic, he knows that opposition to abortion is de fide — and hence a matter of faith, inaccessible to natural reason. But he humbly declines to “impose” his faith on others who haven’t been granted this infused virtue by the Holy Spirit. Hence, anyone who would tyrannize others’ consciences is implicitly an inquisitor. So outlawing abortion would be the same as locking up Protestants until they accepted Mary’s Assumption or pinning yellow stars on Natalie Portman and Mila Kunis.
This intellectual subterfuge began, as Hadley Arkes and Archbishop Charles Chaput of Philadelphia rightly point out, with candidate John Kennedy — whose infamous speech to Protestant pastors marked off an intellectual kill zone around religion. This kill zone has proved a handy refuge for pro-abortion (they want it legal, they don’t even want to discourage it, and they expect taxpayers to pay for it) Catholics from Mario Cuomo to Nancy Pelosi and Sonia Sotomayor.
If Biden’s premise were correct, it sure would be immoral for Catholics to try to outlaw abortion. If the humanity of the unborn were de fide like the Hypostatic Union, Catholics who tried to impose it via the police would be like those Muslim busdrivers in Britain who ban seeing-eye dogs from public buses. (The Quran disapproves of pooches.) Islam is radically unlike Christianity in that it denies all recourse to reason and natural law; all truths are known by faith — their faith.
If this is what the Obama administration really believes about faithful Catholics, no wonder they’re trying to close down all our hospitals. (Our schools will be next — just wait.) They see us as just like Islamists who promise to impose Islamic law on everyone, at the point of a sword. If they give way to us on abortion, it’s just one step down the slippery slope that leads to a totalitarian theocracy. If that were the hidden agenda of the Catholic Church, I would persecute it myself.
If you want a president who thinks you’re an Islamist, who promises to appoint judges whose decisions are based on that same view of the Catholic Church, now you know how to vote.
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The most important point you make here - and very well - is that opposition to abortion is based on reason and science, and also that valid (legal) opposition to it in a pluralistic society cannot be based on anything else. This is compelling, and the effort to change people’s minds on this issue - the #1 priority for any Catholic as a social activist - hinges on it. Swiping at Islam, though, referring to the other side by name, really just unfocuses the piece as a whole, and is likely to invalidate your point to anyone who doesn’t already agree with it: Anyone on the fence reading this now has two doses of medicine to swallow instead of one - and the second one is presented much less gracefully. I hope people don’t get hung up on that, because the article is excellent.
Joe Biden argues a form of “subsidiarity”. He argues that the decision on abortion should be devolved from the state to the lowest level - the pregnant woman.
The real choice is not Biden vs Ryan but between Obama and Romney.
Is Romney really pro-life or a political opportunist? He has flip-flopped on abortion, destructive human embryonic research, climate change, even Romneycare - all co-incidentally with what was currently electorally advantageous.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=P_w9pquznG4
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Political_positions_of_Mitt_Romney#Abortion_and_related_issues
^ Well, if Romney is a political opportunist, it is probably safe to say that he will be more pro-life than his opponent, if only because that is what is politically opportunistic. Every Republican knows the line one must toe to not tick off the pro-life voting bloc while at the same time not appearing too concerned and scaring away abortion-rights moderates.
Most likely he will collect the pro-life vote Monopoly-$200-style, and then not do anything. This is surely preferable, if you are pro-life, to having the guy who nominates the Supreme Court justices, and the greatest and most public lobbyist of Congress, and our representative to the international community, consistently lobbying for a total extension and subsidization of abortion-on-demand.
@Leo — Would we say that murder should be “devolved from the state to the lowest level” — which in that case, would be the murderer and the victim? No, of course not. Because it is completely reasonable and just for the civil authorities to make laws (and enforce those laws) that prevent one human being from harming another.
Subsidiarity does not say that every decision and power should be devolved to the individual or even to the local level. Those decisions and powers that cannot adequately be handled at the local level may be handled by a higher level of society.
@ Carolyn.
Murder is devolved to the state. Murder is against state law, and is only rarely a federal crime. Murder falls within the plenary police power of the state, not federal government. Abortion is only a federal issue insomuch as its treated as an equal protection question. Even without roe b wade, the federal government has no business outlawing abortion, just like it has no business outlawing murder.
My reaction was, what right does the moderator have asking candidates to speak as Catholics-or any other denomination-in the first place? If they were both Methodists or Disciples of Christ would she have asked those questions? It seemed tacky, innappropriate & set up to corner Mr Ryan.
Question for the author:
According to Catholic teaching, is opposition to *contraceptives* / artificial birth control founded on faith? How appropriate would an effort to restrict or abolish it be, in light of what you’ve said about abortion here?
Dear Keith,
The Church grounds her teaching on contraception on natural law. However, making law requires a consensus, and few outside the Church seems convinced by the natural law arguments she adduces here. So it’s out of the question to try legislating on this question, until and unless the Church can change that consensus.
Jamie r, in response to Carolyn says “Murder is devolved to the state.” and finishes by saying, “Even without roe b wade [sic], the federal government has no business outlawing abortion, just like it has no business outlawing murder.” Jamie, you ignore her comment which is that murder does not devolve to the individual in regard to another person but is being allowed to do so in regard to the smallest and most helpless of persons. But in regard to your claims that murder devolves to the state, not the federal government, who do you think enforced laws against murder in the territories before state governments were established? It was federal marshals.
NewCath 08 - that is correct, but the feds stepped in precisely because there was no “state” level gov’t to protect the common good (i.e., protecting innocent life). Thus, your example is an instance of subsidiarity working as intended, not an exception to it.
And Carolyn’s comment was right as you point out - protection of the innocent wrt abortion devolves to the state, not the individual (although I suppose one could argue that “self-defense” does devolve to the individual, but in that case we are talking about an attacker-victim scenario, one that does not apply to mother-unborn child regardless of the symantic shenanigans pro-aborts employ).
Romney will not be MORE anti-life as Obama;
Romney will not be AS anti-life as Obama;
There is excellent reason to believe Romney will be LESS anti-life than Obama;
There is, in fact, excellent reason to believe Romney will be CONSIDERABLY LESS anti-life than Obama;
There is, sadly, no reason to believe that Romney will be as pro-life as, say, George W. Bush was. But you can’t always get what you want.
But if you try sometimes, you just might find you get what you need.
We need someone less anti-life (and, indeed, less anti-Catholic) than Obama.
Perhaps we should try, come election day, to get what we need?
In case you thought I was blowing smoke, here’s Adam Gopnik of The New Yorker using this very exchange to compare Ryan to a “mullah”:
http://www.newyorker.com/online/blogs/newsdesk/2012/10/of-babies-and-beans-paul-ryan-on-abortion.html?mobify=0
Perhaps, but everyone I know who wants to impose their morality on everyone else is Christian, not Muslim. When abortion-rights moderates and advocates eye the “pro-life” side with suspicion, they’re thinking not so much of “Islamists” as they are thinking of the kind of people who put John Scopes on trial: Christians who are anti-science, anti-reason, and anti-the real world in general.—And who live next door. And who form a sizable chunk of our population, and probably most of the demographic opposition to abortion. At least, that’s what most people I know think, and what I thought until fairly recently.
Could it be that the Catholic lay faithful have practically no notion of what Natural Law is?
What really impresses me about how crazy Biden’s answer is is how he purports to sincerely agree with the Church’s teaching which means he also must sincerely agree with the fact that he is advancing his political career on top of a mound of human corpses caused by behavior he objectively completely supports (and wants the government to fund). He doesn’t want to stop other people - as ‘devout as I am’ - from having the freedom to do what he agrees is killing their children.
Personally, I find it very hard to take the Catholic Church seriously on the abortion issue, since they have proven over and over again that their membership can support abortion rights and still receive Communion. As far as I am concerned, the Church’s opposition is only lip service.
This is what happens when you have a Catholic Church full of women who lie over and take it, not a single real man among the whole American Church!
(Christ never said to lie there and watch the Church die so long as they include you in the government!)
Jim
The Catholic Church has been infiltrated by evil secularists.
Blaming the whole Church is like blaming all of Germany for the Nazis even though a great many Non Jewish Germans died trying to protect Jews from the monsters who took over their country.
The other day in Uraguay their parliament voted on legalizing abortion.
The next day, the bishops publicly excommunicated those parliament members that voted for abortion.
Clearness, action, and clarity on Church teaching. We need that from our bishops here in theUS.
“Ryan made clear that his opposition to abortion is based not first on faith, but on “reason and science,” which tell him the same person you see on the ultrasound is the one who pops out of the womb. Here he invoked natural law — the only proper ground for public discourse in a pluralist country.”
This statement ‘based on reason & science, and not faith….is very important because of sharia law in the Islamic faith. According to U.S. law, killing is illegal and we have to prove over and over again that sharia and abortion is killing, though both are also different.
I have a couple of questions to those who insist there are no eternal truths or moral absolutes:
Is it eternally true that there are no eternal truths or is that an idea that is here today and gone tomorrow?
If there are no moral absolutes then do you believe that the holocaust, slavery, sexism and racism are not absolutely wrong. Do you believe in the existence of evil?
Relativists don’t seem to understand that they constantly contradict themselves.
If the RCC took a solid stance on abortion and marriage, and stood firm to remove politicians who can’t vote their faith, we shouldn’t be surprised that an apostate party won the White House in 2008 and 2012.
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