Abortion, Murder, and Cake

My apologies to Rick for sloppy writing.  That last paragraph of my post (about having cake and eating it too) was not so much aimed at him as at those (like Ponnuru) who seem to want to make faithful Catholic support of the Democratic party somehow out of bounds.  (Despite his efforts to claim the mantle of a moderate, I think the intentionally inflammatory and offensive title of his book deprives Ponnuru of that high ground.)  I also have in mind here folks like Bishop Sheridan, who suggested during the 2004 election that Catholics who vote for pro-choice candidates (of any stripe) cannot receive communion until they recant and go to confession, and Robert George, who has compared support for the continued legality of abortion with support for legal slavery.  I think that these sorts of extreme positions are impossible to reconcile with the sort of discussion we are having here about the necessarily prudential decisions concerning the relationship between abortion's immorality and the proper legal response to it.  For the same reason, the failure of many of these same people to take the harder line the abortion/murder analogy would seem to compel strikes me as inconsistent in the way Rauch (and Kevin Drum, and others) have argued. 

It goes without saying that I reject Rick's characterization of the Democratic party's position on abortion.  I don't think principled opposition to legal prohibition commits it in any way to a particular view on the morality of abortion any more than a view that abortion is immoral (though not the same as murder) requires supporters of prohibition to support its criminalization.  The 2004 Democratic Party platform, for example, says that abortion should remain "safe, legal, and rare," which strikes me as a formulation that contains an implicit recognition that abortion's moral status is at least problematic.  As I've said, for the same reasons one can oppose criminal punishment for those who procure or perform abortions and still think abortion is deeply wrong, one can also -- for prudential reasons -- oppose its legal prohibition, even vociferiously oppose it, while believing the same thing. 

I also reject Rick's view that abortion is clearly more important the party than other issues about which I care, but I really need to prepare for class, so I can't gather evidence in support of my position.  As to the question whether the parties differ on the Iraq war (or war in general, given the current saber rattling towards Iran), the differences seem obvious enough to me, as they did in 2004, but I think that discussion is best left for another day.