Rick is right to point out how far the Democrats have to go concerning abortion and how daunting the challenge is to pro-life Democrats. Without denying or minimizing that challenge, I would respond with a couple of comments why pro-life Democrats should soldier on. First, the presidential race, at the primary stage, is the place and time at which the abortion-affirming wing will be strongest among Democrats, because the process aims at the one highest position and the activists have so much influence. But as the article linked by Rick notes, the issue overall is under debate in the party, and the pro-life position will be more successful in moving things its way in some other contexts, such as Congress, governorships, and state legislatures. Thus, in the 2006 midterm elections, a number of congressional candidates favoring measures against abortion, led by Bob Casey in the Senate, were nominated by the Democrats and won. Second, the hard-nose abortion-affirming wing of the party has been empowered this cycle by, among other things, the widespread sense that the Democrats could win on "values" issues without having to move on abortion, simply because the Bush administration has flunked so many moral issues: the justice of the war in Iraq as initiated and executed, the half-hearted attitude toward renouncing torture, the acceptance of scandal and overreaching, etc. One can't put the weight of blame for Democrats' positions onto Republicans; nor am I claiming equivalency among all these issues. But as a practical matter, it would help those Democrats trying to push their party on abortion if the competing party provided a less morally flawed challenge.
Does news of Fred Thompson's lobbying work on behalf of the National Family Planning and Reproductive Health Association (in which he reportedly tried to lift federal restraints on abortion counseling) mean that pro-life Catholics should think twice before voting for him? I'm not equating his lobbying work with the policy positions of the leading Democratic candidates, but his decision to accept that client raises questions about his dedication to the pro-life cause, doesn't it?
I consistently try to make the point with friends that traditional Christianity's opposition to same-sex marriage and parenting cannot be equated with homophobia, though I admit that the articulation of that opposition often bears a striking resemblance to homophobia. If Christians are to maintain the position that the children of same-sex parents are worse off than the children of opposite-sex parents, they will have to be careful to ensure that the differences are not due, at least in part, to the social hostility toward those families to which Christians are prone to contribute. More particularly, what justification does the Gospel provide for Christian churches to picket against a group of children on vacation with their gay parents?
Howard Friedman has a helpful round-up of the religion-related answers given by the candidates at last night's Democratic presidential debate, including Senator Obama's reassurance that he does not think that "people of any faith background should be prohibited from debating in the public square." I trust that this is not the extent of his outreach to religious voters.
Here is a long post, over at the always-interesting Vox Nova blog, on the question whether it makes sense to think of the Faith in "liberal" and "conservative" terms. Here's a bit:
It is my conviction--and Pope Benedict XVI's many writings on law, society and politics confirm this--that Catholic perspectives on culture, society and politics will relentlessly challenge a world that has been interrupted by the advent of salvation in Jesus Christ. Something unexpected, something unanticipated, something foreign ought to be perceived by the world when Christians engage it with agape-caritas instead of conventionality-duty. And let me be frank: before a Christian can carry out such a glorious task, a Christian's mind and heart must be initially and continually transformed and renewed by the very same agape-caritas that is to be present to the world through that Christian's actions. This is a daunting and frightening prospect for the Christian, even after conversion, for this transformation and renewal never ceases as we plunge deeper and deeper into the mystery of divine love. Agape-caritas challenges our prevailing notions of love and, when extended into our actions in society, it challenges our prevailing notions of justice, shattering the simplistic reasonings and categories we cling to in our outlook of mundane tasks such as politics.
I enjoyed Tom Berg’s post about the good Samaritan. In my
church (the Cornell Catholic Community), Father Robert Smith (among other things)
also found a challenge beyond inclusiveness. He observed that the priest and the Levite did not help the victim in order to maintain ritual cleanliness. From
this perspective, this resonates with the message Jesus often presented of the
perils associated with too strict following of rules. But before we liberals triumphantly ran
with that theme, Father Smith came to the heart of his homily in which he asked
us to reflect on the rules or self imposed limitations we have that prevent us
from helping others more often, on the attention to worldly affairs that distracts us from the presence of Christ within us and from living a life in which we see others
through the eyes of Christ.
In this piece, from the Chicago Tribune, the author discusses the Democrats' "abortion quandary." Here are some snippets:
In sometimes subtle ways, Democratic Party leaders and political professionals are grappling with how to address abortion, an internal debate that turns on questions of emphasis, political positioning and how far to go in accepting as a public-policy goal the view that abortion is a moral tragedy to be avoided.
While there is no serious discussion of moving away from the party's long-standing support of abortion rights, some moderates have pressed the party to more aggressively press a message that Democrats would work to reduce the number of abortions. But the party's pro-abortion-rights constituency is wary of too strong an identification of abortion as a social ill, fearing that would provide political momentum for legal restrictions. . . .
It is a quandary, indeed. If party party leaders and candidates agonize about even acknowledging that abortion is a "social ill", or a "moral tragedy to be avoided", then is there any hope at all for a place in the party's policy-conversation for "seamless garment" types, or even run-of-the-mill "troubled-but-pro-abortion-rights" Americans?
Three of four members of our household have now read Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows -- and that was with a late start, not getting out of the checkout line at the bookstore party until 2 a.m. Saturday. No spoilers in this post. But if you're ready to be told a lot, Christianity Today's review catalogs the ways in which the book presents (almost always symbolically) themes that are deeply Christian, most notably the power of sacrificial love. The review's conclusion:
When C.S. Lewis started out to write The Lion, the Witch, and the Wardrobe, he didn't have Christianity in mind. "Some people seem to think that I began by asking myself how I could say something abut Christianity to children; then fixed on the fairy tales as an instrument, then collect information about child psychology and decided what age group I'd write for; then drew up a list of basic Christian truths and hammered out 'allegories' to embody them," Lewis once wrote. "This is all pure moonshine. I couldn't write in that way at all."
"Everything began with images," Lewis continued. "A faun carrying an umbrella, a queen on a sled, a magnificent lion. At first there wasn't anything Christian about them. That element pushed itself in of its own accord."
Something similar seems to have happened to J.K. Rowling. She began writing about wizards and quidditch and Bertie Botts Every Flavor Beans, and somewhere along the way, Christ began to whisper into the story.
In yesterday's New York Times Magazine, Noah Feldman has a wonderful essay about identity, belonging, and community. His starting point is his own experience being excluded from the official newsletters -- even erased from the photographs -- of the yeshiva day school he attended for twelve years because he married someone who is not Jewish. I have not experienced that sort of exclusion, but he did capture some of the disorientation I feel as an evangelical-turned-Catholic, a feeling that I don't completely escape in the evangelical or Catholic circles in which I now operate, I confess. Feldman writes: "It is more than a little strange, feeling fully engaged with a way of seeing the world but also, at the same time, feeling so far from it." You can (and should) read the whole essay here.
Joseph Raz's paper, Incorporation by Law, was published in 2004, but it has just now been made available online. When you're Joseph Raz, you don't need to provide an abstract, so here is an excerpt from the introduction:
My purpose here is to examine the question of how the law can be incorporated within morality and how the existence of the law can impinge on our moral rights and duties, a question (or questions) which is a central aspect of the broad question of the relation between law and morality. My conclusions cast doubts on the incorporation thesis, that is, the view that moral principles can become part of the law of the land by incorporation. This way of putting the question is not meant to be neutral. Legal theorists tend to start at the other end. They do not ask how law impinges upon morality, but how morality impinges on the law. It may be natural for legal theorists, being as they are focused on the law, to start with the law and ask what room it makes for morality. I will suggest that this way of conceiving the question of the relations between law and morality has contributed to some important mistakes. A better way of motivating reflection on the relations is to start with morality.
