"Intervening Choices": A further reply to Bob

Thanks Bob and Fr. Araujo for your comments.

Abortion:  Bob is obviously correct that there is deep disagreement in our culture over the moral and moral/legal status of abortion, and we need to do the best we can to pray and work through those disagreements.  Part of the work is attempting to listen to and understand where the other side is coming from.  If it is my belief that a person's  sincerely held beliefs are unreasonable but that the person is reasonable, I have hope that one day that person  will come to see their position as unteneble.  (As an aside, in my own life, when I have come to see the unreasonableness of a position I previously held, it is usually not reason alone that convinced me but a softening of my will, which allows me to reason more clearly).   In short, failure to see the reasonableness of my interlocutor's position in a disagreement is no reason to stop a) arguing or reasoning together and b) loving (which from my experience has a greater impact).  Even if we have "bracketed" the larger question of the abortion license for now because of our deep disagreement (or because the Supreme Court has bracketed it for us), I don't think legislators who see abortion as the taking of innocent human life have to or ought to bracket that decision within the context of the health care debate washing their hands of the issue, comforting themselves by saying that it is someone else imposing the death sentence.  Holy Week brings to life a character who made that fateful  decision when there was far less disagreement among his constiuents (subjects).

Vouchers.  Here, I may have simply misunderstood Bob, he may have misunderstood me, or both.  I thought I was agreeing with him at least in part.  I think that Bob and I would agree that the state is or ought to be blind to sectarian differences because these questions of faith are "beyond its competence or ken."  The purpose of bringing up our nation's soft theism was solely to accentuate the difference between bracketing in the voucher and abortion realms.  Except for a few and perhaps growing number (Jim Dwyer comes to mind), we are generally in agreement that religious faith is a good in a way that we are not in agreement as to whether abortion is a good.  Most of us believe that religion is a good but that the specifics are beyond the competence of the state.  In deciding to grant vouchers, the state is recognizing that good and recognizing its own incompetence in determing the contours of that good.  This seems to be a very different case than one which grants abortion coverage vouchers.