Top Catholics play into GOP's hands

By John Aloysius Farrell
Denver Post - Bureau Chief
Op/Ed

Washington - I am a Roman Catholic, if a bit shamefaced to admit it these days.

Some of my faith's mid-level managers have concluded that the proper response to modernity's complex challenges is to mimic Mullah Omar and his Taliban oafs.

It's a sin, Denver Archbishop Charles Chaput has said in so many words, to vote for Sen. John Kerry this year.

Chaput says that a Catholic who tolerates abortion rights or embryonic stem cell research "is cooperating with evil."

The Republican Party, says Colorado's top prelate, is "our natural ally" on the road to Paradise. It won't be long, I reckon, before he is promising me 70 heavenly virgins if I vote for George W. Bush.

I confess that I have not kept up, as best I might, on the intricate matters of Catholic dogma. It's not my area of expertise.

I do, however, know something about politics. And here's my Sunday offering: The Republicans are playing Chaput and Bishop Michael Sheridan of Colorado Springs and some other American bishops like fiddles.

For 40 years the Republican Party has paid little more than lip service to the anti-abortion cause.

Think about it. In 1972 Catholics deserted a candidate of abortion rights - Democrat George McGovern - to help elect an anti-abortion Republican, Richard Nixon. There were 587,000 abortions in the U.S. that year.

The very next year, Supreme Court Justice Harry Blackmun (a Nixon appointee) wrote the controlling opinion in Roe vs. Wade, ruling that abortions cannot be prohibited in the first three months of pregnancy.

The number of abortions in America doubled, then almost tripled: it has ranged from 1.3 million to 1.6 million a year ever since.

Ronald Reagan was a great talker when it came to abortion. He liked to send videotaped remarks about the sanctity of life to the crowds gathered at the pro-life rallies. But even Reagan caved when things got real.

In 1987, the anti-abortion forces had what perhaps was their best shot at overturning Roe, when Reagan nominated Judge Robert Bork to the Supreme Court. But Reagan deserted them, and his nominee, when Bork ran into opposition.

So it was that Justices Sandra Day O'Connor and Anthony Kennedy - two Reagan appointees - are the key swing votes preserving Roe.

The number of abortions peaked at 1.6 million, midway through the administration of President George H.W. Bush - who named Justice David Souter to the Supreme Court, where he has bolstered the pro-Roe majority.

When the court decided Planned Parenthood vs. Casey in 1992, it was three Republican nominees - Kennedy, O'Connor and Souter - who led the majority that reaffirmed Roe by concluding that "there is a realm of personal liberty which the government may not enter."

To be sure, the Republicans have faced determined liberal opposition over the years. But the GOP has now controlled both houses of Congress for most of a decade, and all three branches of government - Congress, the White House and the Supreme Court - for the past four years. Ending abortion is just not one of the party's priorities.

Rather than leading the charge, President Bush has publicly conceded that he won't spend the political capital to try to overturn Roe, which he calls the law of the land. It is a position he shares with his mother, Barbara, and wife, Laura.

Given an opportunity to challenge Roe at last week's debate, Bush sure seemed to be "cooperating with evil" to me.

"I will pick judges who interpret the Constitution, but I'll have no litmus test," he said, with a mighty waffle.

Indeed, if life begins at conception, as the strict Catholic doctrine says it does, then the Bush administration is guilty of complicity in the murder of thousands of unborn souls.

Bush's government has not stopped the use of the morning-after abortion pill, or privately funded stem-cell research using human embryos, or the slow, frozen, extinction of fertilized eggs in U.S. fertility clinics.

In the end, I don't think that the bishops' fatwa will scare too many Catholic voters into changing their minds. We Catholics are a tolerant lot; classic swing voters, and not averse to ignoring the church on a wide range of issues, like birth control, war in Iraq and capital punishment.

Mindful of the discrimination we faced in the not-too-recent past, Catholics tend to take our Matthew 22:21 seriously. The bishops should do so, too.

And given the American clergy's own unfortunate behavior in recent years, our bishops may want to study Matthew 7:3 as well.

Contact

Denver Post
http://www.denverpost.com/Stories/0,1413,36%7E28203%7E2471396,00.html DC, US
John Aloysius Farrell - Denver Post - Bureau Chief - Bureau Chief,

Email

jafarrell@denverpost.com

Keywords

Election,abortion,Republican

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