“Abortion Ruling Raises Backlash for Catholic Justices"

   Rosie O’Donnell is upset... again. This time she’s upset over the Supreme Court decision, Gonzales v. Carhart, which upheld Congress’ ban on partial birth abortion.  "’You know what concerns me?’ O'Donnell asked [two weeks ago] on ABC's ‘The View.’ ‘How many Supreme Court judges are Catholic?’  ‘Five,’ said host Barbara Walters. ‘Five,’ O'Donnell said. ‘How about separation of church and state in America?’”  The implication is clear:  a devout Catholic, because he or she is Catholic, is not qualified to hold high public office, at least not in large numbers.  Back to what Arthur Schlesinger of Harvard described, speaking of anti-Catholicism, as "the deepest bias in the history of the American people.”  As O’Donnell would have it, the state should discriminate against anyone seeking high office if he or she is an adherent of a religion that disagrees with O’Donnell. 

      However, the truly pertinent questions to ask – far beyond O’Donnell’s thought patterns, restricted as they are – would be, “How many members of Congress are Catholic?”  And, “Did the five Justices vote the way they did simply because they are Catholic?”  Since the Supreme Court was reviewing legislation passed by the people’s representatives in the House and Senate and signed into law by an elected President, the “religious” question is all but irrelevant.  But O’Donnell will tread where angels fear to to go.  She will openly defend what most Americans – Christian, Jew, Muslim, Mormon or even atheist – refuse to defend:  the indefensible.  Congress passed the ban on partial birth abortion not because this “procedure” is specifically against the moral teaching of the Catholic Church (or any other religious entity), but because it is an act of barbarism, an act so obviously criminal that even most “pro-choice” advocates had rather remain silent about it; they have enough humanity left deep down to realize that partial birth abortion is the logical conclusion of “choice.” Silence, here then, is golden, lest one have to face realistically the “pro-choice” depravity that would sanction bringing an innocent child to near-birth, with only the head still in the birth canal (often with viability of life outside the womb), only to evacuate the child’s brains (thus collapsing the head) by stabbing a hole in her head and then inserting a suction device.  Here is where the “right to abortion” leads.  And the Supreme Court upheld this Congressional ban because the Constitution does not guarantee a so-called “right” to procure a partial birth abortion; as far as the Constitution goes, the argument for abortion rights is a mere fantasy.

      Opponents of the five Justices are right when they claim that this Court decision endangers the status of Roe v. Wade, but that’s not because the five Catholic Justices are conspirators seeking to attack the Constitution; it is, rather, because Roe v. Wade is bad jurisprudence, whose argument is without precedent and constitutionally groundless.  Justice Ginsburg, in her angry dissent from the Court’s majority opinion, claimed that this endangerment of Roe v. Wade is “an effort to chip away at a right declared again and again by this Court – and with increasing comprehension of its centrality to women's lives.”  But the Catholic Justices were not trying “to chip away” at Roe v. Wade; that decision’s own absurdity is simply becoming more obvious with a return to the Court of sound and sane jurisprudence.  Meanwhile, if abortion truly has become central to women’s lives in this country, then we are in far deeper trouble than most realize; we have become nothing better than high-tech barbarians. 

      Nevertheless, the Catholic-bashing by the likes of O’Donnell is a back-handed compliment to the Church:  O’Donnell’s ranting illustrates that there is a least one remaining, and organized, voice of sanity left.  But the Church faces opposition from the strangest of places.  One expects it from TV Talk Land, but some of the most pronounced bashing has come from, of all places, organized religion itself, from representatives of mainline Protestant ecclesial communities in the Religious Coalition for Reproductive Choice, whose director of field services, Barbara Kavadias, sporting, of all things, a Roman collar and touting yet another self-contradictory slogan – “Pro-faith, Pro-family, Pro-choice” – echoed O’Donnell with her “Aha!” observation:  “They [the Catholic Justices] are imposing their points of view,” complained Kavadias, (when we all should know by now that only the views of people like Kavadias are worthy of imposition, who, hypocritically, does not hesitate to pressure federal and state government to impose her views on Catholic hospitals and other institutions).  But the anti-Catholic insinuations only get darker, more conspiratorial, as “explained” by Larry Greenfield, associated with RCRC and executive minister of the American Baptist Churches of Metro Chicago:  “The threat comes from a few, but powerful, religions and a few ... powerful religious leaders who pretend to speak for all religions.”  This wild assertion raises other questions:  how is it that the Catholic Justices’ majority opinion is an attempt to “pretend to speak for all religions”?  They, the Justices, are rather speaking for the Constitution. If you or I, with or without a religion, were to sit down and actually read the U.S. Constitution, would you or I be able to find there a “right” for someone to demand a partial birth abortion?  Where is such a “right” in that document?  Do people like O’Donnell, Kavadias and Greenfield know what our Constitution actually says, and do they not realize that their low tactic of Catholic-bashing is revealing far more about them – that they are deceitfully or stupidly spouting a red herring – than about the real motives of the five Justices? 

      Here’s the red herring:  the Court’s majority opinion, upholding the Congressional ban on partial birth abortion, is a Catholic decision that is imposing on the country and on some Protestant groups the beliefs of Catholics.  If the Court’s decision can be thus (mis)labeled as “Catholic” and separated from the legislation of Congress, a bill signed by the President, then it can be denounced as a dangerous breach in the wall between church and state.  This is, of course, a strategy that has been played many a time in the history of America, when the Know-Nothings – so aptly named – used anti-Catholic bigotry to advance their agenda.  The present-day “Know-Nothings” are hardly different:  if a fact gets in the way of one’s goals, ignore it.  If the Constitution does not contain a basis for the “right” to abortion, then invent one (Roe v. Wade).  If the graphic and accurate descriptions of abortion (especially partial birth abortion) are discomfiting, talk about “choice.”  If the ultra sound screen depicts a living, moving baby waiting to be born, turn the monitor the other way.  Like the famous cartoon chimps, covering their eyes, ears and mouths – that is, shutting down the avenues to an awareness of reality – the Catholic-bashers, when it comes to abortion, see no evil, hear no evil, and certainly do not speak of the evil so evident; they’ll blabber on and on, rather, about “choice,” “rights,” and the lurking dangers of the Catholic infiltration of American government.  The best of them will cower behind the skirts of inane slogans, because they still have a conscience, sorely wounded, to salve.  And the worst will, well, be reduced to the circus mentality, with its huffing and puffing, of a Rosie O’Donnell. 

      It was on this very point – the centrality of the U.S. Constitution for a member of the Supreme Court – that Justice Scalia risked his reputation with some pro-lifers, when he gave a talk at the Gregorian University in Rome, which I heard, and pointedly said that he does not vote on the bench according to his Catholic beliefs, but rather according to the genuine meaning of the words of the Constitution, which in no way can be convincingly construed to guarantee the “right” to abortion.  It would have to be amended in order to do so, and that’s not likely. Perhaps being Catholic, though, actually did influence the five majority Justices, since the Catholic Faith insists on the virtue of honesty; and those Justices are just being honest about what the Constitution says or does not say.  To pretend that Roe v. Wade is good jurisprudence is to reveal one’s ignorance or to lie and deceive.  Even some of the pro-abortion Justices have admitted that Roe v. Wade is a bad decision (as have such liberal journals as The New Republic), but then go on to defend it because so many in this country have come to depend on it for the purposes of contraception. This is not honest, and it certainly is not solid ground upon which to claim, as Justice Ginsburg does, that partial birth abortion is a constitutional “right.” 

      Another point Justice Scalia made at his lecture in Rome was that we are now members of democratic societies; and in a democracy, if most of the people demand abortion, then it will be allowed, with or without restrictions.  It’s all up, ultimately, to “the will of the people.”  And thus, the whole issue revolves around what kind of people we are or desire to be.  Americans seem to be morally conflicted on this issue of abortion, as illustrated in Dr. J. Budziszewski’s essay “The Revenge of Conscience” (online at www.discovery.org/scripts/viewDB/index.php?command=view&id=156): 

      Consider this tissue of contradictions: Most who call abortion wrong call it killing. Most who call it killing say it kills a baby. Most who call it killing a baby decline to prohibit it altogether. Most who decline to prohibit it think it should be restricted. More and more people favor restrictions. Yet greater and greater numbers of people have had or have been involved in abortions.... [I]f abortion kills a baby then it ought to be banned to everyone; why allow it? But if it doesn’t kill a baby it is hard to see why we should be uneasy about it at all; why restrict it? We restrict what we allow because we know it is wrong but don’t want to give it up; we feed our hearts scraps in hopes of hushing them, as cooks quiet their kitchen puppies. 

      This describes the state of mind of most Americans, and of many a wayward Catholic:  hopelessly enmeshed in moral contradictions.  For a number of “Catholic” politicians, the declaration of the “right” of abortion solved in their minds the moral dilemma.  The issue was “abstracted” out of the moral realm by a fiat of the Supreme Court in 1973.  And thus we hear the claim “I am personally opposed but will uphold the law of the land.”  But this “escape” – so cherished by many who want a way out of this battle – is incoherent:  “If, Congressman [or Mr. or Madame President], you are personally opposed, why such personal opposition?  Or if you favor the ‘right’ to abortion, but only under certain restrictions, why?”  Again, if abortion is truly a “right,” then it is a right to something good, for how can there be a “right” to something immoral or evil? Such so-called personal opposition or desire for restrictions can only be based on a recognition that abortion kills a human being; otherwise, why be personally opposed, why call for restrictions? And if it is then murder, why seek to uphold such a “law”? 

      This confusion is what happens when abstract “rights” are elevated above morality, when “rights” have no concrete basis in and tie to duty and obligation.  And so we are now in a quagmire of our own making:  hardly anyone is fully comfortable with unrestricted abortion, and yet most refuse to abolish it all together.  The Supreme Court has drawn an arbitrary line at partial birth abortion, and, yes, that’s a step in the right direction.  But given the force of law, allowed by Roe v. Wade, it is still arbitrary in the sense that the law now recognizes the humanity of a child who can be brought to partial birth, but where does that humanity begin?  It is a decision that strikes a blow at the foundation of abortion-as-a-right, but leaves, hanging in the air, the status of an unborn child at earlier stages of gestation.  But the decision, still, draws a line in the sand:  that’s made clear by pro-abortionists who accurately see that the upholding of this ban threatens Roe v. Wade.  That is, the pro-abortionists approve partial birth abortion because it is the logical extension, in all its horror, of the “right” to abortion.  Justice Ginsburg has said as much; and Catholic-bashing religious leaders concur:  they now find themselves defending the barbarism of partial birth abortion in order to protect a “right”; that, of itself, tells us volumes about abortion and its proponents