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William Murchison on What “Personally Opposed” Politicians Need to Do
May a self-confessed Episcopalian gingerly butt into a Catholic family dispute? The nub of the dispute: what to do when Catholic politicians who depict themselves as “personally opposed” to abortion won’t lift a political finger to impede the exercise of the right to abortion.
“Personally opposed” is not exactly the oldest dodge in politics, but it requires rigorous challenge. Only recently has that challenge been forthcoming, in the form of notices from certain Catholic prelates that Catholic politicians with pro-choice voting records stand to forfeit Communion.
Eliza’s Approach
This seems all very well and proper, not to mention overdue. But a complementary recourse, it seems to me, could do with some exploration. There are more ways than one to hold the “personally opposed” accountable for what they do and say. I myself favor the Eliza Doolittle approach, voiced to Freddy Eynsford-Hill (Anglicans both, I expect): “Sing me no song! Read me no rhyme! Don’t waste my time, show me!”
It’s show time.
Consider how the “personally opposed” politician—John Kerry, for instance—commonly frames his objection to doing anything that might be conceived as suppressing the right to abort a pregnancy. “I don’t tell church officials what to do,” Kerry declares, “and church officials shouldn’t tell American politicians what to do in the context of our public life.”
So much, if with more elegance, the “personally pro-life” Mario Cuomo said in his much-acclaimed 1984 address on the topic at Notre Dame University: “Catholic public officials,” Cuomo reflected, “take an oath to preserve the Constitution that guarantees . . . freedom . . . not because they love what others do with their freedom, but because they realize that in guaranteeing freedom for all, they guarantee our right to be Catholics.” Which sounds gloriously high-minded. Reduce abortion to a church-state question and, these days, you’re halfway home, given the breadth of secular concerns over clerical “interference” in public matters.
Cuomo adorned his rhetoric with expressions—if not outstandingly fervent ones—of support for unborn life. Twenty years later, the rhetoric is coarser, angrier, as befitting a coarser, angrier time. Thus Kerry. Thus New Jersey Congressman, Fordham graduate, and lifelong Catholic Bill Pascrell, vexed at Archbishop John Myers’s call for Catholic politicians to get right with the church’s position on life. Pascrell denies vigorously that he has been “sent to Congress to follow the dictates of the Catholic Church.” He continues: “I have to represent everybody in my district. That’s what democracy is all about.”
Oh, yeah? What about pro-life voters, a numerous constituency, who get the back of Rep. Pascrell’s hand each time he yields to the abortion lobby? How in the world does a congressman vote everybody’s interest all the time? Pascrell is full of beans. (To his credit, he voted for the ban on partial-birth abortion.) Moreover, when did one ever, prior to Roe v. Wade, hear of a law or judicial enactment immunized against the possibility of challenge?
For the moment, however, let law and the Constitution go. Let us assume the utter sincerity of the “personally opposed” politician and the poignancy of the wish to combat abortion while respecting the present state of the law. Eliza has it right all right: Show me! Show us all.
William Murchison a syndicated columnist, is author of Mortal Follies: Episcopalians and the Crisis of Mainline Christianity (Encounter Books).
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