An issue came up this week in the comment thread of my previous post. I thought I might as well throw it up as a head post and see if anybody else has thoughts about it. The question is: when, if ever, is it ever okay to vote for a politician who believes that abortion should be legal?

I was pointing out that the Church needs to make it more clear, across the board and not just to particular politicians, that support for legalized abortion prevents one from being a Catholic in good standing, and (according to the CCC) incurs and automatic latae sententiae excommunication. In other words, people who have supported legalized abortion should not be receiving Communion until they have visited a confessional and made things right with God and the Church. And that support need not necessarily take the form of, say, actually working as an abortion doctor or as support staff at Planned Parenthood. It could also take the form of driving a person to an abortion clinic, helping to pay for an abortion, trying to bolster political support for Roe v. Wade, or (as I put it) deliberately voting for a pro-choice politician.

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Is there anything sexier in American politics than having the Church “come after you?” Hard to think what it would be. Everybody loves a rebel, but it’s just so darned hard to be one these days in America, where authority has been so thoroughly denigrated that there’s just not much left to flaunt. This is where liberal Catholic politicians have a real edge. They actually have somebody to answer to when they say heretical things. And not just any old somebody… the Catholic Church, the most favorite bad guy of all time! Just think how jealous those liberal Protestants must be! Most of them probably dreamed, early in their political careers, of taking on the evil conservative establishment in the name of goodness and rightness. But they’d practically have to start sacrificing children before their flabby denominations would say anything about it (oh, wait…), whereas the Catholics can be rebels merely by voicing completely standard liberal views on civilized talk shows. Some people have all the luck.

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Apologies for being MIA the last week and a half. I was down South visiting family… and since returning my brain has been in that mode where I feel like starting lots of things, but can’t seem to finish any of them. Anyway, I was thumbing through my alumni magazine yesterday evening and was annoyed to see that they’d marked the anniversary of Humanae Vitae by publishing this story by E.J. Dionne, a visiting professor in the journalism department last year. I had the idea that his name looked vaguely familiar, and when I glanced at the bio I figured out why; he’s the author of one of those sleazy political books that you see on the front tables as you’re walking into Barnes and Noble — the kind with blunt, hit-you-upside-the-head titles and the obvious intention to snag those lefties in a panic about the evil conservatives and all the havoc they’re wreaking in America. His particular title? Souled Out: Reclaiming Faith and Politics After the Religious Right. Cute.

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This is cool. From Stella Borealis, a report on an increasing source of frustration for Planned Parenthood and other pro-abortion groups: a lack of qualified doctors. Not wanting to be saddled with the burden of answering to pro-life groups, it seems most medical schools stay away from abortion these days, and doctors usually have to find their own training from outside sources. Assuming they want to, that is. Even if they don’t have moral objections to the practice, it can be difficult for doctors to get institutional approval and malpractice coverage, and then there’s the fact that being an abortion doctor just isn’t the pleasantest of jobs. The author of the article is obviously strongly pro-abortion and doesn’t mention it, but you’ve got to think that killing multiple unborn babies in a week starts to make a person feel pretty bad about himself after awhile. But even if he doesn’t, he still has to deal with all the protesters, the bad reputation, and sometimes even safety concerns. Most people would rather just be an orthodontist (or, if you really like babies, how about a pediatrician or an OBGYN?)

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This from the latest print issue of the National Review:

Sometimes, abortions go wrong, and the baby survives. (What a sickening sentence.) That is what happened in England recently. Jodie Percival became pregnant with her third child, and, along with her fiancé, decided to have an abortion. Her first child had died of kidney disease, and her second child is now afflicted with such disease. “I was on the pill when I became pregnant,” Ms. Percival said. “Deciding to terminate at eight weeks was just utterly horrible, but I couldn’t cope with the anguish of losing another baby.” So she had the abortion - or thought she had. She felt a fluttering in her stomach, and went to have a scan. “I couldn’t believe it,” she said. “This was the baby I thought I’d terminated. [Such a clinical word.] At first I was angry that this was happening to us, that the procedure had failed. I wrote to the hospital, I couldn’t believe that they had let me down like this. They wrote back and apologized and said it was very rare.” In the end, baby Finley was born, and he is expected to lead a normal life. Yes, sometimes abortions go “wrong.”

She couldn’t cope with the anguish of losing another baby? And so decided to kill the one in her womb. From pregnancy.org, the baby at eight weeks:

At any rate, thank God that the baby survived. But how terrible it must be when as a child (or young adult) such children learn that their parents tried to kill them when they were most helpless and defenseless?

My husband and I went tonight to see Juno, a recent hit comedy about a high school girl who has a baby and gives it up for adoption. It was cute. We liked it. We were trying to figure out afterwards why we haven’t heard much from the pro-life movement about this film. Admittedly, it isn’t a perfect reflection of everything Catholics hold dear. The heroine, in addition to getting herself knocked up in a one-night stand, has divorced parents, is a fan of rock music and slasher movies, and mentions in passing the possibility of giving the child to a lesbian couple. Unlike Bella it isn’t filled with gardens and large families and other analogies to help press home the pro-life message. At its core, though, Juno does a nice job of cutting through many of the lies of the pro-abortion movement, and, as compared to Bella, it has the signature advantage of being a real hit. (It’s even been nominated for Best Picture.) As a mainstream movie with no trace of outright moralizing, there’s nothing to scare away liberals and regular teenagers looking for a good time. Actually, maybe it’s a good thing that the pro-life movement hasn’t made a fuss about it.

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I don’t really want this blog to get too wildly political, especially this early in election season (but then, now is rather a critical time too) but I was about to frame an extensive answer to comments posted by Johnboy on an earlier thread, and I realized that, if we were going to argue about politics, I might as well make it a head post where everybody could see it. It doesn’t make sense to hide a controversial argument on a thread that probably nobody is reading anymore.

The positions stand thus. In my post on Mitt Romney last month, I mentioned in passing that, among the Republican candidates, I am somewhat partial to John McCain, (though certainly not without some reservations.) I would also be tolerably happy with Romney as the GOP candidate. McCain seems more honest and adult to me, but Romney has, among other things, a slightly more attractive position on stem cell research. In any case, I think I would be tolerably satisfied with either one. I would also probably vote for Fred Thompson in a general election, though it doesn’t look as though I’ll get the chance. I will not, under any circumstances, vote for Rudy Giuliani or Ron Paul. I haven’t decided whether or not I would cast a ballot for Mike Huckabee, but I will say right now that I would be seriously displeased if he were chosen as the GOP candidate for the 2008 presidential election.

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This has never been a politically-oriented blog, but I just wanted to take a moment to urge those readers who care about such things to muster up all that energy for mockery and contempt, and redirect it, for the good of the country and the Republican Party.

Just about everyone who follows politics closely (which I have done at some periods of my life, though not so much in the present) feels a need to vent negative energy once in awhile. Some pundits hardly do anything else – which is probably unhealthy – but politics is a game that needs its villains as well as its heroes, and politicians provide such excellent material for the satirical eye that it would be all but impossible not to take some shots.
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Apparently it’s been raging for quite some time, but I just heard about it: the controversy of the homosexual sheep. A researcher named Charles Roselli, from the Oregon Health and Science University, has been working to discover why about 8% of rams appear to be gay (that is, to prefer the company of other rams and to that of ewes.) Both PETA and a wide variety of gay/lesbian groups started a firestorm of criticism, and sent floods of hate mail to Roselli. Why are they so upset? They imagine, against Roselli’s protests, that he might be attempting to discover the cause of homosexuality so that homosexual human beings could be diagnosed and, possibly, changed.
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In light of the recent anniversary, I thought our readers might be interested in this article from Human Life Review. George McKenna tracks the attitudes taken towards abortion by the major American political parties, and asks the perplexing question: how did the Democrats become America’s pro-abortion party? As McKenna points out, it’s not what one might have expected in the 1960’s, when the Democrats counted the great majority of Catholics among their voters, and trumpeted the defense of the weak as their primary agenda. Republicans, the historically anti-Catholic and pro-middle class party, flirted with abortion at a time when a young Ted Kennedy was declaring it morally repugnant. And yet, just a few years later, the Democrats were adding a plank to their platform declaring a “universal right” for women to procure an abortion, while Republicans were recasting themselves as the defenders of life. What happened?

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