Catholic Abortion-Rights Supporters Produce 'Moral Incoherence,' WSJ Opinion Piece Says

Main Category: Abortion
Also Included In: Women's Health / Gynecology
Article Date: 26 Mar 2009 - 6:00 PDT

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University of Notre Dame President John Jenkins is incorrect in his assertion that the choice of President Obama as this year's commencement speaker will help encourage dialogue between the Catholic university and the president, Wall Street Journal columnist William McGurn writes in an opinion piece. According to McGurn, Jenkins was quoted in the university's student newspaper this week as saying, "'We hope for this to be the basis of an engagement'" with Obama. McGurn writes, "Now if the president were going to Notre Dame to engage in dialogue, that would be one thing. But Mr. Obama will not be going to Notre Dame to 'dialogue.' He will be going to help advance his agenda."

According to McGurn, abortion is at "the center of that agenda," including Obama's "enthusiasm for the Freedom of Choice Act" and "the way he misrepresented his role in killing an Illinois state ban" on so-called "partial-birth abortion." McGurn says that Obama's reversal of the "global gag rule," his recent executive order easing federal restrictions on embryonic stem cell research and his move to rescind the Bush administration's HHS provider "conscience" rule "are all orthodox positions" for the Democratic party "these days." By contrast, in the past, Catholic leaders "enjoyed tremendous influence" in the party, he writes. If these leaders had "used that influence to try to arrest the Democrats' slide on life, things might have been very different today," McGurn says, adding, "Instead, they became classic enablers, treating abortion as an irritating issue that needed to be placed off to the side."

McGurn writes the "result is moral incoherence ... in which abortion-rights advocates have the most to gain, because it demoralizes those who support the cause of life while removing fears of even the slightest social sanction for those who do not." He continues that it "is an incoherence we see all across American Catholic life today" and that "gives us a college president who tells the campus paper that honoring an abortion-rights president is consistent with the bishops' statement that such leaders 'should not be given awards, honors or platforms which would suggest support for their actions.'" Likewise, "it has brought us to a day where the most prominent Catholics in America -- from Vice President Joe Biden and House Speaker Nancy Pelosi (D-Calif.) to virtually every well-known Irish Catholic in the Senate -- now defend the snuffing out of tens of millions of innocent human lives as the exercise of a fundamental right," according to McGurn. He concludes that at Notre Dame, "it allows administrators and professors to tell themselves they are in 'dialogue' with the spirit of John F. Kennedy when they are in fact surrendering to a Ted Kennedy reality they themselves have helped create" (McGurn, Wall Street Journal, 3/24).

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