How To Completely Discredit the Claim that the Five Non-Negotiables are Non-Negotiable

I think it is actually true that the the “Five Non-Negotiables” (abortion, euthanasia, gay “marriage”, ESCR, and human cloning) are, in fact, non-negotiable issues.  I don’t necessarily think they are the *only* non-negotiable issues, but for a quick and dirty index of bottom line moral questions contested in our present political culture, they’ll do.

They problem is, a huge swath of allegedly “prolife” Catholics don’t really believe they are non-negotiable and emphatically hold other things (which they allegedly claim to be of lesser importance) as their *real* non-negotiables, while using the putative “non-negotiables” as fig leaves for the things that really matter to them.

Take, for instance, the allegedly “prolife” Catholic governor of Nebraska, Pete Ricketts. Imagine you and your dad have $300,000 burning a hole in your pocket and you want to blow it on something. Here is what they could have spent that money on:

• 45 one-year tuition scholarships to the University of Nebraska.
• One year of health insurance for 102 low-income Nebraskans.
• Ricketts supports charters and vouchers for private schools. With the money he has spent to re-legalize state-sanctioned killing, he could have bought a year of tuition at a private elementary school for 81 kids who otherwise couldn’t afford it.
• Ricketts also opposes abortion rights. The average pregnancy costs about $8,800 in the United States. That means Ricketts could have paid the hospital and medical costs of at least 34 low-income women — probably more, given that the cost of health care in Nebraska is almost certainly lower than the U.S. average.
• From what I can tell, the average soup kitchen meal costs about $1.20. For $300,000, Ricketts could have purchased 250,000 meals for homeless people. He could feed 228 people three meals per day for a year.
• Alternately, he could a year of rent-free living for 45 people in an average one-bedroom apartment in Lincoln.
• He could employ 11 Nebraskans for a year at the state’s median salary.

But instead of doing that, Ricketts and pere chose to defy the call of the Church, three popes, and the bishops of the United States (and the world) to end the vengeful barbarism of the death penalty. When the state of Nebraska lawfully and with due process repealed the death penalty, “prolife” Catholic Ricketts took all that dough and poured it into an effort to reinstate it.

There are any number of Catholics who are fully prolife and take seriously the *whole* of the Church’s teaching with regard to the value of and dignity of human life.  But anti-abortion-but-not-prolife death penalty zealots demonstrate very clearly that, given the choice, what *really* matters to them is not saving human life, but killing human beings that Movement Conservatism wants dead, the teaching of the Church be damned.  Compared to that priority, the unborn can go hang.

At this point, it is customary for anti-abortion-but-not-prolife people to throw out the canard about “prudential judgment” and the whole “we can agree to disagree with the Church except when there is a dogma involved.”  But this is, of course, false.  The Church calls us to docility, not to Minimum Daily Adult Requirement Christianity:

“In matters of faith and morals, the bishops speak in the name of Christ and the faithful are to accept their teaching and adhere to it with a religious assent. This religious submission of mind and will must be shown in a special way to the authentic magisterium of the Roman Pontiff, even when he is not speaking ex cathedra; that is, it must be shown in such a way that his supreme magisterium is acknowledged with reverence, the judgments made by him are sincerely adhered to, according to his manifest mind and will. His mind and will in the matter may be known either from the character of the documents, from his frequent repetition of the same doctrine, or from his manner of speaking” (Lumen Gentium No. 25).

Here’s the thing: Docility means that unless you have a *damn* good reason, you go with the Church’s prudential judgments. And there is not a good reason to ignore your alleged prolife “commitment” in order to kowtow to bloodthirsty Movement Conservatives who want America to maintain the august company of Saudi Arabia, Iran, Iraq, North Korea and various other Bronze Age and Commie despotisms in devotion to vengeance killing. It is, in fact, *highly* negotiable, while abortion is not.

So if you are *really* serious about maintaining a credible and persuasive prolife witness, what gives way in your list of priorities is maintaining the death penalty, not your commitment to the unborn. You put your money toward helping stop abortion and you say, “The people of Nebraska have spoken, and as a prolife citizen and a Catholic, I laud their choice. Now let us also recognize the dignity of the unborn human person who is guilty of no crime at all and work to preserve their lives as well.”

Prolife Catholics (real ones, not merely anti-abortion ones) are in the forefront of the drive to abolish the death penalty as well as abortion. That’s why JPII, B16 and Francis all call for its abolition. We should too.