I seem to have a gift for hurting people’s feelings

even when I don’t mean to. As I hope should be evident, my sympathies are entirely with the protestors at Notre Dame. Civil or self-aggrandizing, I think that they are on the side of the angels and that the Obama/Jenkins joint nose-thumbing at Catholic teaching and the unborn was a complete disgrace. I think people who try to defend the arrests of protestors like Terry, Keyes or Fr. Weslin (the latter of whom I have more sympathy for) on the grounds that they were annoying are making excuses for grave evil. There is, frankly, no law against being annoying and there is no *just* law for demanding that annoying people stand over *here* but not over *there* on a Catholic campus in order to fight for Catholic teaching and pray Catholic prayers for babies the Catholic Church defends from death. The spectacle of Fr. Weslin’s arrest is a permanent disgrace to Notre Dame.

That said, I think (like Bishop D’Arcy) it is also the case that Terry’s circus needs to go, but not by force of law. I say this because I’m a firm believer in the prolife movement and a firm believer that Terry’s tactics only serve to create more pro-choice people. There is a perverse mindset which argues “Fine! Let the hellbound make their choice! I shall stand for virtue!” But I think that an ostensibly prolife movement that creates pro-choice people is doing its job badly.

Which brings me to the point I tried (and failed) make yesterday. Reader Pansy Moss (whom I regard as a saint) writes in distress about this post:

You know, this line of thought always hurts me. I have been accused of this before because I feel incredibly strong about the abortion issue. That’s because, I’m sure like many people, I have personally been touched by this issue. Friends of mine have been touched by this issue. Relatives have been touched by this issue. It’s very pervasive and heartbreaking and has yet to lead to any good.

It offends me when people tell me I’m not really Catholic because this issue hits home so strongly, and 9 times out of 10, no one even bothers to ask my opinions on capital punishment, torture, helping the poor etc (I don’t even eat veal because I am against the way baby calves are treated), because I feel quite strongly about those issues as well. You cannot commit evil hoping some good will come out of it. Doesn’t work, find another way. Just like with abortion. Figure out a solution that doesn’t kill babies.

Yet “real” Catholics continue to point fingers at me saying I didn’t vote for Obama and I am pro-life because I am only loyal to the right side as opposed to the fact, yet I really don’t care what the Church teaches and am simply want to be in the Republican club. Yeah, right. I come from a NYC family of democrats, yet I want to feel “in” with my pro-life opinions. Whatever.

I am not sure why we have to play this Catholic litmus test game all the time. Abortion is a grave evil, and of people fall short on getting the big picture, at least people are taking steps to eliminate one evil. Personally I think all these issues are so intertwined that perhaps when we as culture see the light, the others will be easier to argue as well.

Anyway, I know you said “largely”, and if the shoe doesn’t fit…

The purpose of my post was most certainly not to say that prolifers aren’t “real” Catholics. On the contrary, I think prolife Catholics are holding the line on a vital issue and that is shall be remembered with favor in the Great Reckoning. My point was different: it’s that, in our focus on abortion, we are forgetting that larger cultural forces are *using* us and that prudence bids us to pay attention to that and not let our fight for the unborn get co-opted by people who only wish to use us, not help us or the unborn. I think the average prolifer is, like Pansy, saintly. But I’m also aware of the fact that (in this country at least) the fact remains that the average pro-lifer (and with Catholics the stats are even higher) has tended to identify with and defend things nobody calling themselves “prolife” should ever have tried to defend: namely, practically everything the Bush Administration did, no matter how stupid or criminal. No, it’s not the case that *every* prolifer has done so. But people who watch TV are not going to make those sort of fine distinctions. What they see is a movement of people who constantly went to bat for a dubious war, for war crimes, for an Administration that presided over the destruction of the economy, even as the Veep was declaring that deficits don’t matter.

We may wish that the kidz at ND could see more clearly the intentions of prolifers in wanting to save babies. But the fact remains that they perceive prolifers largely as tools of a discredited political party. And when religious operatives for that party routinely employ the exact same consequentialist selectivity they do on behalf of their favorite sins, that should not surprise us. So, for instance, we still find, at this late hour, theologians like Michael Novak making excuses for torture with the “ticking time bomb” fantasy and arguing that what the Bush Administration authorized is somehow justified by it. He even suggests that we should imagine our closest relatives in imminent danger of death and asks whether we would *really* reject torture in such a case.

In this, he is *exactly* like Obama, who argues on *precisely* the same grounds when pleading for embryonic stem cell research with the old “If it was your daughter who could be cured…” ploy.

God knows prolifers are hard pressed today. God knows the MSM hates us. God knows the Obama Administration, for all its words of “dialogue” is our enemy. But there is hope too. The majority of Americans now identify as “prolife” (which gives a cautious president like Obama pause). We have human nature on our side. Grace as well. But we have to face the fact of our missteps. When the overwhelming percentage of people who identify as “prolife” and “pro-chastity” are foursquare in favor of the sexual torture of prisoners, they (like it or not) destroy the credibility of the prolife movement and reveal themselves as anti-abortion, not prolife. When they labor to call such stuff “enhanced interrogation”, to suggest that “it’s not torture and besides it works”, to make every excuse in the book for it, they are dooming the prolife movement to being perceived as a wholly-owned subsidiary of the GOP.

I’m fully aware that there are many prolife people (like Pansy) who refuse to be co-opted in this way. I hear from them everyday. My point is that such people constitute nothing like the face of the prolife movement in the mind of the average American. Randall Terry does. “Faithful Conservative Catholics” and Evangelicals laughing in comboxes over “frat hazing” and laboring for years to justify torture do. Judie Brown does. Michael Novak does. Rush Limbaugh does. Apologists for a disastrous Administration do. That’s partly why I think a Coalition for Clarity will be necessary, in order to disentangle the prolife movement from unnecessary support for disastrous and failed ideas that have nothing to do with our mission.