Unsolicited Advice For The Bishops

The following two statements are in conflict:

1)  The placing of economic interests or interests outside of abortion against abortion is always and everywhere evil.

2)  There may be times when a Catholic who rejects a candidate’s unacceptable position may decide to vote for that candidate for other morally grave reasons.

As the lesser recognized theologian Rosie Perez put it in White Men Can’t Jump, “Sometimes when you win, you really lose, and sometimes when you lose, you really win, and sometimes when you win or lose, you actually tie, and sometimes when you tie, you actually win or lose. Winning or losing is all one organic globule, from which one extracts what one needs.”  Or to put it another way, choices are not always atomistic or autonomous.  Sometimes what advances your interests today, ultimately sets you back in the future.  If as some bishops have publicly feared, Obama signs FOCA, it will not have happened in a vacuum.  House and Senate members will have had to vote for it.  Those of us that have been dubious of the prospects of that legislation have used that point in our considerations.

Certainly I’m sympathetic to the concerns that people will always put off dealing with the abortion issue.  Such is a very American attitude: don’t do nothing, do something!  Sometimes issues are best put off, particularly those issues you will lose.  The opposition offered by Archbishop Chaput and other Colorado bishops to the personhood amendment in Colorado would be an example of this.  Absent a cooperative framework, any protection for the unborn or for that matter any loss of said protection will be transitory.  And certainly when we are called to account for injustices commited to the unborn, claims that we traded future protections for the unborn in favor of temporary measures that went as quickly as they came will enjoy the same hallowness as claims that the deaths of Iraqis in an unjust war took precedence.  In the fight for the unborn, prudence must be at least as great a guide as principle.  The particular cannot and should not be placed in opposition to the whole, even if the particular takes precedence in priority.