Man Bites Blog

I was always a ambivalent about bishops denying pro-choice politicians’ Eucharist, but I was annoyed be efforts of lay Catholics to pressure the bishops into doing so.  It smacked a bit too much of mixing religion and politics.

This post from Francis Beckwith crystallizes my uneasiness.  He asks, “Will President Obama offer Vatican ambassadorship to Catholic denied communion?“

I hold no position on whether it would be prudent for President Obama to make such an appointment, but I very strongly believe that the pastoral decision of one priest, who was swiftly corrected by his bishop, should not be relevant to the decision.

But more than that, it reveals the motives of these activists — the concern isn’t that Doug Kmiec (who still professes to be pro-life) or a pro-choice politician is desecrating the Eucharist by receiving it, or that the Church is giving scandal by allowing them to receive.  No, the point is to have a rhetorical trump card.  He was denied communion!  He must be wrong; I must be right!

To use the denial of communion as an argument against the assignment of someone to a secular position devalues the Eucharist in a way that PZ Myers could only dream of.  To someone with a proper understanding of the Eucharist, being separated from the love of Jesus given in this way is of a much greater concern than it preventing appointment to some official post.

I have not been a fan of the arguments Kmiec has used to defend his position, or his conduct in the face of criticism, but if he’s wrong, regardless of whether a priest saw fit to deny him communion.

And then I wonder why some folks are reluctant to embrace to pro-life movement…

Fresh from the victory of the candidate he endorsed, Douglas Kmiec throws himself a pity party in the pages of Commonweal  magazine.

To be clear, I am in agreement that some conservative critics of Kmiec went overboard and were intensely and inappropriately personal in their criticisms.  That is an unfortunate aspect of our public discourse, and the emergence of the Internet as the dominant medium for such discourse has made this worse.  And it is also true that Prof. Kmiec was on the receiving end of some unfortunate pastoral decisions.  It’s understandable that someone who has been the focus of such negative attention might want to turn the tables.

Nevertheless, I think someone with the prominence of Prof. Kmiec has a responsibility to take on people his own size, so to speak.   I’m sure Prof. Kmiec will find no shortage of readers, both among Commonweal’s subscribers and in the mainstream willing to nod along with his condemnations of “right-wing blogs,” and if that’s enough for him, then I guess he can have it.  But Prof. Kmiec’s position was subject to more tempered and serious opposition from people like Rick Garnett, Stephen Bainbridge, and Ross Douthat( and myself, if I may be so bold to claim inclusion in such company), which Prof. Kmiec doesn’t even attempt to address, preferring to focus on his more outlandish critics.

For example, Kmiec bemoans speculation about his motives, pounding the strawmen of those who thought he drank the Kool-Aid or was angling for a position in the administration.  But more serious critics were honestly flummoxed that Kmiec claimed to favor Obama based on his position on the war and social justice issues after having worked on the primary campaign for Mitt Romney, who positioned himself far on the right on these issues.  The word “Romney” doesn’t appear in Kmiec’s piece.

As for why Kmiec has inspired such anger, it’s not so much that he’s supported Obama, but that he has thoroughly adopted the rhetoric and tactics of the pro-choice movement, betraying those with whom he claims solidarity in defending the unborn.  For example, in this piece, he writes:

(My message to President Obama on FOCA, by the way, will remain what it was to candidate Obama: FOCA runs contrary to the pursuit of the common good.)

This essay is not about abortion, but at least this much must be said: blog lies to the contrary, there is no real legislative interest in FOCA. The attempt to use FOCA to drive a wedge between the church and the incoming administration is unjustified. The bishops, having stated clearly their opposition to FOCA-and rightly so-should not allow the right wing to obscure what Obama shares with the church: concern for the poor; support for the average family; a commitment to ending an unjust war; and respect for our environment. Unless the sore losers of November 4 manage to poison the well, the Holy See and the Obama administration should be working more closely together in service to others than any administration in modern memory.

Let’s remember that part of FOCA is the requirement that hospitals receiving public funds must be willing to perform abortions, Obama has stated his support for it, and not backed off.

Yet, Prof. Kmiec apparently thinks we should just shut up about it.  All Obama gets is a matter-of-fact statement that it might not be such a hot idea.  But right wing Catholic bloggers are tearing the country apart, and ruining a glorious chance for the Vatican and the Holy See to work together.   Obama should not be expected to withdraw his support for FOCA, but conservative Catholics are expected to not make a fuss about it because Obama probably doesn’t have the votes, and it’s probably not a legislative priority.

And Prof. Kmiec wonders why some of us feel betrayed?

Where’s St. Thomas More when we need him?

Daniel Larison provides a qualified defense of Douglas Kmiec.

More precisely, he offers a defense of how a pro-life person could come to abandon the Republican Party and support Obama.

Which I agree with, having been there myself.  If I was going to disown Catholics who supported Obama, I’d pretty much have to clean out my Facebook list.

When I saw that a prominent pro-life scholar had come to support Obama, I had high hopes.  I was hoping to see an intellectually coherent defense of that position.  I had hoped this signalled a new openness from the Democrats to the pro-life cause.

What we got instead was the same arguments we’ve been hearing from pro-choice Catholics for years.  It was a huge disappointment for me.

Also unaddressed is how someone frustrated with the Republicans because of the war and torture would first support Mitt “Double Guantanomo” Romney.

from here.

First, I and most of Obama’s critics don’t believe that Obama is an enthusiast for infanticide, or even abortion.  It’s just that his actions regarding this bill reveal skewed priorities, and raise serious questions of whether pro-lifers can work with someone so uncompromoising on abortion.

So my question is this:  If Roe v. Wade makes a law asserting the personhood of a baby born alive unconstitutional, wouldn’t that lead someone as compassionate and fair-minded as Prof. Kmiec believes Obama to be to question Roe v. Wade.  Isn’t this a problem with Roe v. Wade rather than the bill?

I am somewhat sympathetic to the notion that, in spite of his utterly unacceptable position on abortion, Barack Obama is a good choice for Catholics, so I was interested to see Douglas W. Kmiec’s piece arguing the same in Slate.

I found some things in the piece to agree with, but wasn’t blown away by it.

Reading two responses he sent to the Corner, I was even less impressed. I kind of have to agree with Ramesh Ponnuru’s conclusion that, “once you take away Kmiec’s sour grapes over the primaries and his fuzzy thinking, there’s nothing left to his case.”

I could see a Catholic coming to the conclusion that Obama was the best candidate. I could see a conservative being driven to the Democrats by McCain’s nomination. What I cannot see is the nomination of McCain over Romney causing someone thinking as a Catholic to jump to Obama.

The main conservative critiques of McCain, as I understand them, were his support form campaign finance reform, his support for comprehensive immigration reform, and a general tendency to prefer the approval of the mainstream press to that of his own party. Well, Catholicism probably doesn’t have much to do with campaign finance reform, or McCain’s relationships with the press and his own party, and the bishops have taken a fairly severe pro-immigration stance. Add in McCain’s rejection of torture and Romney’s support for it, and the idea that a Catholic would work for Romney’s campaign but find McCain unacceptable is indeed odd.

It’s true that Romney is still on his first marriage, but it seems odd that would matter to someone calling himself a “Reaganite.”

One of the big oddities is Kmiec’s contention that Romney had a superior position to McCain on Iraq:

especially when the candidate of the status quo has a military occupation position (”100 years, sure, maybe a 1000″) that is far too flippant for an issue of human life or national security and that is directly contrary to an equally resolute teaching of the Church. So if the primary process takes out a candidate like Governor Romney who had a grasp of the kind of humanitarian rebuilding necessary to stabilize (and not merely occupy) Iraq,

If Romney possesed such a grasp, he did a damn fine job of hiding it during the primary campaign. My recollection is that Romney always tried to present himself as the most hawkish, most unfriendly to immigrants, most willing to torture, person on the stage. Wasn’t it Romney who said he wanted to “double Guantanomo?” Talk about “far too flippant for an issue of human life or national security” — it’s also worth noting that Romney took a significant detour from answering the question that was posed in order to deliver that line, clearly something he had planned to say at some point in the debate, and not a case of a question taking him off guard.

And that lie the Romney campaign spend the final weeks of its campaign whining to the refs about was that Romney wanted timetables instead of milestones for the surge. So which is it — was Romney’s position on the invasion and the surge distinguishable from McCain’s or not?

There may be a case that Obama is the choice for Catholics, but the Republicans nominating John McCain rather than Mitt Romney isn’t it.