What Mario Cuomo got wrong on abortion

The Week ^ | January 5, 2015 | W. James Antle III

[presidio9]

Mario Cuomo was never the presidential candidate Democrats dreamed of. But the three-term New York governor was long an eloquent spokesman for American liberalism.

"You campaign in poetry," he memorably told The New Republic. "You govern in prose."

And you can be wrong in both.

In 1984, the same year gave Cuomo gave a stirring keynote address at the Democratic National Convention, he delivered a speech at Notre Dame University in which he attempted to reconcile his Catholic faith with his support for legal — indeed, taxpayer-funded — abortion.

The essence of Cuomo's argument was that abortion rights and religious rights spring from the same principles. You can't protect one without defending the other.

"I protect my right to be a Catholic by preserving your right to believe as a Jew, a Protestant, or non-believer, or as anything else you choose," Cuomo said. "We know that the price of seeking to force our beliefs on others is that they might some day force theirs on us."

A fine brief for religious liberty. People who favored banning contraception probably never envisioned a differently motivated government would someday mandate the Little Sisters of the Poor pay for contraceptive coverage.

In practice, though, this argument quickly finds itself in a confusing gray area, as the government already codifies as law the beliefs of many faiths. Uncle Sam outlaws theft even though the Ten Commandments say thou shalt not steal. Homicide is illegal even though the Ten Commandments say thou shalt not kill. Many religions teach us to care for the poor. Cuomo would not argue that social welfare spending therefore violates the separation of church and state.

Religious people were at the forefront of fights against slavery and racial segregation. Banning slavery and segregation may "force our beliefs on others," but it is not necessarily enshrining religious doctrine in civil law.

From a religious liberty perspective, why are these laws different than a potential government ban on abortion?

Cuomo merely observed that the Catholic Church teaches that abortion is wrong, and stopped there. He did not grapple with why the church and other abortion opponents believe the practice is wrong, or address any of the rational justifications for opposition to abortion.

Abortion is different from religious doctrines like sanctification, transubstantiation, or the immaculate conception. It is different from religious truth claims like the parting of the Red Sea, Joseph Smith being visited by the Angel Moroni, or the resurrection of Jesus. It differs even from ethical questions like whether a person should drink coffee or alcohol, engage in premarital sex, or indulge in pornography.

If abortion is the unjust taking of innocent human life, then the reasons for thinking it is wrong are also good reasons to consider getting the government involved.

Most people who oppose abortion may be religious, just as abolitionists were once heavily religious. But you can oppose abortion without believing fetuses have souls just as easily as you can oppose slavery without necessarily believing a would-be slave was created in the image of God.

The overwhelming majority of religious people would grant that not all sins should be crimes. But some sins — theft, fraud, slavery, the killing of innocents — are proper objects of public concern.

Cuomo anticipated some of these objections. "It has been argued that the failure to endorse a legal ban on abortions is equivalent to refusing to support the cause of abolition before the Civil War," he said. "This analogy has been advanced by the bishops of my own state."

Amazingly, Cuomo went on to argue, "But the truth of the matter is, few if any Catholic bishops spoke for abolition in the years before the Civil War." He said that American Catholics were a marginal, mostly immigrant population at the time. Their arguments would have carried little weight with the rest of the public. Getting involved in the politics of slavery might have deepened anti-Catholic sentiment.

He added, "They weren't hypocrites; they were realists."

"It is a mark of contemporary liberalism's commitment to abortion that one of its leading lights should have been willing to support temporizing on slavery to defend it," Ramesh Ponnuru observed in his anti-abortion book Party of Death. "It is a further mark that liberals did not reject, or even take notice of, Cuomo's argument about slavery."

But if you are going to go that far down the road of reducing all moral arguments to arcane theological disputes, it is hard to avoid Cuomo's problematic destination.

Mario Cuomo's Notre Dame speech is remembered as the definitive summation of the "personally opposed, but" position on abortion. With all due respect to the late governor's oratorical skills, that has more to do with people's internal conflicts over abortion than the logical strength of his arguments.

[ansel12]

Without personal attacks, your posts would be so much shorter.

But the fact is, that the non-Catholic Christian vote, when all added together, all lumped together, still is a majority pro-life republican vote.

The Catholic vote is a majority, pro-abortion, democrat vote.

The majority of Catholics need to quit voting with the pro-abortion/anti-Christian left, and start voting with the majority of the rest of Christian voters.

[presidio9]

I don't blame you for being defensive Ansell, but there's a key difference between a personal attack and the act pointing out someone's obvious character flaw in an honest attempt to help them. The numbers you quote are nominally correct, and certainly nothing any Conservative would support.

But they don't justify your obsession with Catholicism on this an many, many other Catholic threads.

Clearly you have other issues that you need to get off your chest.

[ex-snook]

The majority of Catholics need to quit voting with the pro-abortion/anti-Christian left, and start voting with the majority of the rest of Christian voters.

and have their job exported and their unemployment halted.

Need these be the choices?

[ansel12]

Let’s pretend that you were a pro-life conservative, on a forum for conservatives.

Now look at your thread topic, a famous pro-abortion Catholic, democrat politician dies and is given his media rich burial by the Catholic church.

So naturally the topic is the democrat party and voting and abortion and the Catholic vote and how it all connects to the Cuomo and his burial, right? No, look at your posts, you never wanted any of that to come up, much less be discussed or evidently even known.

It is impossible to discuss Cuomo as a Catholic and wrong on abortion, without discussing that he was a leader in the party that most Catholics vote for and that most Catholic politicians belong to.

Look at my posts, and then look at your posts, mine are relevant and fit a conservative, pro-life political forum, yours don’t, in fact, a pro-abortion liberal could be praising what you are trying to do on this thread.

[presidio9]

Again, I don't blame you for not listening to what I'm trying to say here Ansell. It would make me uncomfortable too.

I think we agree that the numbers show that too many people who self-identify in polling as Catholic vote for Democrats. We put that to rest a long time ago.

The deeper issue is why you, a non-Catholic, spend so much time on threads discussing Catholicism as it relates to politics. Once in a while, I could understand -I agree that the collective voting habits of self-identified Catholics are a problem.

But I was curious yesterday, so I took a look at your posting habits. The truth is, I really haven't posted much to FR lately, so I was surprised to see your name pop up on this thread. No, "surprised" isn't really the word. "Concerned" is closer to what I felt.

You spend a great deal of your day (hours and hours, really) on FR, which is fine. But you get into it every day, without fail, with someone, on a subject relating to Catholicism -which is, frankly, weird.

This is clearly no a passing interest for you. It is an obsession. Now, as you point out, this is a political forum, so I could understand your involvement in these types of threads if Catholic voting patterns laid significantly outside the norm (they don't). Or if FR was full of nothing but Catholic political threads and you had no other outlet for your interest in politics, but it isn't. You have many options, but you choose to troll Catholic threads to voice your disapproval of the behavior of people who are clearly not practicing Catholicism but choose to identify as Catholic for political purposes. As I said, it's weird. It suggest a deeper issue, one that I think you would be better off dealing with directly.

[ansel12]

Let’s pretend that you were a pro-life conservative, on a forum for conservatives.

Now look at your thread topic, a famous pro-abortion Catholic, democrat politician dies and is given his media rich burial by the Catholic church.

So naturally the topic is the democrat party and voting and abortion and the Catholic vote and how it all connects to the Cuomo and his burial, right? No, look at your posts, you never wanted any of that to come up, much less be discussed or evidently even known.

It is impossible to discuss Cuomo as a Catholic and wrong on abortion, without discussing that he was a leader in the party that most Catholics vote for and that most Catholic politicians belong to.

Look at my posts, and then look at your posts, mine are relevant and fit a conservative, pro-life political forum, yours don’t, in fact, a pro-abortion liberal could be praising what you are trying to do on this thread.

[presidio9]

I know this is difficult for you Ansell.

But reprinting your previous post will not change the facts of this conversation, nor your disturbed posting history here on this political web forum.

I'm here to help when your ready.

[ansel12]

I would say that you did pretty well by Cuomo, you posted a thread on him, and then proceeded to defend the abortion vote and attack the pro-life/anti-democrat political discussion.

This thread will serve as a very good example of what keeps the Catholics voting for the pro-abortion democrat party and the Ted Kennedys, and Mario Cuomos.

No wonder the denomination votes as it does.

[presidio9]

Clearly that's not what I did. I would say that I am content to agree to disagree with you on this issue, but I am genuinely concerned. You spend way too much time on this social media site. I can relate. I've been there. There are worse ways to waste time.

But while you're one this site, you spend way too much time obsessing on your own incorrect understanding of a religion that you are not part of and have no first-hand experience with. This is mostly harmless for others, who mostly have better things to do with their lives, and are hopefully intelligent enough to see your delusions for what they are. But for you, on the other hand, they are particularly harmful. You need to address what it is, specifically, that is bothering you personally about Catholics, and Catholicism -why you log on to this site every day to make the same complaints and lob the same insults at conservatives who are otherwise like yourself except that they have learned to reconcile those who claim a religion for survey purposes versus the one they actually practice. Obviously, you can't think of anything better to do with your time, but I can assure you: There's more to life.

You can shoot the messenger if you like. But as I said, I want to help. But first you must be willing to help yourself. That start with looking at the mirror and recognizing the behavior for what it is.

[ansel12]

It clearly is what you have done, and are doing, you are trolling on your own thread, because someone brought up the pro-life politics in regards to this pro-abortion Catholic democrat’s death, that you posted in News/Activism.

What you have displayed, is an absolute obsession with me and delivering your long and wordy personal insults to deflect from the pro-life politics.

Cuomo, democrats, the Catholics vote, and abortion, was not to come up on this thread judging by your bizarre posts.

No wonder you guys manage to keep the Catholics voting as they do.

[presidio9]

Here's the thing Ansell: Most healthy people don't feel the need to obsess over that fact, because it is common knowledge. I posted the thread because it's obviously distressing to me and most Catholics that people like Cuomo continue to get cover from the liberal media and even some members of the Catholic clergy. Most intelligent people would understand that that was the purpose of this thread, and why I pointed out for someone who asked that the Cuomos did not want to chance getting into a fight with Cardinal Dolan over Saint Patrick's.

However, the deeper (and therefore far more immediate) issue here remains the fact that you log on every day and get into the same argument with one Catholic or another about their religious beliefs. I was not the first person to point it out on this thread. This is not sane behavior.

Feel free to accuse others of trolling, but its easy to document your habit of going out of your way to pick fights with Catholics, and your logic for doing so is not rational. Your daily posting history speaks for itself: You spend hours and hours (and hours...)on this website, fighting with people you can't see and don't know, and it is effecting you emotionally.

That's the only reason why I am still on this thread. Nothing you or I are saying here on this subject is new or is going to change minds. I'm worried about you, Ansell, as one Christian to another -not the lurkers. Your behavior and what passes for logic in your unhealthy mind speak for themselves. I'd like to see you get help.

If I can be a small part of that, I consider it well worth my time. I think you have more to offer.

[ansel12]

Thank you for encouraging me to continue to educate pro-life conservatives.

Some may not know how Clinton defeated Dole, among Catholics “it was 54 percent for Clinton, 38 percent for Republican Bob Dole, and 8 percent for independent Ross Perot. That’s not the whole story. While Clinton ran worse among many voter groups in 1996 than he had in 1992 (including seniors and youth, at opposite ends of the age spectrum), he did better among Catholics: a gain of 2.3 million votes compared with Dole’s gain of 400,000 and Perot’s loss of 3.3 million. Of the 23 states with a Catholic vote above the national average, Dole carried only two: Texas and Colorado. Had Dole run just a little better among Catholics, his supporters surmised, he might well have been elected.”

[presidio9]

Wow Ansell. I finished watching the Rangers kick ass in LA, and was just about to call it a night. I was proud of you, but I guess you couldn't help yourself. Baby steps. Tomorrow, see if you can control your impulses for 24 hours. Then try to beat that record.

In the meantime, it sounds like you're not clear on the mechanics of a presidential election, so perhaps I can help there too. In this country, we elect presidents through an electoral college, not by simple majority. In the 1996 election Clinton won there 379 to 159. The top 5 closest states that Bill Clinton won and Bob Dole lost were, in order: KY, NV, AZ, TN & FL. Other than AZ (30%) none of them are more than 25% Catholic. So, no, if Catholics had voted the same as other Christians in the 1996 election (they went for Clinton 50 to 41 percent), it is not likely that the election would have gone to Dole in any event.

But it is illustrative of a deeper point: The cultural fabric of our national politics. By that I mean that the region than a person comes from, and their ethnic and socioeconomic background is a much better indication of a person's religious affiliation than their religious habits. For the most part. Jews and a few minority religious groups are the notable exceptions who predictably vote in as a liberal block. It is for exactly that reason that among the strongest of all conservatives are conservative Jews: They have to be. Same goes for conservative blacks. And conservative Hispanics for that matter. Ever met a first generation Cuban immigrant?

But, again, this is really not the most helpful conversation for you right now. What you need to be reminded of -constantly -is the fact that you log on every day to FR and seek out threads that have any association to Catholicism. When you get there, you pick pretty much the same exact fight with a different stranger, day after day after day. Until then, you've got yourself a the mental health equivalent of a sobriety coach. I am writing a paper for grad school right now, so I'm spending a lot of time on my laptop. Every time you return to your negative behavior, I am going to keep reminding your mistake. It's a win/win, I think, because it will help keep me focused on my work. If I have time, I may even start checking on your behavior on other threads. Make a valid point, I'll leave you alone. Return to your compulsive habits, I'll be there to support you. I'm that kind of guy.

You may think you're helping yourself with delusional claims about educating pro life conservatives. But everyone that I am aware of on this website is pro life. Everyone is equally disgusted with men like Mario Cuomo. Its quite evident that you know that deep down. You don't like yourself very much and you are lashing out at strangers because you think it will help. It won't. You need to come to terms with what, exactly, it is that bothers you about Catholics and Catholicism and be honest about it. Then you need to find something different to do with your time every day. I would suggest volunteering to help with a political campaign (you're clearly motivated, and I don't doubt your political convictions), but there are endless opportunities for anyone with time to contribute.

My prediction is this: When you come to terms with whatever it is that is bothering you personally, life will get better for you. If you don't you will continue on this cycle of self-destructive behavior. The choice is yours.

But I'm rooting for you Ansell.

[ansel12]

Let's try a 1996 election where the Catholics only give Clinton 41% instead of the 53% that the Catholic voters did give him.

But here you are defending their vote, on a thread about one of the Catholic heroes, Mario Cuomo.

It is no wonder that Catholics vote as they do, when even on a pro-life site you are so obsessed with concealing the vote and it's impact on pro-life conservatism, and how all this should be the topic of conversation on this thread about Cuomo's elegant and public Catholic funeral.

Imagine an America where the Catholics voted with the Evangelical Christians, instead of with the gays and atheists.

Cuomo's grand Catholic send off, and last reminder to the Catholic voter's of where their loyalty lies, the democrat party.

[chimera]

Well, I am a Catholic voter and I have no loyalty to the ‘Rats, nor do I vote for them. But my vote means little. Still, I resent being improperly generalized with those who betray their Lord and His Church by publicly and privately opposing their teachings.

[ansel12]

How can you personalize such a thing?

Do you think that Dennis Prager or Ann Coulter, or Ted Cruz takes it personal when they are sitting around planning, studying, and discussing voting, and it includes the Jewish vote, or the female vote, or the Hispanic vote, or that they can discuss those votes without a hint that their personal “tribe” is being discussed as being part of the left’s voting column?

We are importing Catholic voters for the democrat party, by the millions, shouldn’t our side know what that means and get some help putting 2+2 together?

[chimera]

It just seems wrong to engage in egregious generalization, that's all. There are plenty of faithful Catholics who want nothing to do with the abortion-promoting Dems. We should not insult them by grouping them with those they oppose on moral and ethical grounds.

[ansel12]

This is a political site, we discuss and analyze politics and voting and strategies.

How do we stop discussing voting and voting data, what did you think a thread on Mario Cuomo and abortion was going to be about, the Muslim vote, the Evangelical vote, candles?

[chimera]

Fine to talk about him specifically, and how he is one of many who profess allegiance to the Church but publicly oppose its teachings. That is hypocritical and you are correct to call him (and others) on it. I just thought it inappropriate to generalize this one individual to Catholics as a group. Like any large group, there will be those who talk the talk but don't walk the walk.

[ansel12]

LOL, it is fine to talk not only about Cuomo, but about the MAJORITY of Catholic voters, voting pro-abortion democrat, his party.

The subject isn’t that “some” Catholics vote democrat, that is true of all groups, even some gays and atheists vote republican for instance, the subject is that “most” Catholics vote pro-abortion democrat and support the left, which also means the democrat immigration, which means MORE democrat voters, it is a cycle that we need to break somehow, but first people need to learn that it is happening.