Kathleen Sebelius and the Fight Over Who's Truly Catholic
By Dan Gilgoff, God & Country
Lots of response to my post on Health and Human Services Secretary-designate Kathleen Sebelius's explanation for personally opposing abortion while supporting abortion rights. Most comments are from opponents of abortion, many of whom object to Sebelius calling herself a Catholic.
Noreen from Texas writes:
Just another politician afraid to stand up for their beliefs. I wish they'd stop saying they're Catholic. It's a lie.
Antiabortion activists have long made a sport of doubting the purported Catholicism of supporters of abortion rights. But the Pew Forum on Religion and Public Life reports that 49 percent of American Catholics believe abortion should be legal in most or all cases, versus 47-percent who believe that abortion should be illegal in all or most cases. According to Noreen's standard, that's an awful lot of disingenuous Catholics.
At the same time, Pew notes a correlation between church attendance and abortion rights views among Catholics:
Nearly six-in-ten (57%) white non-Hispanic Catholics who attend church at least once a week, for instance, oppose legalized abortion, including 27% who say it should be illegal in all cases. By contrast, among white Catholics who attend church less frequently, a large majority (62%) say abortion should be legal and just 35% say it should not.
That adds some credence to the pro-lifers' penchant for distinguishing between "real" and "alleged" Catholics.
M. Forrest of Massachusetts writes:
Notice that the governor admits that abortion is "wrong." The people that try this line she is using (personally oppose abortion, don't want to use the law to stop it), never quite come out and say WHY they think it's wrong. Again, they use ambiguity in the language to escape the monstrous horror of what abortion is.
Not sure I agree. Here's the relevant quote from Sebelius, which is unambiguous. She thinks that abortion is wrong but that criminalizing isn't the way to right that wrong:
My Catholic faith teaches me that all life is sacred, and personally I believe abortion is wrong. However, I disagree with the suggestion that criminalizing women and their doctors is an effective means of achieving the goal of reducing the number of abortions in our nation.
Michael of New Jersey makes a poignant comparison between the traditional antiabortion position and the civil rights movement:
How's this sound?
Put your self in America, circa 1950.
"I'm personally against segregation, but its the law."
Sounds like an intellectually flaccid coward, no?
This is why many traditional opponents of abortion can't countenance the "common ground" approach to reducing abortion that many Democrats and religious moderates have taken up. For them, it's a matter of right or wrong, with no room for compromise.
- Read more by Dan Gilgoff.
- Read more about abortion.
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Reader Comments
GOD not You
Hi SoMG of NY
When I told my wife years ago about argument's like yours, she as a mom of many found it hard to believe that women could be so COLD to Kill even the healthy UnBorn as if they were a bunch of cancer cells.
She hadn't read the bible or history like I have and couldn't understand humanity and it's never ending struggle to return to ape-hood.
Some women want to have this right till just before birth at 36 or 40 weeks. You are probably one of them.
Yes it is a SIN, and I do understand that people like you exist.
Yours in GOD
Thanks, A Great Dialog,
Hi All, AndieLee, , ,
A Great dialog. I won't be here again yet wish you all well in your fight and with your Christian/Human education.
Some tit on tat comments
"Need a cause? Start by cleaning up the cesspool the Catholic Church has become - becuase if you support any authority as divinely inspired that turns a blind eye to pedophilia then you too have some serious moral compass issues and perhaps should not be sitting in judgment"
This was and will be a future problem. I heard it all personally in the Boston area and went to the early VOTF meetings. Although horrible and hard to take this episode should not stop Catholics or religious people from stopping or negating the SINS of the world.
SIN itself is an important concept that should not be diminished or changed into political correctness.
Was what the leadership did a SIN? Yes a Mortal Sin
(I know some might disagree, yet one has to look from GOD's perspective and the trust given to his leadership core)
Is willy nilly Abortion a SIN? Yes it is Killing
(And Sebelius's argument is a facade. She should still do all the things in KS she promotes yet must also use SIN.)
"Sebelis, Sen.Casey-PA, Nancy Pelosi, VP Joe Biden, The Kennedy's and other secular cafeteria Catholics are walking the wide road to eternal damnation. Read Luke 13:22-30 and Matthew 7:12-23"
Wow Good Stuff, I won't read your references or give you mine, yet from reading and analyzing the entire bible I will tell you, you are 100% correct. Jesus and even Buddha talked about the knot hole or the keyhole for how to get to heaven. In other words it is hard work with The Wide road being that travelled by most people. Also he said the rich and famous might get their rewards in this world yet not the next.
There are many problems with the Catholic faith one being how it is taught, and refreshed, and the lack of great bible based training. The bible can become alive in any age and retrain the new for current life challenges.
Yours in GOD,
The answer
The important fact about the fetus is not what it is, but WHERE it is.
I say if something is inside my body I'm entitled to kill it no matter what it is. If all the human beings alive today--innocent and guilty, unborn and already-born, great and small, rich and poor, smart and stupid, religious and faithless--were assembled somewhere inside my body, along with Almighty God, Baby Jesus, and the Flying Spaghetti Monster, then I'd be entitled to holocaust 'em, any time, for any reason or for no reason.
That's part of the meaning of the word "my" in the phrase "my body".
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