After about 30 years of teaching college students, I’ve learned a lot of the tricks for prompting discussion among students–not that I have always been successful. One is to argue vigorously that two like cases are unlike, or that two unlike cases are alike, and see if the students rise to the challenge of telling you that you’re wrong.
But one must remember that this is an argumentative ruse, a playing of devil’s advocate. Woe to the teacher who mashes together two different things as just alike, and starts believing it because it sounded so darn clever.
This, I think, is the fate that has befallen Michael Peppard, an assistant professor of theology at Fordham University. Unfortunately, his embarrassment has been published in the pages of the New York Times. Peppard argues that, in the position that he enunciated on abortion in last week’s vice-presidential debate, Paul Ryan revealed that “along with Mr. Biden, he has joined the ranks of dissenting Catholic politicians, those who preserve a distance between nonnegotiable Catholic moral teaching and civil law.”
“Paul Ryan, Catholic Dissident” (that’s the headline on the piece) on abortion? How so? Because, as Professor Peppard points out, Ryan stated the position of the Republican ticket as being in favor of prohibiting all abortions, except in cases of rape, incest, or danger to the life of a mother. The Catholic Church makes no such exceptions, therefore Ryan is a dissenter from Church teaching–just like Biden! Perhaps there should be a “wafer watch,” Peppard remarks, to see if Ryan is refused the Eucharist on this basis, as some have said Biden should be.
Peppard is right about the exceptionless Catholic position on abortion. But to equate Ryan’s case with Biden’s is absurdity. Ryan favors prohibiting roughly 99% of the abortions that now take place in this country. Biden favors prohibiting none of them. The vice president made it crystal clear that preserving Roe v. Wade is more important to him than what his Church teaches–which of course is not “de fide doctrine” as Biden falsely claimed, but the conclusion of reason and science about what justice requires, as Ryan rightly said.
Ryan’s public policy position is analogous to the one Abraham Lincoln took on slavery–to oppose the institution as much as public opinion will allow, and hope to pull public opinion to where you want to lead it. Lincoln held slavery to be a great evil in all cases, everywhere it existed, but his stated position in the 1860 election was only to oppose its spread westward into the territories–and to put the evil on a course to its “ultimate extinction.” He knew a more radical position would only disable him politically. By the same token, many Americans are squeamish about prohibiting abortion in a tiny number of extreme cases presenting the most heartrending difficulties. But our situation now is that hundreds of thousands of abortions occur each year having nothing to do with those extreme situations. If we can stop the vast majority, it can await another day for us to tackle the delicate cases of rape, incest, and danger to women’s lives.
Professor Peppard’s reasoning would have us reject Lincoln along with Stephen Douglas because neither man is John Brown. The argument refutes itself. As Frederick Douglass was to say in celebrating Lincoln’s memory in 1876, “Viewed from the genuine abolition ground, Mr. Lincoln seemed tardy, cold, dull, and indifferent; but measuring him by the sentiment of his country, a sentiment he was bound as a statesman to consult, he was swift, zealous, radical, and determined.”
Professor Peppard also thinks he has identified another deviation from Catholic teaching in Rep. Ryan’s position:
Mr. Ryan also criticized Roe v. Wade, and he is right that a democratic process would have been better for abortion law in our country. But handing abortion law over to the voters is no more of a Catholic position than is having it decided by the Supreme Court.
Come again? The Catholic position is that persons in authority have a responsibility to do the right thing with that authority. Ryan’s view, that the abortion question should be returned to the democratic processes of elections and legislation, is inseparable from his view of what policy those processes should produce, if responsible actors conform their actions to justice. But the first order of business is to remove the question from the grip of an institution that usurped the right to decide it nearly 40 years ago, and to get the matter back where it belongs.
This piece is a sad failure as an attempt to assimilate Ryan’s case to Biden’s. About Biden, Professor Peppard can only bring himself to say that his position in the debate was “a wishy-washy mélange of moral intuitions,” when in truth it was a coldly cynical betrayal of all moral reasoning, and of the faith in which Biden was reared. If we are to believe that Biden’s moral intuition includes even the feeble “wrong for me personally” view of abortion, we might like to know whether he has ever spoken at fundraisers for crisis pregnancy centers, ever uttered a word in public to persuade his fellow Catholics and fellow citizens to choose life over death, ever spoken at Catholic schools about living chastely and respecting life. There are no recorded instances of Biden’s ever having done any of these things.
We could all do more to promote respect for the sanctity of life. Paul Ryan has done a lot. Joe Biden has spent decades in public life assiduously doing the opposite.
October 16th, 2012 | 2:43 pm
This is how the aforementioned Catholic Left (so ensconced in our Jesuit Universities)has decided to help the President. Four years ago a speaker employed by Catholic Charities spoke at my parish to outline how both McCain and Obama were not acceptably Pro-Life. McCain had, after all, supported embryonic stem-cell research. I made the point then about Obama defending infanticide while in the Illinois Legislature contrasted with McCain’s consistent record of Pro-Life voting until the embryonic stem-cell issue. This is called moral equivalance and was used extensively by the Left during the Cold War to justify the horrors of the Soviet regime. We are not fooled. JoBi has NEVER stood for Life, Ryan has.
October 16th, 2012 | 2:52 pm
I get the feeling that these “personally opposed” Catholic politicians are only concerned about abortion rates because they see them as a symptom of poverty.
October 16th, 2012 | 3:04 pm
I almost agree. It depends on whether one looks at things from a practical or a doctrinal point of view. Certainly for pro-life voters considering only the issue of abortion, the choice of Ryan over Biden is crystal clear. But setting the election and all comparisons aside, from a doctrinal point of view, a Catholic cannot support a position that abortion is permissible in cases of rape, incest, and threat to the life of the mother. (I have had pro-lifers ague to me that taking such a position is simply deciding which murders to allow.) If Ryan were to actually adopt this as his own personal position—rather than a political position where compromise is necessary to have the most restrictions on abortion possible—he would be in dissent. The magnitude of the dissent would in some ways be smaller than Biden’s, but it would still be dissent over what constitutes murder.
Peppard has a stronger point about another of Ryan’s answers:
This is absolutely not the Catholic position. If the people were to decide in favor of abortion, and “unelected judges” were to decide against it—say, a future Supreme Court ruled that abortion was prohibited by the Fourteenth Amendment—this would be a great victory for pro-life Catholics. At that point, any Catholic pro-lifer who still maintained that the decision should be with the people, not with “unelected judges,” would need to have his or her head examined. According to Catholic teaching, a vote by a majority of people in the United States—indeed a unanimous vote—could not legitimately legalize abortion.
October 16th, 2012 | 3:37 pm
Ryan’s words were: “… the policy of a Romney administration will be to oppose abortion with the exceptions for rape, incest and life of the mother.”
That sounded to me like it had already been discussed by Ryan, Romney and their advisers, and the “policy of a Romney administration” had already been decided upon. That remark in the debate tells us nothing about what Ryan’s input was in that discussion. So, based on that remark there was no way to tell Ryan’s position is on the hard cases.
One can draw some conclusions from his voting record, some of which follows:
# Voted YES on banning federal health coverage that includes abortion. (May 2011)
# Voted NO on expanding research to more embryonic stem cell lines. (Jan 2007)
# Voted NO on allowing human embryonic stem cell research. (May 2005)
# Voted YES on restricting interstate transport of minors to get abortions. (Apr 2005)
# Voted YES on making it a crime to harm a fetus during another crime. (Feb 2004)
# Voted YES on banning partial-birth abortion except to save mother’s life. (Oct 2003)
# Voted YES on forbidding human cloning for reproduction & medical research. (Feb 2003)
# Voted YES on funding for health providers who don’t provide abortion info. (Sep 2002)
# Voted YES on banning Family Planning funding in US aid abroad. (May 2001)
# Voted YES on federal crime to harm fetus while committing other crimes. (Apr 2001)
# Voted YES on banning partial-birth abortions. (Apr 2000)
# Voted YES on barring transporting minors to get an abortion. (Jun 1999)
# Rated 0% by NARAL, indicating a pro-life voting record. (Dec 2003)
# Rated 100% by the NRLC, indicating a pro-life stance. (Dec 2006)
Those last two items say much more than the rest about the contrast between Biden’s and Ryan’s positions on abortion. Biden had a 100% approval of his voting record by NARAL.
Peppard’s attempt to make Ryan and Biden appear equivalent on abortion in terms of Catholic teaching was a blatant attempt to deceive, and sadly, probably succeeded to some extent.
October 16th, 2012 | 4:28 pm
harry,
Without going into the whole detailed history of it, I will say that it is clear to me that Ryan always opposed all abortions, in full agreement with the Catholic position. He did not discuss it with Romney. Romney made remarks responding to the Atkins statement about “legitimate rape” to the effect that the position of the Romney/Ryan ticket would not oppose abortion in cases of rape, incest, and the life of the mother. That made things slightly difficult for Ryan, but as I recall, he made it clear that it was not his personal position, but he accepted it as the position of the ticket, since it was far preferable to the position of Obama/Biden. I don’t see how even the staunchest pro-life advocate could find fault with Ryan here. He has not compromised his personal position, and it would not help the pro-life cause if he were to make an issue of the difference in the two positions and resign.
October 16th, 2012 | 4:30 pm
“The Catholic Church makes no such exceptions, therefore Ryan is a dissenter from Church teaching–just like Biden! Perhaps there should be a “wafer watch,” Peppard remarks, to see if Ryan is refused the Eucharist on this basis, as some have said Biden should be.”
While I am an enthusiastic supporter of the Church’s position of NO exceptions-I understand that politics is the art of the possible, not the ideal. This is why you don’t look to politics for salvation.
Then again, am I really to accept the moral judgment of an insincere equivocator who implicitly denies the Real Presence by referring to Holy Communion as a “wafer”?
Not to repeat myself, but the Catholic left is all left, and not at all Catholic.
October 16th, 2012 | 10:48 pm
“Ryan’s public policy position is analogous to the one Abraham Lincoln took on slavery–to oppose the institution as much as public opinion will allow, and hope to pull public opinion to where you want to lead it. Lincoln held slavery to be a great evil in all cases, everywhere it existed, but his stated position in the 1860 election was only to oppose its spread westward into the territories–and to put the evil on a course to its “ultimate extinction.” He knew a more radical position would only disable him politically.”
I’m glad to have this analogy articulated in just this way. Whenever I explain to other pro-lifers that compromise is necessary, someone asks where we would have been if Lincoln had compromised with slavery. When I answer as Franck does here that Lincoln did compromise, I’m told that I don’t understand history. It is the absolute position that turns people away from the pro-life movement.
We lose when the issue is framed as choice and freedom. But we win when the issue is framed as determining when life begins. Every time someone comes to believe that life begins at week one, week three, week six, ten, or fifteen, we move closer to developing the conscience, but the voices calling for an absolute ban only delay real progress.
October 17th, 2012 | 12:48 am
Apparently, Professor Peppard forgot this passage about limiting abortion laws from Pope John Paul II’s Evangelium Vitae: “[73] In a case like the one just mentioned, when it is not possible to overturn or completely abrogate a pro-abortion law, an elected official, whose absolute personal opposition to procured abortion was well known, could licitly support proposals aimed at limiting the harm done by such a law and at lessening its negative consequences at the level of general opinion and public morality. This does not in fact represent an illicit cooperation with an unjust law, but rather a legitimate and proper attempt to limit its evil aspects.”
October 17th, 2012 | 8:45 am
Both Ryan and Biden think abortion is justified in some cases. They only differ on who should decide when it is justified: Biden thinks the pregnant woman should decide, whereas Ryan thinks politicians should.
October 17th, 2012 | 11:19 am
Many who recognize that it is wrong in principle to kill an innocent human being, and realize that it is the fact that one is a human being that merits one the protection of law, not his/her age or stage of development, are also completely willing to fight for passage of laws that will not end “legal” child killing completely, but will only increase the survivor count when it is finally over and the statistics are gathered for the greatest holocaust of innocent human life in the history of the world.
Pointing out the scientific fact that human life begins at conception is not saying one will only support strategies the intent of which is to bring all child killing to an end immediately, yet there should be an absolute ban on taking the lives of innocent human beings, and that needs to be pointed out, even if it can’t be accomplished immediately. To fail to point that out is to become a participant in propagating the “Big Lie” and to delay the day when the lethal bigotry of our times is finally dispelled.
Ryan thinks, with the Founders, that the very purpose of government is to protect the inalienable rights of humanity, the first of which is the right to life itself. Biden seems to think there is no such thing as inalienable rights, and that the only rights humanity has are those bestowed upon us by whoever is currently in power.
October 17th, 2012 | 11:48 pm
Harry,
“To fail to point that out is to become a participant in propagating the “Big Lie” and to delay the day when the lethal bigotry of our times is finally dispelled”
But that’s the problem. Very few people are lying, and most understand that nothing in the abortion debate even resembles the definition of bigotry.
By portraying abortion supporters as liars and inventing your own definition of “bigotry,” you give people who support some restrictions on abortion even less reason to throw their support behind those restrictions.
People don’t like being associated with positions that seem extreme or crazy.
October 18th, 2012 | 7:47 pm
When expressions like “fetal tissue,” “a mass of tissue,” and the “products of conception” are used in reference to abortion when one knows good and well that what one is referring to, upon visual inspection, looks to most people like a little human being — a tiny child, and one uses such language deliberately in order to hide the reality of the abortion procedure from another, that is intentional deception — lying.
I know a woman who, in her training to be a nurse, when the subject matter turned to prenatal life was shown photographs of unborn children which included fetal development when a woman is at the stage of pregnancy she was at when she had had an abortion. At that time she had understood the phrase “mass of tissue” as used by abortion clinic personnel to mean just that, and that what was going to be removed from her body didn’t even remotely resemble a baby. Then when she saw what her child had looked like, and realized that they had lied to her, she was devastated.
Now that woman, before she discovered the truth, had discussed abortion at that stage of pregnancy with others and used the same kind of euphemistic language those at the abortion clinic had used. That was not lying on her part as there was no deliberate attempt to deceive — she didn’t know such language was euphemistic. The fault was with those who had lied to her. This brings me to the next part of your comment:
Bigotry can be quite innocent. A young white person brought up in the Old South would assimilate the notion that Blacks had their place in society and whites had a superior place, and would do so even if nobody ever explicitly said so. That that was the case would have seemed to be “just the way it is.” So one can be bigoted without knowing that they are, and without any malevolent or hateful intentions at all, due to their having trusted the institutions of society that they were taught to trust from the time they were small. Many of the institutions of the Old South were not to be trusted.
Now let’s take the case of a young, single woman who finds that she is pregnant. From the time she was small she has been indoctrinated with the notion that there are certain institutions she can trust, like the medical profession, the Supreme Court and the news media.
– She can trust a doctor – he is so honorable that it is okay for him to see her disrobed if that is necessary for him to care for her health.
– She should be a good citizen and honor the decisions of the Supreme Court.
– News stories are not fiction, but fact; to be an informed citizen, she should stay up with current events via the various electronic news outlets and read the daily newspaper.
What are these institutions she was taught to trust telling her? The Supreme Court has declared it is her constitutional right to get an abortion. The “honorable” doctor is willing to perform the abortion (she doesn’t know the medical profession quietly allows the likes of Kermit Gosnell within their ranks until the atrocities committed by such people are made public). The news media have done all they could to marginalize those who object to abortion and always use dehumanizing euphemisms when referring to the child in the womb. So what is this trusting young woman going to do in her very stressful situation? Of course, she is going to get an abortion.
As was the case with the Old South, many of the institutions of contemporary society are not to be trusted. They propagate and sustain bigotry which allows the exploitation some segment of the human family and the brutal violation of its intrinsic human dignity. At the same time they also make victims of those who trusted them.
October 19th, 2012 | 8:15 am
Harry,
“That was not lying on her part as there was no deliberate attempt to deceive — she didn’t know such language was euphemistic. The fault was with those who had lied to her.”
How do you know they were lying?
As you point out, “fetal issue,” etc., might be euphemism. It could also a shorthand description. For someone who believes that a meaningful life doesn’t begin until consciousness is possible, pain is felt, viability is reached, etc., the developing child might as well be just “tissue.”
Their use of euphemism or shorthand description would not be lying but an expression of their beliefs about the beginning of human life.
More importantly, why do you assume they were lying?
Too many people in these debates reflexively assume that their opponents are liars. Reasonable people disagree about definitions, beliefs, and policies. I don’t know why so many partisans want to treat disagreements as lying.
“Bigotry can be quite innocent.”
What you describe is socialization, not bigotry.
Originally, a bigot was a religious hypocrite. Today, the OED uses bigot to describe anyone who is “characterized by obstinate, intolerant, or strongly partisan beliefs.” Bigot describes an attitude, not a belief itself.
In other words, pro- and anti-abortion proponents can be bigoted in their obstinance or intolerance, but their positions cannot—by definition—be bigoted.
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