Speaker Pelosi , Governor Sebelius (soon to be Secretary Sebelius) and Representative Patrick Kennedy, among a whole host of politicians who claim to be Catholic, are getting a great deal of awful theological advice and, in their own way, have become errant theologians themselves. We have all heard Nancy Pelosi's foolish remarks about abortion. Recently, some correspondents have sent statements made by Gov. Sebelius and Rep. Kennedy.
Gov. Sebelius has said,
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 bortions in our nation.
There is another way. By working in support of the common good we can better protect human life and the dignity of all people.
If we work hard and match our rhetoric with our actions, we can create a culture that is more welcoming of mothers and treasuring of our children. We must redouble our efforts on prevention and personal responsibility. We must stand with women who feel so alone that abortion seems like their only choice. These women need people to walk with them, not cast stones at them....
If we truly wish to reduce the number of abortions further, we need to work together to truly promote a culture of life, by helping women and families get the support they need when facing unexpected pregnancies and to continue to reduce the number of abortions. Health care, child care, job opportunities, affordable housing—they are all the building blocks of a culture of life and we can use them to build a future where abortion is extremely rare.
In response to a constituent who wrote to ask him to vote against the Freedom of Choice Act, Patrick Kennedy wrote:
As you may know, the Freedom of Choice Act would codify into law the Supreme Court case Roe v. Wade, which ensures a woman's right to decide whether or not to terminate her pregnancy. In addition, this legislation also attempts to preserve a women's right to choose by preventing any legislation that would interfere or cause undue burden. I support the primary purpose of the Freedom of Choice Act, which is to ensure a woman's right to choose by making it public law, so that the national dialogue in regards to women's reproductive health and abortion may take a more fruitful course than in the past.
Regardless of where each of us stands on the issue of abortion, we can both agree that no one wants a woman to be faced with the choice to terminate her pregnancy. As former President Clinton has said, 'abortion should be safe, legal, and rare.' Therefore, I believe the dialogue of this nation should be centered on how to prevent unintended pregnancies, so that the need for abortion is greatly reduced. One important step we can take in addressing this issue is by ensuring comprehensive sex education, which instills in youth and young adults the merits of abstinence and safe-sex.
These Catholic politicians, like so many others, have all been mislead into believing that one can support laws which uphold the so-called right to abortion as long as one is personally opposed to abortion or wishes to reduce the number of abortions somehow through some unspecified social policies. The theologians behind this coaching are no doubt, themselves, badly mistaken about the meaning of freedom and the nature of law. One wonders if these theologians are the same ones that were on the list of
President Obama's Catholic Advisory Council.
The statements made by these politicians demonstrate an absurd notion of human freedom, one that is completely inconsistent with human nature. Consider carefully what they are saying. A person has a right to abortion because it is a free choice. A woman has a right to kill her unborn child because of freedom. But, would reason not dictate, rather, that killing innocent human beings is not consistent with human freedom? Indeed, since we are speaking of freedom which properly belongs to human beings, would it not be more correct to say that the proper exercise of human freedom excludes the killing other innocent human beings? The mental deformity that allows one to believe that freedom includes the right to kill the innocent is so completely depraved that it should be called uncivilized and barbaric.
The codification of this notion of freedom in a national law permitting abortion is the creation of the worst kind of injustice in codified law. Since such a law sanctions the attack upon innocent human life, it makes law, which is supposedly for the common good, an enemy of the fundamental good of human life. There is no reasonable proposition that would justify the sanctioning of the destruction of the good of the life of one in the name of the good of freedom of another. How could one human's authentic good, in this case freedom, possibly be the cause for permitting the annihilation of another person's right to live? If such a law cannot be considered unjust and, indeed, barbaric, by all reasonable people because it contradicts the good of human life, on what basis would any law against human killing be based? There are only two elements in the equation--freedom of choice and defenseless human life. Is it that none of the theologians giving this bad advise to these politicians see the unreasonableness? If all they are asserting in the end is some political notion of freedom and rights, then, are we not saying that any form of human oppression can be justified in the name of freedom?
These theologians and politicians have contributed to the continuing downhill slide into an anarchical tyrrany of relativism.
