POLITICS & ABORTION
Brandmeyer, Gerard A.
POLITICS & ABORTION GERARD A. BRANDMEYER One of the major surprises of this presidential campaign was the early success of the "pro-life" movement in maneuvering abortion policy into the...
...His salvation, if he is telling the truth, seems in certain important ways to have touched his personal life...
...That risk is now reality...
...Would there be other Vietnams...
...The fact is that her stand on behalf of the anti-abortion cause means that a truly parochial, one-issue advocate can draw coveted media attention all the way to Madison Square Garden where both her name and her cause are expected to be placed before the Democratic convention...
...Nevertheless, in a two-party political culture, where victory goes to the candidate who controls the middle ground so abhorrent to the adversaries in a status politics dispute, the vast majority of voters will not make an elective choice based on any single issue...
...POLITICS & ABORTION GERARD A. BRANDMEYER One of the major surprises of this presidential campaign was the early success of the "pro-life" movement in maneuvering abortion policy into the foreground as the burning issue which would make or break any candidate...
...Debate between the abortion adversaries is invariably brutish, mean, and short, with neither side appreciating the moral and metaphysical complexities which trouble the other...
...The answer to the first question is probably not...
...McCormack was successful, her cause would be set back just when it seemed to be gaining ground...
...As to "missionary" involvement in foreign affairs, it is a possibility, but more I think because Carter is a former military officer than because he is a graduate of BYPU...
...On the face of it, a one-issue, anti-abortion candidacy was a rash gamble, linked to these two implicit and fragile premises: (1) Invariably, lots of alienated voters are eager to send the political establishment a message in primary elections, and (2) heavily Catholic and tradition-bound New England, the site of the first three primaries, would be fertile ground for rallying such voters around the abortion issue...
...In the three New England primaries, Ellen McCormack only approached a respectable showing once, in the non-binding and lightly reported Vermont primary where she drew 9.4 per cent which still left her a weak last...
...A truly radical Salvationist would never have been elected Governor or come so far toward being elected President...
...The last question, that of a messianic complex, sounds hardest but is in fact easiest to answer...
...Recall that according to the CBS-New York Times poll taken in New Hampshire and Massachusetts, the abortion question did not rank among the five most salient issues even with Catholic voters...
...To the politicians this means that the ordinary rules of the game are intact...
...Would he take his J.C...
...There is no denying that even amending the Constitution would at most serve to restore pre-1973 conditions for obtaining an abortion...
...What is most disturbing about Jimmy Carter is not that he is unlike but that he is too much like the pragmatic, secular, compromising, greedy LBJ and RMN...
...Carter is really a very normal Southern Baptist...
...Such dangers are no greater with him than with any other adult male, and they are perhaps greater with a Democrat than with a Republican only because a cooperative Congress is now necessary to mobilize the troops...
...Unlike economic (class) politics, status politics is uncompromising...
...From a right-to-life perspective, all this would achieve is murder on a somewhat lessened scale...
...Perhaps a President who can "feel" warmth flowing to and from him as he shakes hands with voters is not such a bad bet...
...He might in armchair interviews suggest some seemingly old-fashioned prescriptions for the society's problems, but he has too common a need for power and popularity to threaten his career with acts that might diminish either one...
...McCormack is the first serious amateur candidate for a major party nomination in memory...
...He claims it has made him care more for people, not a bad sign in a Presidential candidate...
...We have only Carter's promise of restraint as we have only promises from all the others...
...He said he did it to show to his fellow man the same love God had shown him...
...The presidential primaries have established Ellen McCormack, the right-to-life advocate, as a marginally credible candidate by virtue of the few delegates she managed to earn...
...Rational and tolerant give-and-take yields to immoderate and irreconcilable fervor...
...These returns confirmed for both the politicians and the press corps what they had believed all along, but had begun to doubt last winter in the wake of zealous lobbying pressure from the pro-life movement...
...Some people even find fault with this and predict he will be too "soft" to be an effective President...
...At least that seemed to be the shape of things in January and February according to the media messages from Iowa and New Hampshire...
...Just when the right-to-life movement was gaining momentum and the candidates were beginning to wonder if this were not the dreaded unequivocal issue, along came Ellen McCormack so graciously to put them at their ease...
...Carter once voted, virtually alone, to integrate his local church in Plains, not the most popular thing to do in the Georgia of the 60's...
...Any qualified pollster could of heart translate into using the big stick to enforce Baptist social purity...
...But it can and often does release a flow of love for others...
...There is no need to say, without qualification, yes or no to abortion...
...So in New England, where she needed to do well, the anti-abortion candidate was competitive only with Milton Shapp, Birch Bayh and "no preference...
...What does it matter where a national leader got his social concern, in catechism class, a university classroom, or a Baptist revival meeting, so long as it's there...
...Political sociologists define status politics issues as those in which competing status groups face off in bitter struggles over the moral and the immoral, the sacred and the profane, or the ugly and the beautiful...
...Boyd warns will be a "messianic" Presidency...
...Instead, Mrs...
...Yet the primary results suggest that the decision to run Ellen McCormack was a serious tactical mistake for die right-to-life movement...
...but then we haven't done all that well with "tough" Presidents over the last few terms, have we...
...That is, with subtle and delicate deference to the moral sensibilities of each side, this issue too can be straddled...
...Would he bring from his training in BYPU (Baptist Young People's Union) a missionary zeal that might lead him, as Eric Goldman believes similar training led Lyndon Johnson, to try to "save" his little brown, black and yellow brothers all over the globe from a fate worse than death...
...Yet by late-spring the burning issue had all but vanished, occasionally to be recalled whenever Cronkite, Reasoner, or Chancellor tally the latest delegate count...
...To understand why, consider abortion as a "status politics" issue...
...Salvation-for Southern Baptists perhaps roughly parallel to veneration of the Virgin for Catholics-can turn a person inward to spiritual self-indulgence and disregard for social responsibilities...
...initials too seriously...
...Like so many of the rest of us, he never lets his faith interfere with practical matters...
...McCormack plunged in, apparently unaware of the risk...
...Not a bad reason...
...He keeps the typical Southern Baptist "English walnut" distinction between what he believes and what he does...
...Abortion represents legalized murder in the minds of many Americans, with roughly 38 to 45 per cent approving a Constitutional amendment banning abortion according to recent Harris and Gallup polls...
...Any movement that is fortified by certainty and free of doubt, communicating solely within its isolated circle of true believers, is prone to overestimate its own strength...
...Never mind that without a subsidy from federal matching funds, she might not have been able to afford that blunt fetus-laden media campaign...
...Some figure, let us say 10 to IS per cent of the vote in each of the three states, should have been the minimum target...
...The gamble was rash because, unless Mrs...
...Would we have with Jimmy Carter what Malcolm have attested to the low probability of achieving such a goal...
...Since he believes God speaks directly to him, since in addition he tends to be a loner and rarely lets his aides sway his thinking, would he ever take a humanly illogical step, one that might risk war, because God told him to...
...Often, as with the abortion issue, victory is mostly symbolic...
...If abortion cannot be eliminated, then the pro-life movement is limited to the symbolic objective of having Law and Public Policy validate and uphold the personal standards of those who feel that their moral station demands expression through this movement...
...Yet he is obviously potentially a much better man than either Johnson or Nixon...
...It may well be responsible for the little good we Southern Baptists have done in the world...
...There were no signs of puritanism in his limited exercise of power as Governor of Georgia...
...He showed in fact a liberal tolerance for pluralism...
Vol. 103 • July 1976 • No. 14
