Editorials

...on whom the American government now spent three million dollars to fly them home...

...THE First Amendment, prohibiting the establishment of religion and guaranteeing freedom of religion, speech, press, and political activity, is not to be tampered with...

...Their argument, it seems, would apply as well toward Jewish mobilization on behalf of Israel, the broad mobilization of the religious community for civil rights legislation, the nineteenth-century agitation by religious leaders against slavery...

...In California, once a year, they were 900 votes...

...Curiously, this argument is being advanced by groups whose own tenets ought to place them squarely on the other side of the issue...

...It is also instructive to note both the excesses and the considerable political dedication of the right-to-life movement as chronicled in the plaintiffs' brief...

...It is quite possible, indeed quite likely, that many who are not opposed to abortion itself are nonetheless opposed to government funding of abortion—the real issue at hand—because of a political attitude about government's role in morally controverted issues or a pragmatic belief about compromise in a pluralistic society...

...Is it just to cut off abortion funds for the poor in a society where abortion is both generally permitted and readily available to the middle and upper class...

...We do not contend," say the plaintiffs, "that any of the picketing, lobbying, or any other pastoral or political activities by churches is unconstitutional and we do not seek to prohibit these activities...

...As the philosopher Baruch Brody reminds us, "Opposition to torture in Brazil does not become a religious moral position just because that opposition is now being led by the Catholic bishops...

...The plaintiffs in McRae maintain that the Hyde Amendment is equivalent to the establishment of a religion, Roman Catholicism in particular but also of other religious viewpoints opposing abortion (Orthodox Judaism, Mormonism, various currents of belief among Lutherans, Methodists, Baptists, etc...

...But we do wonder, first, at the religious groups like the Methodist Women who undermine their own political rights in order to win an immediate victory and, second, at the ACLU attorneys who cannot be at least as solicitous of the First Amendment when a controversy involves American Catholics as when it involves American Nazis...

...Dead they had so little individuality that after five days their counters didn't know whether they were four hundred or eight...

...Indeed, at times their brief reaches to sociological and theological definitions of religion as whatever draws upon religious imagery and references or whatever is of ultimate concern or, quoting Paul Tillich, "what you take seriously without reservation" or, more operationally, whatever is deeply divisive and produces emotional accusations and uncompromising behavior...

...and the individual, nameless, faceless dead...

...Even opponents of abortion have debated this point...

...It is, of course, fascinating to learn just how many times the Catholic lobbyist passed notes to a Congressional aide during the House-Senate conferences on the Hyde Amendment...

...and neoconservative writer Norman Podhoretz, in an exceptionally insensitive Public Broadcasting TV analysis, has told us how the whole affair simply typifies the shallowness of 1960s liberals taken in by radical poses...

...What we do know about, of course, is the religious convictions of many of the leading proponents of the Hyde Amendment—and the plaintiffs in McRae make much of this knowledge...

...Now they were a pile of anonymous corpses whom the Guyanese government had welcomed four years ago but now refused to bury...

...In fact, we do not know precisely on what grounds voters who oppose government funding for abortion actually base this position...

...In their zeal to outflank Congress's decision, what the Hyde Amendment's opponents have done in McRae is to inflate the notion of religion, and therefore of establishment and of religious infringement, beyond anything relevant to the First Amendment...

...Whatever the mixture of beliefs behind it, Congress's decision to protect fetal life is as secular on the face of it as its decisions to protect tracts of wilderness from spoilation, unknowing consumers from toxic drugs, or laboratory animals from cruel experimentation...

...laws against murder, for example, would be forbidden because they overlapped the fifth commandment of the Mosaic Decalogue...

...To support these allegations the plaintiffs' attorneys have produced a mass of evidence illustrating conflicting religious views on abortion, the leading role of Catholics in the anti-abortion forces, the militancy of the right-to-life movement, the divisive effects of its fervor and its single-issue approach to politics, and the role of Catholic Congressmen and lobbyists in formulating the Hyde Amendment...

...If both positions in this controversy are equally religious ones, if the withholding of government monies amounts to the establishment of the anti-abortionists' religious viewpoint and an infringement on the religious practice of those for whom abortion, in certain circumstances, might be religiously mandated, then would not the payment of government monies likewise amount to establishing the religious views of the latter group and infringing on the practice of the former...

...But virtually all of this material is irrelevant to the crucial issue...

...Likewise we are not concerned with the whole range of grounds on which the plaintiffs in Brooklyn have challenged the Hyde Amendment...

...It so happens that the plaintiffs in McRae cite Commonweal at several points, quoting editorials and articles that complained of the narrow vision or untoward tactics of the right-to-Iife effort...

...Indeed, if one is to talk of "entanglement," both the courts and common sense concur that providing taxpayers' funds for some purpose is far more entangling than simply withdrawing from the area altogether...

...The New York Times editorial (November 21), as if Guyana were as distant, in an imaginative sense, as the Congo, has reminded us of the thin line between sanity and madness and referred us to Joseph Conrad's Heart of Darkness...

...They are not our concern at the moment...

...In Guyana, except when they cried for help, they were someone else's social problem...

...The rest of the year they were a social problem, the most marginal members of the community—the poor, black, addicted, old and aimless, seduced by the surface glitter of the American Dream but unable to cope with the competitive demands of our society, then sidetracked into a social subgroup of fellow-losers too alienated, powerless, and intellectually and emotionally deprived to smell a false messiah...

...And maybe not—given the plaintiffs' worry about "deeply held beliefs" and political divisiveness—even that...

...The fact, however, that the Supreme Court has already rejected most of these arguments as grounds for overruling the decisions of legislators to restrict abortion funds has led to the emergence of a novel, and extremely mischievous, line of reasoning...

...Not long ago we received a plaintive letter asking support for the American Civil Liberties Union...

...They were life's losers...

...918 CORPSES Explanations...

...The Hyde Amendment and the right-to-life politics surrounding it raise a host of complicated questions...

...Reportedly, most of the bodies will remain unclaimed—unclaimed in life, unclaimed in death...

...The suit in question is McRae v. Califano, a class action challenging the Hyde Amendment, the Congressional rider on HEW's budget that restricted Medicaid reimbursements for abortion to a very narrow range of cases...

...The ACLU was trying to make clear Commonweal: 772 that its defense of American Nazis in the notorious Skokie case arose from its belief that the ACLU action protected the First Amendment rights of all citizens...

...The second consequence of their reasoning is the disen-franchisement of American Catholics of their rights to political activity...

...The first consequence of this inflation is to render their own argument contradictory...

...At the same time, by not funding abortions the Amendment restricts the free exercise of religion on the part of poor women whose religious affiliations might lead them, or even require them, to a conscientious choice of abortion...

...Meanwhile, historians and anthropologists tell us we have seen all this before—the corpse piles of Buchenwald, the body counts of Vietnam, the suicides of Masada, the religious fanaticism of the Mormons, the Millerites, and the followers of Father Divine...

...In all of the explanations, some faces slip from view: Congressman Leo J. Ryan, who did listen to cries for help, who died trying to save some of his most powerless constituents from a danger greater than anyone had ever dreamed...

...We do not know on what basis the Representatives and Senators supporting the Hyde Amendment reached that conclusion...

...But if the leading proponents of cutting off funds for the war in Vietnam had organized and agitated on religious grounds, would that have made a Congressional refusal of further funds for that war a religious and not a secular policy decision...

...These are important questions...

...Some of them, like the possible conflict between the Hyde Amendment and the equal protection guaranteed by the Constitution, the distinction between funding abortions and funding childbirth, or the relationship between abortion and the "medically necessary" procedures covered by the original Medicaid statute, can be, and have been, argued at length...

...The restriction on abortion funding has no properly secular purpose, advances one religious viewpoint at the expense of another, and finally involves excessive government entanglement with religion...

...The argument in that suit is aimed specifically at the First Amendment rights of American Catholics, but ultimately it endangers the rights of all religious believers and in fact of all who hold deeply and dearly to values they would like to see reflected in our political life...

...What about the wisdom of right-to-life politics, its single-issue and single-minded approach, its frequent resort to inflammatory rhetoric, the heavy involvement of the Catholic Church through its Pastoral Plan...

...In short, it is argued that the concern for unborn human life reflected in the Congressional action has no other basis than a sectarian theological one...

...We will have more explanations in articles, TV commentaries and books—two due to appear this week—till the explanations have left us as numb as the old film clips of the enraptured faces of Jim Jones's ecstatic followers hanging on his words of Christian love and the films of American troops hosing down aluminum coffins...

...The third consequence of their reasoning is to disenfranchise all religious viewpoints from an active engagement in the political process...

...This is Catch-22 with a vengeance...

...The only legitimate viewpoint in politics would be what the.late Frederick S. Jaffe of the Alan Guttmacher Institute, called a "secular ethics...

...Some of them we have taken up at other times, and will probably address again...

...One ill-spoken spokesman: "We're not babysitters...

...As Lawrence Tribe writes in American Constitutional Law, "If a purpose were to be classified as non-secular simply because it coincided with the beliefs of one religion or took its origin from another, virtually nothing the government does would be acceptable...

...Neither the religious roots of a public policy, the language and beliefs of its supporters, nor the personal motives of the policy-makers are central to disqualifying that policy as without a legitimate secular purpose...

...Yet that is exactly what is occurring in a little-publicized civil suit now moving toward a decision in the United States District Court in Brooklyn...

...The State Department has explained why, in spite of all the complaints, it didn't know more about the People's Temple Marxist-religious commune in Guyana until 918 murders and suicides forced the world to pay attention...

...Among the plaintiffs challenging the Hyde Amendment is the Women's Division of the Board of Global Ministries of the United Methodist Church, and among the plaintiffs' representatives are attorneys from Planned Parenthood and the American Civil Liberties Union...

...We assume they will take to heart our equal distress at their own vision and tactics...

...What they do seek, however, is that the results of those activities be declared unconstitutional, and that largely on the basis that it was Catholic picketing, lobbying, etc., which produced the results...

...We sympathize with the ACLU's plight in communicating its motives...