Democrats and Catholics

...It knows that most older Americans depend on Social Security and Medicare and that most poor children need some form of welfare assistance and Medicaid...

...ethnic, if not racial, tolerance...

...Phone calls were answered...

...Consider physician-assisted suicide (PAS)—a matter that might seem, at first glance, distinct from abortion...

...I have been one of the holdouts...

...But let's face it, our politics doesn't work that way any more...

...I have become a highly selective Democrat...

...There are holdouts, millions of them, and there have been returnees to the Democratic Party...

...I feel just as strongly about Democratic Party support of the death penalty, cuts in social welfare, and physician-assisted suicide...

...The Democratic candidate in Michigan's 1998 governor's race was a PAS proponent and Jack Kevorkian's lawyer...

...Some might even wonder if there was a yet unexamined connection between the violence of American culture and the anger or fear or guilt that some women, men, and children consciously and subconsciously feel about abortion...

...District Court judge Barbara Rothstein's ruling explicitly compared the decision of a woman to end a pregnancy to the decision of a terminally ill person to end his or her life...

...It is not quantity that concerns them, is it...

...I am still a registered Democrat—why be anything else in New York City...

...elected representatives, for better or worse, are allowed to represent their constituents on the policy questions at hand...

...Once upon a time, it was one of the Democratic Party's primary purposes...

...U.S...

...It is quality and accessibility that they want...

...My opposition to each of them shares the common assumption that protection of the most vulnerable, the poorest, the most fragile members of human society, and yes, even the outcast, is one of the primary purposes of politics...

...it is the party of African Americans, most immigrants, and most minorities...

...Strong words, I know...

...There was no talk of class warfare here, but clearly his interests weren't ours...

...My "baptismal" party seems tone-deaf to many of the issues it historically championed, and it has become a champion of some issues at odds with its communitarian and social democratic lite past—politics that gave many Catholics a political home...

...Others, who may be agnostic on when human life begins, nonetheless recognize that there are better and worse reasons for seeking an abortion or that the cultural and social conse42 DISSENT / Fall 1999 quences of on-demand abortion are not all in the benefits column...

...All analogies are imperfect and mine may even seem offensive to prochoice supporters...

...It was not simply the 1.5 million abortions that took place every year, it was that second and even third trimester abortions had become an acceptable medical practice...

...who want to own and carry guns...

...But I suffer from political homelessness...

...I voted for Bill Clinton in 1992, but couldn't touch the presidential lever in 1996...

...so too from expectations that he (and not she back then) would be with you not only legislatively, but also when it came to the parking tickets and real life problems...

...It acknowledges the existence of the have-nots...

...But words that I hope will help politically homeless "Democrats," Catholic and otherwise, shape up and convince their party that a libertarian litmus test is not the basis for a viable Democratic Party or sound public policy...

...Will they support physicianassisted suicide because they believe it helps support the right to an abortion...

...More than ever this is the party of the haves, of corporations, of lawyers, doctors, businesspeople, well-off suburbanites...

...After two decades of political struggle, abortion turns out to be a marginal policy issue for both Republicans and Democrats, but it has had a very different impact on the two parties...

...Enough said...

...That has not prevented a vigorous political debate about better and worse ways to allow that right to be exercised...

...Today's party system is a long way from that thick culture of family, church, neighborhood, and lifelong affiliation...

...people who don't want to pay taxes...

...Now I know...

...Clinton's rhetoric and gestures are only the symptom of a deeper problem...

...When in office, Reagan and Bush were willing to tinker at the edges of abortion policy and vet Supreme Court nominees for their views (though as it turns out this has made no difference on the Court's abortion decisions...

...I thought that in this White House scene, with the president in the starring role, he went out of his way to offend those—and not just prolifers—who thought intact dilation and extraction was morally offensive and, since alternatives were available, medically unnecessary...

...I go to the polls DISSENT /Fall 1999 41 every election—reluctantly...

...in fact, the Republican precinct captain belonged to the same parish as we did...

...The Democratic Party is the opposite of all of this, or pretends to be...

...Civic engagement—the holy grail of the nineties— was the bread and butter of people like my aunt, whose city job and political activism were a seamless cloth that included neighborliness...

...True, welfare needed an overhaul and work is better than welfare—as long as there is work...

...The women's movement and the abortion movement wanted safe and legal abortions available...

...That's why Catholics voted Democratic...

...taking people to the polls and to the doctor...

...I used to ask myself whether I would feel so strongly if the issue that turned Democrats into a hybrid of Republicans and libertarians were not abortion but something else...

...It had become clear that any restrictions on abortion or abortion methods, even one that bore a strong resemblance to infanticide, was unacceptable to the women's movement and the abortion rights movement, and apparently to Clinton as well...

...Some women and men with religious or moral objections to abortion wanted them rare because they consider abortion the taking of human life, but which can sometimes be justified...

...It's some distance, too, from the extensive overlap that once connected the way you voted and the way your elected representatives voted...

...And I happily carried them out, including telling my age-mates that Thomas Dewey, if elected president, would make us go to school on Saturday...

...In fact, as we scan his administration, can't we conclude that Clinton has legitimated and reinforced the Republican shredding of the New Deal/New Frontier social net...

...To my mind, the only viable alternative is education, debate, persuasion, and symbolic acts and language, like Clinton's 1992 campaign promise...

...There were Republicans, and some of them were Catholic too...

...Now, of course, near the end of his second term, who could be surprised by Clinton's opportunistic theatrics...

...In that debate, gun control has not become a litmus test for either Democrats or Republicans...

...I am loath to say it, and I say it with great reluctance, but I am coming to think of the Democratic Party not as the party of the people, or the party of the poor and vulnerable, but as the party of death...

...No prolife candidate will get Party endorsement or campaign funds...

...Leave aside my ancestral antibodies to the Republicans...

...And finally, I looked for the day when someone would question its role as a litmus test in the Democratic Party...

...That will not change...

...Why should they care if abortions were rarer, as long as they were safe and legal...

...A great deal was made of Reagan Democrats—traditional New Deal Democrats who shifted to the Republican Party in 1980 when Ronald Reagan was first elected president but who retained much of their Democratic Party profile...

...Having watched the struggle, pro and con, since Roe v. Wade, I accept that there is almost no chance that that there will be any significant shift in the law, except at the margins (such as requiring parental consent for minors...

...So I argued with myself...

...I assume, after all, that prochoice advocates see the abortion choice as a tragic one for most women...

...getting the potholes filled and the garbage collected...

...I wax nostalgic and, yes, maybe I am wearing rose-colored glasses...

...Wasn't it time for a more careful look at what Americans were really "choosing" when they announced themselves prochoice...

...Though I can't bring myself to touch the Republican lever, I find it increasingly difficult to pull the Democratic one...

...PAS has been added to the prochoice agenda...

...who don't want to pay for or regulate on behalf of the common good...

...Become a Republican then," you say...

...Is this the future of the Democratic Party...

...In 1992, he promised that in his administration he would work to make abortions "safe, legal, and rare...

...Emily's List, which raises money nationally for Democratic women candidates, has a prochoice litmus test...

...Machine politics worked in Chicago...

...Why couldn't abortions remain safe and legal, and also be rarer, if there were a change in attitude that might begin with some acknowledgment, as I hoped Clinton was implying, that there were social and moral costs to a policy of on-demand abortion...

...Where is this litmus test taking them...

...Then late in his first term, the president vetoed a bill that would have reserved the use of intact dilation and extraction, a particularly grisly and difficult method of late-term abortion, to saving the life of the mother...

...And yet Catholics have not finally become Republicans (See David Leege, The Catholic Vote in '96," Commonweal, September 27, 1996...

...Republican candidates persistently go after the small number of single-issue anti-abortion voters and Republican prolife candidates are regularly nominated and elected to the House and Senate...

...She linked her finding that the Washington ban was unconstitutional to a range of Supreme Court abortion decisions, especially Planned Parenthood v. Casey (in which the Court shifted the abortion "right" from a privacy right to a liberty interest...

...In Washington State, where a referendum in favor of physicianassisted suicide lost at the polls in 1991, a coalition of groups appealed to the federal district court...

...AFTER CLINTON'S election in 1992, it quickly became clear that, as with many of his pronunciamentos, the words, "safe, legal, and rare," did not match his actions...

...Men got jobs...

...One of these elections, I will have not voted for more Democrats, than I have voted for in more than three decades of showing up at the voting booth...

...I said I voted for Bill Clinton in 1992, but not in 1996...

...Still a Catholic, still a Democrat...

...The personal may have become political, but politics, it seems, is no longer personal...

...Isn't it time for Democrats to stop being held hostage to prochoice politics...

...But isn't it time for the Republicans to be deprived of their cynical use of abortion politics...

...At least that's the theory—and the posture...

...It recognizes that we have to pay for schools, for welfare, for occupational safety, for environmental protection...

...After all, Clinton's own Baptist denomination could hardly be called prochoice...

...But it surprised me then...

...True, you couldn't vote until you were twenty-one (when you would vote for the incumbent), but there were lots of other tasks for the niece of a Democratic precinct captain...

...Could it have been that he had a bit more money than the rest, or that being a lawyer meant he had different interests...

...He was barely sworn in before he rescinded a Reagan-era executive order that had barred the use of American tax dollars abroad for promoting abortions or changes in abortion restrictions through international aid and family planning programs...

...They wouldn't mind if abortions were, if not rare, rarer...

...What any NOW or SEIU members actually thought about physician-assisted suicide we don't know, and perhaps it makes no difference, since the underlying issue turned out to be the right to abortion and a defense of choice...

...Though I am opposed to abortion, I recognize that they will take place, legal or not...

...Roe v. Wade is here to stay: the right to abortion is constitutionally protected...

...Her line of argument was temporarily tabled when the Supreme Court ruled that PAS, at least for the time being, should be left to the states...

...Could we begin to make some distinctions between good and bad choices...

...At various times and for a variety of reasons, from Nixon through Reagan, a good number of Catholics slipped into the Republican Party...

...In The Inheritance: How Three Families and America Moved from Roosevelt to Reagan and Beyond, Samuel Friedman brilliantly captures the trajectory of some East Coast third-generation Catholics into the Republican fold...

...Not so the Democrats...

...Among those filing amicus briefs were the Seattle chapter of the National Organization for Women (NOW) and Local 6 of the Service Employees International Union (SEIU), major Democratic Party players...

...to the contrary, Justices David Souter and Sandra Day O'Connor provided it with firmer grounding in Planned Parenthood v. Casey...

...Furthermore, as time has passed, the prochoice DISSENT / Fall 1999 43 outlook and arguments have spilled over into other arenas...

...Neither political party represents my views or the views of many of my fellow Catholics...

...1 F I TOLD you I was born into the O'Brien family in Chicago in 1941, that my father was an ardent union member, that both my parents were staunch Catholics, that we lived in a two-flat owned by my uncle on the same street on which my father grew up, I'd wager you'd have no trouble guessing how my family voted, or even how I've voted most of my life...

...Some budget surpluses could go for tax cuts as long as we pay attention to areas of the public sector long starved by the budget cuts of the eighties...

...And what of our liberal and left allies...

...That's what I hoped Clinton was raising by "safe, legal, and rare...

...In conversation such people might argue that rather than a triumph of choice, abortion can be an instrument for exploiting the poor and the young, and even women generally...

...AND THERE is another problem with the Democrats...

...and who bear the taint of their racist politics...

...Kids went to city summer camps...

...His phrase seemed to speak to two opposed constituencies...

...That means a major funding source for women candidates automatically precludes any woman who would raise any critical questions about the nation's abortion policies...

...Would anyone be surprised to find in state-by-state battles, groups like NOW or NARAL (the National Abortion and Reproductive Rights Action League) or union locals favoring PAS—not because they necessarily favor the practice but because they see it linked to their support of abortion...

...It may be sacrilegious to say so, but when you were baptized a Catholic in Chicago you were also baptized a member of the Democratic Party...

...No longer...

...The second constituency was more varied, less cohesive, and, except for the prolife movement itself, completely unorganized...

...For one thing, Republicans do not shy away from the prolife side of the issue...

...MARGARET O'BRIEN STEINFELS is the editor of Common-weal magazine, which is celebrating its seventy-fifth year of publication in the fall of 1999...

...And because it will not change, perhaps it is time for the Democratic Party and the liberal-left to stop making it the lens through which candidates and issues must be scrutinized...

...At the veto ceremony, the president surrounded himself with weeping women who said they had had the procedure...

...Consider by way of analogy that the right to bear arms is also constitutionally protected...

...I have always hoped, and continued to do so, that, over time, these could make the attentive citizen more critical of the way abortion functions in our society and more attentive to the possibility that the abortion "choice" could be critically examined apart from its constitutional status...

...44 DISSENT / Fall 1999...

...Whether or not this was wholly credible (certainly many of my prolife friends thought anyone a fool for believing him), I took it as a signal that abortion was about to become an issue for many Democrats, not only Catholics, and a recognition that the on-demand regime in place needed tempering and greater moral scrutiny...

...There was no accounting for some people—that's what the O'Briens thought about Bob O'Rourke...

...In practice, the Republicanization of the Democratic agenda under Bill Clinton raises questions about the party's real allegiances...

...The state of political homelessness that many Americans feel—certainly as represented by low voter turnout, declarations of party independence, and the erosion of bloc voting—is a result of a disconnect between vote and representation, between party platforms and personal values...