On Catholics and Democrats
Pollitt, Katha
MARGARET O BRIEN STEINFELS longs for ' the days when the Democratic ma chine ruled Chicago, handing out jobs to her relatives and fixing the parking tickets of loyal (white) voters. I wonder...
...It is simply not true that "no pro-life candidate will get party endorsement or campaign funds...
...If Emily's List has become an important player in the fundraising game it's not because the Party has an abortion-rights "litmus test...
...Somehow abortion always turns up as a major stumbling block to acquiring these new constituencies— DISSENT / Winter 2000 n 85 never high taxes,"big government," the economy, the unbelievably corrupt and worker-hostile two-party system itself—things real working-class people complain about constantly...
...Why would-be progressive strategists insist on claiming as all but allies people who evince little or no interest in their program or values, while taking for granted their millions of loyal prochoice and feminist constituents is an interesting question...
...As she herself acknowledges, the majority of voting Catholics are still Democratic—interestingly, older Catholics, who are more likely to be strongly antichoice, are more likely to maintain their affiliation than their younger, more prosperous, suburbanized children, who are squarely in the American mainstream and are more likely than their grandparents to be prochoice...
...A collection of her columns and essays is forthcoming in September...
...Steinfels objects that Emily's List—an independent fundraising operation, not an arm of the party, by the way—insists its candidates be prochoice, as well as female...
...However, far from proving that the Democratic Party organization is monolithically prochoice, the very existence of Emily's List testifies to the spotty record of regular party funding sources in supporting prochoice (and female) candidates...
...A 1996 CBS-New York Times poll found that only 9 percent of Catholics would refuse to vote for a candidate who differed with their views on abortion...
...Most states, for example, already bar third-trimester abortions, by whatever method, except to preserve the life or health of the mother, as is permissible under Roe v. Wade...
...She never explains why the United States, a nation in which abortion is legal, should impose in other countries restrictions we reject for ourselves...
...Steinfels presents herself as an abortion moderate, but the actual positions she es 84 n DISSENT / Winter 2000 pouses are anything but...
...Behind Steinfels's essay—and perhaps also behind Dissent's interest in publishing it—is the "left-conservative" social-democratic dream of winning majoritarian support for New Deal-style social benefits by casting out the demons of sexual and cultural liberalism, racial equality, and feminism...
...Plenty of Democratic politicians have antichoice or mixed voting records.: for the 1998 Senate, for example, the National Abortion and Reproductive Rights Action League gave a prochoice ranking of 65 percent or less to Joseph Biden, Mary Landrieu, John Breaux, Daniel Moynihan, Ernest Hollings, Harry Reid, Robert Byrd, Tom Daschle, Tim Johnson, and Patrick Leahy...
...Similarly, Steinfels supports Reagan-era funding cutoffs for international family-planning organizations that "promote abortion"—this is antichoice lingo for depriving Planned Parenthood and other groups of essential dollars unless they agree to a panoply of anti-abortion regulations, such as gag rules barring health workers from informing patients of their legal options and from engaging in lobbying for abortion rights...
...communities" would once again be run by the ward heeler, the union boss, the clergyman, the mayor who may be dishonest but who "delivers...
...I suspect Steinfels is not the only one who misses Mayor Daley's authoritarian Chicago...
...The Democratic Party is doing little to reverse this situation...
...Steinfels is attempting to mobilize a monolithic ethnic-urban sexually conservative "Catholic vote" that hasn't existed for decades—and that can no more be resuscitated than the five-cent subway token...
...In all, I counted twenty-four Democratic representatives (all men, by the way) with NARAL ratings of 20 percent or less—that's 12 percent of the Democratic delegation...
...That—plus the little noted fact that the bans typically call for criminal prosecution of physicians—is why they are opposed by all the major relevant professional medical associations, have been repeatedly thrown out by state courts, and have been voted down in state referenda, most recently the one in Maine this past November...
...Nothing prevents antichoice Democrats from setting up their own PAC...
...MARGARET O BRIEN STEINFELS longs for ' the days when the Democratic ma chine ruled Chicago, handing out jobs to her relatives and fixing the parking tickets of loyal (white) voters...
...KAThA POLLITT is a columnist at the Nation...
...The lack of a health exception was why President Clinton vetoed the "partial birth" abortion bans passed by Congress in 1995 and 1997...
...You would never know from Steinfels's essay that abortion today is no "on-demand regime...
...But the "partial birth abortion" debate is not really about, or just about, the very small number of late abortions performed by a particularly "offensive" method (is there a method she would approve of...
...family values" would shape public policy...
...But then, she seems to think that the Democratic Party should cater to her views on abortion just because she has them...
...When the calculations run the other way—as they do in many districts—the party is perfectly happy to trade abortion rights for a chance to win...
...In fact, the number of abortions performed annually has been going steadily downward...
...More recently, Michael Forbes (0 percent), the Republican Congressman from Long Island who switched parties (but not abortion positions) last summer, was energetically courted by Democratic bigwigs, including Representative Richard Gephardt (84 percent, up from 54 percent in 1997) and prochoice President Clinton himself...
...Who insists that medical schools that take federal funds teach students how to perform abortions (most don't) and that hospitals that take federal funds perform abortions as part of routine gynecological care...
...In this scenario, the Democratic Party's most loyal constituents—feminists, gays, civil libertarians, blacks, liberals—are the problem and an imaginary bloc of "Catholic" or "white working-class" votes the solution...
...The attempt to ban "partial birth" abortions is about two things...
...Abortion is increasingly hard to find, and, for poor women, increasingly hard to pay for...
...I wonder how many black Chicagoans see racism as just a regrettable sour note in Chicago's working-class New Deal symphony...
...Second, the bans are typically worded vaguely, so as to cover a variety of methods performed much earlier in pregnancy...
...I WISH THE Democratic Party really had the staunch prochoice politics Peggy Steinfels thinks it does...
...We are moving toward the very situation Steinfels wants: abortion is legal, but increasingly out of reach...
...This is not surprising when you consider that most Catholics are not antichoice, and, indeed, have abortions at a slightly higher rate than other faiths...
...Where are the Democratic politicians speaking out against Catholic-secular hospital mergers, which result in the loss not just of abortion services but access to birth control, in vitro fertilization, emergency contraception, and sterilization...
...Similarly, Steinfels presents banning dilation and extraction abortions as a minor concession to justly outraged Catholic sensibilities...
...Believe me, if millions of Democrats, Catholic or not, felt as strongly as Steinfels does about restricting abortion, the party of Bill Clinton and (formerly antichoice) Al Gore would instantly respond...
...She wants President Clinton to distinguish between good and bad reasons for abortion—an interesting philosophical question, perhaps, but one that could affect public policy only if Roe v. Wade, which expressly leaves the abortion decision to the pregnant woman in the first two trimesters, were overturned...
...in a 1994 poll, Catholics rated abortion 9th among eleven political priorities (for all voters, abortion ranked between eight and nine, which makes Catholics slightly more indifferent to abortion than the norm...
...Why shouldn't it...
...Is a single Democratic politician fighting for the restoration of federal funds for poor women's abortions— abolished, let's not forget, by a Democratic president, Jimmy Carter...
...No one would accuse today's party fixers and rainmakers of an excess of ideological purity...
...One can only assume that she would like to see those restrictions here as well...
...Except for her own feelings and a passing reference to Samuel Freedman's The Inheritance, which profiles three right-wing activists, she provides no evidence for her claim...
...To the extent that the Democratic Party remains prochoice, the reason must be that through the magic of focus groups and polls and Dick Morris-like triangulations, it has figured out that it will gain more votes, campaign workers, and contributions that way...
...Far from mandating a commitment to abortion rights, in 1998 the party's official election strategy was to recruit conservative candidates—pro-gun, pro—death penalty, antichoice—to run against vulnerable Republicans...
...The statistics and polling data I've seen do not support Steinfels's belief that abortion, much less assisted suicide, plays a significant role in these shifts...
...It's unfortunate that Steinfels does not seem aware of these widely reported developments...
...First, antichoicers want to get rid of the health exception—forcing women to carry to term even if the pregnancy will result in a dead anencephalic baby or in horrific, lasting, but non-certifiably-fatal damage—paralysis, sterility, accelerated disease...
...It's because thousands of Democratic women use Emily's List to make sure their dollars go for prochoice, female, at least faintly feminist candidates instead of the Glenn Poshards and the Michael Forbeses...
...Over in the House, the congressional delegation from Steinfels's home state of Illinois includes William Lipinsky (12 percent), Jerry Costello (2 percent) and Glenn Poshard (24 percent), who ran unsuccessfully for governor in 1998 with full party (and AFL-CIO) backing...
...Once again the "worker" would be cast as white and male ("men got jobs...
...I suppose it's natural for Steinfels to mourn the lost political privileges of her own religio-ethnic group, but what does a famously corrupt racial and ethnic spoils system—enforced, let's not forget, by staggering levels of police brutality—have to do with social justice or "the working class"—heavily minority, even in Steinfels's youth, not to mention today...
...Steinfels suggests that "Catholics"—by which she means the old European ethnics, not Latinos, who are about one quarter of today's Catholics and growing rapidly—are becoming disaffected from the Democratic Party, and that the party's support of abortion rights is the reason...
...If Steinfels accepts Roe as the law of the land, as she says she does, why blame the president for understanding what the law permits...
Vol. 47 • January 2000 • No. 1
