First Things on Commonweal on Catholic Voting

Robert T. Miller writes at First Things:

Eduardo Moisés Peñalver, who teaches at Cornell, argues in Commonweal that the genuinely Catholic vote this fall should go to the Democratic party. In fact, for Peñalver, it’s not even a close call, for he thinks that the Bush administration knowingly led the United States into war in Iraq on false pretenses, tortures prisoners to extract confessions and satisfy its hatreds, intentionally seeks to favor the rich at the expense of the poor, and consciously enflames racial hatred for political advantage. He thus proves, sadly, that some people are determined to believe the worst about those who disagree with them on complex political issues.

I would let it go at that, but Peñalver also talks about Catholic moral doctrine on abortion, getting some aspects of that doctrine quite wrong. In particular, he says that, if opposition to abortion were the moral imperative that Catholics like Robert George and Gerald Bradley say it is, then “George W. Bush’s failure to take extraordinary steps during his six years in office to put an immediate end to the slaughter makes him nearly as culpable as prochoice politicians. If mass murder is going on every day in this country, shouldn’t President Bush halt all other government business in order to force through a constitutional amendment outlawing abortion?”

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Publius at Res Publica et Cetera offers his cogent analysis here.