Bill Donohue: "How the Catholic Left Is Boxed in by Abortion"

The Catholic League's Bill Donohue has a piece on left-leaning Catholic interest groups at InsideCatholic:

... Try as they may to find matters that rival the life issues, the Catholic Left continues to come up empty. When the United States Conference of Catholic Bishops voted overwhelmingly on June 13 to affirm the Church's teaching on embryonic stem cell research, the Catholic Left could not summon the courage to congratulate them.

Of the four Catholic Left groups that have been making some noise this presidential season -- Catholics United, Catholic Democrats, NETWORK, and Catholics in Alliance for the Common Good -- only the latter even mentioned the bishops' vote. And the best it could do was to reprint a ChicagoTribune story on it.

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All of these examples come down to one thing: In 2004, the Democrats lost because they got their clocks cleaned by values voters. Now Catholic Democrats are determined not to let this happen again -- hence the sudden interest in "God talk" and attempts to neutralize the abortion issue. But at the end of the day, few will be fooled by such shenanigans. Even those who try to establish parity between the moral significance of global warming and killing children in the womb have to know that they're engaged in a fool's exercise.

Just recently, John Kelly, Catholic outreach liaison for the Democratic National Committee, gave away the store when he wrote, "The Democratic Party realizes that life does not end at birth and must be supported and nurtured through a society built on the common good."

How refreshing. If the Democrats are willing to admit that life doesn't end at birth, then they are conceding that it begins some time before birth. And whether that point is at conception, or at quickening, or at some other time before birth, it makes it morally indefensible to justify some, if not all, abortions.

It is for reasons like this that abortion will continue to haunt the Catholic Left. They've boxed themselves in, and there's no way out.

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