Politics

News analysis

The every-four-year national skirmish among Catholics over abortion politics is as predictable as a politician’s smile. But this year a few “game changers,” in the phrase of the season, have altered the conversation within the Catholic community and for the wider culture.

For the first time since the abortion issue began to dominate the Catholic political discussion 35 years ago, groups have organized and high-profile Catholics have gone public to insist that Catholic teaching does not prohibit a vote for a pro-choice politician.

Much to the contrary, in fact, groups like Catholics in Alliance for the Common Good and Catholics United note that the teaching explicitly prohibits bishops from endorsing or opposing specific candidates, from instructing Catholics on how to vote or from arguing that Catholics need consider only one issue in determining how to vote.

One of the more prominent Catholic backers of the presidential aspirations of Barak Obama today predicted warm U.S./Vatican relations under an Obama administration, arguing that it would enable new partnerships built around the church’s social teachings.

Douglas Kmiec, former legal counsel for Presidents Ronald Reagan and George H.W. Bush, also said that while he has given “no thought” to the prospect of serving as Obama’s ambassador to the Vatican, he would “never rule anything out.”

Kmiec, a law professor at Pepperdine, is author of Can a Catholic Support Him? Asking the Big Question about Barack Obama, in which he argues that the pro-life teachings of the church can be reconciled with voting for Obama despite the Democratic candidate's pro-choice stance. Kmiec spoke this morning to reporters in a conference call organized by the “Matthew 25 Network,” a coalition of Christian groups that has endorsed Obama.

Catholic Democrats, a state-based network of groups representing a Catholic voice within the Democratic Party, has decried as "hypocritical and partisan" an attack by Carl Anderson, national head of the Knights of Columbus, on Sen. Joseph Biden, the Democratic vice presidential candidate.

In an open letter that ran as full-page advertisements in several major U.S. daily newspapers, Anderson attacked Biden’s Catholicism, the action stemming from comments the senator had made about abortion. Anderson compared the vice presidential candidate's views on abortion to those of pre-Civil War advocates of slavery.

The Knights of Columbus is a Catholic fraternal organization. Anderson is the group's Supreme Knight.

News Analysis
Somewhere beneath the turmoil about presidential campaign lipstick remarks and the latest stage of market meltdown, the unspeakable “r” word (race) continues to buzz quietly.

It can be detected, for example, in new laws requiring photo IDs in order to vote; it’s heard among the purging of voter roles on the basis of a single returned letter or an address on a new property foreclosure list.

Those who have long tracked racial issues charge that the sometimes systematic culling of ineligible voters targets mostly poor urban voters, who also happen to be mostly black.

Only a scant few might suggest that racism ended when laws forced the “whites only” signs to come down in places like Alabama and Mississippi, just as hardly a soul would say that racism in the political world ended with the 1965 Voting Rights Act.