Law professor Douglas Kmiec defended his position in NCR several days ago 'Why Archbishop Chaput's abortion stance is wrong' | National Catholic Reporter , in the face of this LifeNet: Franciscan Archbishop Charles Chaput powerfully demolishes Douglas Kmiec and other "Pro-Life, Pro-Obama" apologists .
This morning an analysis of Kmiec's essay in NCR was published online. We highly recommend it - takes ten minutes or so to read.
An excerpt is below the link
Public Discourse - The Pro-Life Case Against Barack Obama . . . and Doug Kmiec, by Ryan T. Anderson
Doug Kmiec is at it again. His most recent Obama propaganda piece is titled ''Why Archbishop Chaput's Abortion Stance Is Wrong.'' As far as we can tell, Kmiec, a legal scholar who identifies as pro-life, has never written an article titled ''Why Senator Obama's Abortion Stance Is Wrong.'' We await such an article. In the meantime, Kmiec has offered a pro-Obama reply to Archbishop Chaput's wise counsel that Catholics vote with a view to securing the equal protection of the law for all people, born or unborn. Kmiec's answers to the Archbishop can be divided without remainder into three categories: the irrelevant, the false, and the fallacious. Exposing their failure shows that the pro-life case against Obama is decisive.
>>>>>>
What about his argument that Church teaching--including Pope Benedict's stated views on the matter--would leave room for a principled defense of a vote for Obama? Is Kmiec right to claim that there can be reasons to vote for a pro-choice candidate over a pro-life one that are proportionate to the possibly unintended harms of doing so?
Notre Dame legal scholar Gerard Bradley provides some helpful thought experiments to guide us in applying the Golden Rule as a proportionality test: What if it were not unborn babies being denied legal protections, but some other class of people? If 1.2 million American women a year were being killed by abusive husbands, he asks, would we vote for a candidate who was ''pro-choice'' about the ''private'' matter of lethal domestic violence but favored addressing its root causes (say, with anger-management classes and education)?
Or suppose some candidate favored protecting a "right" to kill hundreds of thousands of mentally handicapped or infirm people each year. Even if we thought his views superior to his opponent's on issues like foreign policy, the economy, and health care, would we be justified in voting for him?
Given Obama's record, we can even strengthen the analogies: What would we think of a candidate who favored financially supporting legalized domestic abuse or extermination of the unwanted?
Of course, some would object that the cases are different because unborn human beings do not enjoy the same moral status as the rest of us. But this would be to deny the principle of basic human equality that Kmiec claims to accept and that defines his intended audience, faithful Catholics and other pro-lifers.
Comments