Old Relics

by digby

E.J. Dionne thinks this is a good time for Democrats to reach out to anti-abortion conservatives to find common ground. Obama ran on that platform and he needs to change the party from the “pro-choice” party to the “abortion reduction” party. Whatever. If that means that Democrats work with Republicans on expanding health care for women and kids and providing access to birth control than that’s a “compromise” I’m more than happy to support it. (We won’t talk about the fact that pro-choice people have always been for those things — we’ll just pretend that we’re moving off of a fictitious position that everyone should be forced to have abortions and call it a compromise.)

Dionne writes:

Obama, who has shown he can draw lessons from Bill Clinton’s presidency, can find one on this issue. Picking up on the pro-choice movement’s most popular slogan, Clinton declared during his 1992 campaign that abortion should be “safe, legal and rare.”

Abortions did become rarer during Clinton’s time in office, dropping by 11 percent. But since Clinton made no major public moves on abortion reduction, many pro-lifers who had been inclined his way felt he had ignored the third word in his motto. There’s no reason for Obama to make the same mistake—and no reason for advocates of abortion rights to get in the way of his trying to build a new consensus.

On Election Day, according to the exit polls, more than 60 percent of Obama’s ballots came from voters who described themselves as either “moderate” or “conservative.”

These voters don’t want Obama to be timid on his core economic promises, but they do expect him to govern as the cultural moderate he promised to be. He should not lose his chance to make cultural warfare a quaint relic of the past.

(I wonder if Obama will also be able to cure male pattern baldness and create an anti-obesity chocolate brownie too? If he can’t then I’m afraid he’s going to be quite a failure…)

I think we can see the problem here. Just actually reducing abortions won’t be good enough. He will have to do more than that. And whatever that is (he doesn’t say) he shouldn’t let pro-choice people stand in his way. Yessir.

But the idea that pro-choice people are the primary obstacle is kind of funny. You’ll have to pardon me for being a little bit skeptical that this is going to be enough to finally make this issue a “relic of the past” when things like this are happening:

A Greenville, S.C., priest who told parishioners those who voted for President-elect Barack Obama risked placing themselves “outside of the full communion of Christ’s church” is simply enunciating church teaching and has the full support of the Diocese of Charleston, a spokesman said Thursday. The provocative letter from the Rev. Jay Scott Newman to members of St. Mary’s Catholic Church has sparked controversy and yet another conversation about faith and public policy.”Voting for a pro-abortion politician when a plausible pro-life alternative exists constitutes material cooperation with intrinsic evil,” Newman said in the letter posted on the Greenville church’s Web site, www.stmarysgvl.org, “and those Catholics who do so place themselves outside of the full communion of Christ’s Church and under the judgment of divine law.” Newman said that those who did not choose the anti-abortion candidate, in this case U.S. Sen. John McCain, “should not receive Holy Communion until and unless they are reconciled to God in the Sacrament of Penance, lest they eat and drink their own condemnation.”Calling Obama “the most radical pro-abortion politician ever to serve in the United States Senate,” Newman went on to say Catholics must pray for the newly elected chief executive.”Let us hope and pray that the responsibilities of the presidency and the grace of God will awaken in the conscience of this extraordinarily gifted man an awareness that the unholy slaughter of children in this nation is the greatest threat to the peace and security of the United States and constitutes a clear and present danger to the common good,” Newman said in the letter.

If “reducing abortion” through greater access to birth control and more support for poor women will appease that fellow, then we may very well be able to end the culture wars and all live together in peace and harmony. What do you think the odds are of that happening?

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