Letters to the Editor
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Catholics and Bush...
A lot of Catholics (and people of other or no religious affiliation) oppose abortion, capital punishment, and the Iraq war. The Pope himself strongly urged Bush to find a peaceful solution.
I know a lot of Catholics who don't like Bush and oppose the war, but voted for him anyway. These are people who truly consider human life as beginning when sperm meets egg. They saw that over a million abortions were being performed legally every year in America. They saw the death toll in Iraq in comparison as quite small. They saw Bush's record on abortion, his promise to appoint Supreme Court Justices that would try to overturn Roe v. Wade. They saw Kerry's record on abortion, his promise to appoint justices that would uphold Roe v. Wade, and that he had no real plan for getting us out of Iraq. They went with what they considered the lesser of two evils.
(Myself, I refused on principle to vote for either Bush or Kerry. I sat that part of the ballot out. Was that the right decision? I don't know.)
The irony is that Planned Parenthood is getting free nationwide advertising now by having their ads pulled from a Catholic college's public radio station. Sometimes I wonder why PP tries to advertise in places they gotta know will pull their ads...
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"Sometimes I wonder why PP tries to advertise in places they gotta know will pull their ads..."
Well, I think you already said it. The free advertising is a bonus.
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The relatively "small" Iraq death toll
Running the numbers like that doesn't sound like something Jesus would do. I have always admired the purism of Catholicism, which I think is better represented by your own choice to vote for neither candidate. Comparing one candidate's shaky level of responsibility for millions of fetal deaths (most of which would happen even if abortion were illegal) to another candidate's obvious level of direct responsibility for tens of thousands of Iraqi deaths and then choosing the latter? Well, that's pretty tricky math, and it doesn't sound like Christianity to me, voting for a war hawk because he will nominate judges who might eventually overturn Roe v. Wade.
In any case, this was not originally a discussion about the votes of individuals, which happen for many reasons and are really none of my business. It's about the Church as a body taking a hard-line, public, loud, vocal stance against abortion, everywhere, all the time. And about war? Well, talking too much about that might get them in trouble with their political allies. I'm not talking about individual voters; I was Catholic once, and I know that lots of members do tons of work for families, their communities, and social justice. I'm talking about official political activities. You know, if the Church talked as loudly, publicly and vocally about grown-ups being killed as they do about fetuses being killed, I would still have a shred of respect for the it. As it is, I see that body as being disproportinately obsessed with sex and gender.
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@Leandra
I was being sarcastic about the "National Catholic Radio" station thing; it was meant as a dig on WDUQ's being one of the first NPR stations. Anyhow, WDUQ isn't a student-run station at all. It is a non-profit public radio station that's affiliated with Duquesne University; about half of its operating budget comes from donors and only 6% from the university.
I would have no problem at all with the decision to turn down Planned Parenthood underwriting if had originated with the WDUQ station management. However, the order to drop the PP underwriting was imposed from outside the WDUQ organization by the president of Duquesne University, presumably because the Catholic Church disapproves of Planned Parenthood. This is an entirely different kettle of fish!
Many WDUQ listeners are upset about this because they fear this is the first step in reining in WDUQ's journalistic and editorial freedom. It is being read as a signal that local Catholic authorities are cracking down on anything that deviates from the official church line. What will be the next order by Duquesne's president? To censor reports on pedophile priests from the NPR feed? To not report on any local diocesan scandals? Nobody knows.
Also, it's worth mentioning that dumping only the Planned Parenthood underwriting on the grounds that the organization violates Catholic doctrine is hypocritical. Among the underwriters listed on the station's web site are Reproductive Health Specialists, which performs IVF and other fertility procedures that are against church doctrine; Bayer Corporation, whose pharmaceutical division manufactures several different types of contraceptives, all of which are forbidden under church doctrine; and Highmark, whose member physicians provide any number of reproductive health services forbidden by the church. If Planned Parenthood is being turned down for violating church doctrine about reproduction, these organizations should be dumped, too, for consistency. Yet I have heard nothing of the sort originating from the august chambers of the president of Duquesne, which leads me to believe that this affair is political rather than doctrinaire.
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Right-to-Lifers' Hypocrisy & the Catholic Church
I've always been amazed at the utter hypocrisy of the "life begins at conception" crowd who feel that every life and precious and sacred, but then bomb women's clinics and hold to a fierce and bloodthirsty support for the death penalty, or support wars no matter how illegal and unnecessary and bloody they are. As a previous commenter said, they seem obsessed with sex and gender, and this leads them to be curiously selective in their "pro-life" outrage. Plus they don't really care about civilian deaths in Iraq because those are heathen who are destined for hell anyway, right?
I will say this: I utterly despise the Catholic Church and virtually everything it stands for, but the Catholic hierarchy is at least more consistent than the evangelical and fundie Protestants in this regard. They are anti-abortion, anti-contraception, anti-death penalty, and anti-war. They at least understand the importance of intellectual consistency. Now do they shriek as loudly in opposition to the death penalty or the war as they do to abortion? Of course not, and that's where the cynical political calculations and the sex obsessions come into play. But at least on the fundamental level, the principles they espouse are more consistent.
Then again, one could retort that the Catholic Church's opposition to condom usage and other birth control in the Third World, and especially sub-Saharan Africa, contributes greatly to human misery and unnecessary death. The impact on the HIV/AIDS crisis alone--aside from questions of overpopulation--shows the contradictions and inconsistencies of even the Catholic Church on issues of "the sanctity of life". That's where their Christian sexual pathologies trump their concerns about life. So, even the Catholics are hypocrites, but less so than the Bible-thumping Protestants on these issues.