an obscene pander

Yesterday as a nation we celebrated the 228th anniversary of the document containing these words:

We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness.—That to secure these rights, Governments are instituted among Men, deriving their just powers from the consent of the governed, —That whenever any Form of Government becomes destructive of these ends, it is the Right of the People to alter or to abolish it, and to institute new Government, laying its foundation on such principles and organizing its powers in such form, as to them shall seem most likely to effect their Safety and Happiness.

The first of the certain unalienable Rights is that of Life.

Just don't tell John Kerry.

But even as he tried to avoid making news Sunday, Kerry broke new ground in an interview that ran in the Dubuque, Iowa, Telegraph Herald. A Catholic who supports abortion rights and has taken heat from some in the church hierarchy for his stance, Kerry told the paper, “I oppose abortion, personally. I don't like abortion. I believe life does begin at conception.”

Spokeswoman Stephanie Cutter said that although Kerry has often said abortion should be “safe, legal and rare,” and that his religion shapes that view, she could not recall him ever publicly discussing when life begins.

“I can't take my Catholic belief, my article of faith, and legislate it on a Protestant or a Jew or an atheist,” he continued in the interview. “We have separation of church and state in the United States of America.” The comments came on the final day of a three-state Midwest swing, during which Kerry has repeatedly sought to dispel stereotypes that could play negatively among voters there.

If one truly believes that “life begins at conception” then this formulation is utterly incoherent. Unless, that is, one is willing to follow the argument to its natural and logical conclusion, as does Camille Paglia.

Women's modern liberation requires, in my view, their absolute control over their own bodies. I have argued, from my atheistic perspective, that our reproductive machinery is our property, planted in us by Mother Nature in the womb. In other words, our identities as natural beings precede social citizenship, which we gain at birth. Hence the state has no power to intervene in any decision we make about our bodies.

At the same time, I am honest enough to admit that abortion is murder, a form of extermination of the weak by the strong, too often for expediency or convenience. (My sexual philosophy is detailed in “No Law in the Arena” in Vamps & Tramps.) While I militantly defend the right of every woman of any age to abort her fetus, I am also very troubled by the obsessive centrality given abortion rights in contemporary feminism. Surely there is a failure of logic and imagination in those Hollywood spokespersons who denounce capital punishment (which I support) while defending abortion, a cold, lethal, invasive, surgical procedure.

But Paglia is, as she notes, an atheist. Kerry claims to be a Roman Catholic in good standing, a member of a Church which holds that at conception a human soul is created by a direct act of God. How could such belief not impact one's view of civil law? Does Kerry truly believe that religious convictions are illegitimate in the public square? How then does he view the overtly Christian motives of the Founders, or of those who opposed slavery, or of those who more recently labored for civil rights?

I am not a Catholic. Ed Morrissey is, however.

Catholics wish to protect life from conception forward, and others seek to protect it from their definition of its inception. John Kerry, in his remarks to the Iowa newspaper, comes up with a completely different raison d'etre — he seeks to define life so as to protect his political career. Kerry now admits he practices hypocrisy on a scale so monstrous, it boggles the mind.

If life begins at conception, why then does Jon Kerry not only agree to allow abortion, but campaigns on its behalf? Does he care so little for human life and the souls of the unborn that he cheerfully sells them out for political gain? John Kerry was one of only 14 Senators who voted to continue the practice of partial-birth abortions, which take a fetus past the point of viability into the birth canal and kills it by sucking out its brain. How does that match up with a belief in life at conception? […]

And that really gets us to the crux of this statement. Kerry not only has voted to support abortion, he openly campaigned for it, up to the point that he found himself running for national office. Now he says he personally opposes abortion but felt as though he could not impose his “beliefs” on others. If true, Kerry also never felt the need to argue for his beliefs, to try to convince others of the truth of his own beliefs. Many others, including George Bush and a whole Party of politicians, have managed to stand up for what they believe is right and still be successful. What other beliefs will Kerry find as easy to sell out for political expediency?

But political expediency explains only the dissembling pander to yokels from the heartland. The constancy of the Senator's actions (on this issue, if on few others) over his long career has demonstrated another thing entirely: that his primary allegiance is to a very different Church, one in which the only inviolable sacrament is abortion.

As Peggy Noonan sums: Abortion is the glue that holds the Democratic Party together. If you doubt that, ponder a while on the manifest zeal of the Party elders for third trimester termination.