Beating People With Their Own Stick

Yesterday in my lazy travels around the blogs I stepped into the abortion debate – check it out here, way down in the comments. Ah, don’t bother. Why would anyone care? But Gregg Smith Craig Moore (my bad) had thrown an authority figure at me – the Archbishop of Denver, who had made some disparaging comments about Barack Obama centered on, of course, abortion rights. Archbishop Chaput says Joe Biden should not present himself for communion because of his stance on abortion – that is, to be personally opposed but legally tolerant. That’s immoral, says Chaput – our private ideas about what is moral must be imposed on the population at large. Obama is dangerous, he says, speaking as a private person, because Obama is not a strict anti-abortionist.

I responded with the official teaching of the Catholic Church on abortion – that lacking any guidance in the Bible, the Church teaches that abortion is wrong because we as humans must err on the side of life. But the key is “lacking any guidance from the Bible”. The book is silent on the matter, and that, I said, makes it a matter for humans to decide. The Church stumbles, mistaking itself for God.

Well and good, but it left me with an icky feeling. For one thing, I don’t give a good golly damn what any archbishop thinks about anything. For another, I don’t much care about the Bible. I felt sullied by it all – I was using their own club to beat them. And like it or not, abortion is part of the human experience, legal or not, and so is coercion, and I feel more sympathy for a woman forced to yield eighteen years of her life for one night’s foolishness than I do guilt about the relatively simple and harmless procedures we use in early pregnancy to eliminate the problem.

I discussed this matter with a woman very close to me, my daughter, and I brought up the debate about when life begins. Her answer stunned me for its simplicity – “I don’t care.” Sounds callous, I know, but as Obama said, it’s above our pay grade. And there are more important issues at hand than to legalize or criminalize the behavior of a segment of our society, said behavior going on whether it is legal or not. The “pro-life” movement must know that abortion liberates women, as does birth control. Surely Holy Mother Church knows this, as that male-dominated institution outlaws both.

So I’m left here with a Bible in my hand and not knowing whether to use it for a door stop or paper weight. It’s got some interesting stuff in it, some pretty neat stuff – there are potent arguments for the validity of doubt in some Old Testament works. Sometimes biblical verse illuminates, most times not – it’s interpretation that matters most. People tend to use God as a sock puppet. They are really inflicting their own private preferences on us when they use biblical verse against us.

So did I err in using the bible against the anti-abortionists? Was I a hypocrite? Absolutely. And I’ll do it again.

Addendum: All of this reminds me of the words of Genesis, perhaps responsible for more damage and suffering than any words written anywhere: “Be fruitful, and multiply, and replenish the earth, and subdue it: and have dominion over the fish of the sea and over the fowl of the air, and over every living thing that moveth upon the earth.” Ah yes – the dominion clause – perhaps the only words in the Good Book that humans ever took seriously.