The following article originally was published by The Wanderer, and is reproduced with permission.
WASHINGTON, D.C. — Democrats are targeting evangelicals, who are the nation’s strongest Republican voting bloc outside of Mormons. A key piece to that outreach has been repackaging the party stance on abortion, a chief obstacle to support by strongly pro-life evangelicals.
The newly expanded Democratic platform language on abortion deletes the Clinton-era language about making abortion “ safe, legal, and rare” and instead adds verbiage about government-provided family planning, sex education, and medical care that ostensibly will reduce abortions, at least from the view of supportive liberal religious voices.
Immediately after the new plan was unveiled in August, Jim Wallis’ religious left Sojourners hosted a media conference call to highlight enthusiasm for the new abortion stance by evangelicals and Catholics. “ Pro-lifers of both parties can now support Sen. Obama on the basis that more lives will be saved than if they had just taken a moral stand hoping to overturn Roe v. Wade,” rejoiced Florida mega-church pastor Joel Hunter, who delivered the final benediction at the Democratic National Convention.
He lamented that “cynical partisan profiteers” will fault the new plank. But he is “very encouraged” that Democrats have “widened their public support of mothers who choose life.”
What exactly is the supposedly dramatic shift? The 2004 language succinctly said: “Because we believe in the privacy and equality of women, we stand proudly for a woman’s right to choose, consistent with Roe v. Wade, and regardless of her ability to pay. We stand firmly against Republican efforts to undermine that right. At the same time, we strongly support family planning and adoption incentives. Abortion should be safe, legal, and rare.”
More verbosely, the 2008 language “strongly and unequivocally supports Roe v. Wade and a woman’s right to choose a safe and legal abortion, regardless of ability to pay, and we oppose any and all efforts to weaken or undermine that right.”
What excites the religious left is the addition of support for “affordable family planning services and comprehensive age-appropriate sex education” to reduce “unintended pregnancies.” It also affirms access to “pre- and postnatal health care, parenting skills, income support, and caring adoption programs.”
The new platform’s cry for more government-provided sex education, contraceptives, and medical care is hardly a new stance for the Democratic Party. But the Democratic message fits snugly with the religious left’s theme that a comprehensive pro- life agenda demands a wide smorgasbord of expanded government services for nearly every human need, along with opposition to all war and capital punishment. So the religious supporters on the Sojourners conference call waxed at length with enthusiasm.
“Barack Obama’s campaign and the Democratic Party have taken a historic and courageous step toward empowering women for an expanded range of choices and saving babies’ lives by supporting mothers whose will and conscience tells them to carry their babies to term,” insisted the Rev. Hunter. “They have broken through the narrow traditional barrier that focused only on a woman’s right to choose and abortion.” Hunter, a prominent board member of the National Association of Evangelicals, is a rising star in the evangelical left.
An older star in the evangelical left constellation, Wallis hailed the “common ground” he discerned in the new Democratic plank. “ I think a lot of people are going to find their convictions represented here,” he celebrated. And the former 1960s-era activist naturally liked the linkage of abortion to poverty. “Many abortions are chosen because low-income women don’t feel they have choices,” he noted. “There isn’t coercion here, there’s support for a woman to make a decision to bring her child to term. And that’s important along with a woman’s right to choose.”
Actually serving on the Democratic platform committee was the liberal evangelist Tony Campolo, Wallis’ longtime soul mate and a post-Monica spiritual counselor to Bill Clinton. Campolo was more restrained about the plank: “It’s less than we want but it’s a great deal more than many people expected.” The evangelist hoped that the candidate would go beyond the platform.“ This is not simply a pragmatic social issue of economic dimensions,” Campolo exclaimed. “It’s a moral issue. And what we are waiting to hear from Barack Obama is that he, as he has said on other occasions, sees this as a moral issue, an issue of conscience.”
He concluded: “I feel the committee worked hard to give language that gave evangelicals and Roman Catholics the sense that they could participate in the Democratic Party without a compromise of their convictions.”
A Fig Leaf
Also participating in the Sojourners phone-in was Pepperdine University professor and former Reagan- era Justice Department counsel Douglas Kmiec, a Roman Catholic. He hailed the new platform for its incorporation of Catholic social teaching about “ providing for a family wage, providing for decent health care, providing for decent shelter, providing for the conditions that enhance the human person — [and] are essential to making sure that no person, no woman, no expectant mother feels compelled or coerced to make the tragic choice of taking the life of her own child.”
Calling the new plank a “historic moment” that “does much for the Democrats, for Catholics, and for women,” Kmiec admitted that “it still falls short of the Catholic ideal” but added that so too does the Republican platform. “We live in this world and we pursue the art of the possible and as we move to protect even a single life, we’ve done a good thing.”
Implicitly the Democratic plank supports government- funded abortion (“regardless of ability to pay”), on which none of the supportive religionists commented. Nor did they offer hard empirical data evidencing that an increased welfare state, complemented by government-provided sex education and contraceptives (presumably including minors) de facto leads to fewer abortions.
But for religious activists searching for a fig leaf to justify evangelical and Catholic support for Democratic pro-abortion rights candidates, the new plank seems adequate.
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