Flip-Flopping, Abortion, and Religion

Ben's dad again. Brian asked for a response to this concern about Kerry's consistency on abortion. So here are a few reflections.

It doesn't qualify as a flip-flop to assert, as I take Kerry and like-minded Catholic politicians (such as Mario Cuomo) to do, "I personally oppose abortion but am not prepared to impose that moral view on others and am, moreover, committed to ensuring that all women are able to excercise a right that the Supreme Court has decided is guaranteed by the Constitution." This is not a flip-flop because it involves no change of mind.

The deeper question is whether the view is muddled or incoherent. How can I call an action immoral and not be simultaneously committed to doing all I can to prevent it? Worse, how can I believe that God prohibits this action yet claim that it is permissible because protected by a court of mere humans? How can I believe that God is the Supreme Power yet allow Him to be trumped by the Supreme Court?

Let's consider the general moral problem separately from the specifically religious one. Can I regard an action as immoral yet stand by comfortably while others engage in it? In fact, liberal society - in the sense of "liberal" that encompasses modern-day politicians wearing "liberal" and "conservative" labels - is premised on the possibility of doing just that. A liberal society is by definition one that, within a very broad but not completely uncircumscribed arena, allows citizens to decide for themselves, or in conjunction with like-minded citizens, basic questions of purpose and value in life. What is the meaning of life? What is the best way to live one's life? What is a moral life? What is an immoral life? Answers to questions of this sort are not to be established by the state.

As a free citizen of a liberal society, I am at liberty to answer these questions as I please, and act on my answers, provided that in doing so I don't infringe upon basic liberties guaranteed to all citizens in a brief schedule of rights: life, liberty itself, due process of the law, property, etc. It may be objected here - and has been objected - that liberalism broadly defined is itself a moral view, rendering it incoherent (to put it crudely and over-simply, a state-imposed moral view that the state is not to impose moral views). I won't try to answer that objection here. What matters is that the United States has long identified itself with liberalism in the broad sense I've been describing, and that, as I explain below, if liberalism is incoherent, it is no more so than the view that most Americans take of the obligations imposed by religion.

Of course, illiberal societies explicitly reject liberalism's live-and-let-live approach. In particular, theocracies are committed to the notion that the Supreme Power, the Book, and the Deputies of the Power and the Book (e.g., the Pope) are the arbiters of life's basic questions of purpose and value. As a mortal (the proper term for my relationship to God) and a subject (the proper term - rather than "citizen" - for my relationship to the state), it is my duty to follow the path laid down by the Power and the Book as interpreted by their Deputies. (In the case of Protestantism, I might find myself duly deputed, somewhat complicating the picture.) Moreover, it is a legitimate - indeed necessary - function of the state to ensure that all citizens follow this path and abide by the "higher law" that defines it.

Although the United States is not a theocracy, some of the colonists who helped to create it certainly shared this illiberal vision, and the idea of America has, in some minds, always had a missionary, religio-militant, dimension. But many, many religious Americans have difficulty with the idea that the state and the "higher law" must speak in one voice and strike or guide as one hand. Hence (ironically, in light of the Bush administration's campaign rhetoric about Kerry and abortion) the anxiety during the Kennedy campaign that the nation's first Catholic president would take his marching orders from the Pope. I don't think the anxiety was that a president would hold the Pope, specifically, higher than the Constitution, but that he would hold any religious authority in that regard.

These Americans, were they to stop and think about their view (as, of course, some do) would recognize that they face a fundamental philosophical contradiction as deep as the one faced by liberalism itself. By definition, most religions say to us (certainly Christianity says it), "The Truth is One. All must answer to it. And it is [fill in the blank]." Religions themselves, in other words, are inherently illiberal, and this perhaps is one reason why the "reform" version of any religion - reform Judaism, Unitarianism, etc. - is bound to offend the religion's hard-core adherents as substanceless and self-deceiving - worse, it might be said, than straightforward, honest unbelief. So religious Americans who are unprepared to follow their religion's message of a unitary Truth that binds all humanity - which is to say, most Americans - are implicitly disobeying their religion's prime directive in subscribing to membership in a liberal society.

For nearly two-and-a-half centuries, America has gotten along without resolving the philosophical contradictions of liberalism itself or of religious belief in a liberal society. Choosing practicality over philosophy (is this itself a moral choice?) it has tried to be a "big tent" for many different views and lifestyles that maintains allegiance to a baggy kind of faith in "something higher" than human life and human powers.

In other words, in his attitude toward abortion, religion, and the law, Kerry is a quintessential American. I'll take him and his inconsistency any time over the purity of an Osama, a Falwell, or a Mel Gibson (none as pure as they think - but that's a story for another day).