Abortion

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Dear Washington Post editors: Ask some orthodox Catholics why THEY oppose Trump

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You knew this story was coming sooner or later, in The Washington Post as well as in every other mainstream news outlet. The understated Post headline: "Donald Trump has a massive Catholic problem."

Of course he does. I mean, let's think it through.

Raise your hand if you are surprised that the majority of Catholics and ex-Catholics who oppose their church's defense of ancient Christian doctrines on sex, marriage, the defense of life from conception to grave and related issues are going to vote for Hillary Rodham Clinton.

Raise your hand if you are surprised that Catholics who say they support those teachings, but have not defended these doctrines in public life or even a voting booth since, oh, 1973, are going to vote for Clinton.

Raise your hand if you are surprised that millions of Latino Catholics are going to vote against Donald Trump.

So far, it's easy to do the math. So what is the interesting question in this piece of news? Hint. You will not find the answer in the Post piece that is currently getting lots of promotion. First, here are some key facts right up top:

Yes, the man who once feuded with the pope (how soon we forget that actually happened) is cratering among Catholics.


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Yo, Washington Post editors (again): Some conservatives don't really care about the GOP

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Challenge No. 1: Write a history of conservative political life in the post-Roe v. Wade era -- focusing on the Republican Party in particular -- without mentioning the role of cultural and religious conservatives.

Do you think historians could pull that off?

Challenge No. 2: Write a news feature about the GOP race for the White House in 2016 without mentioning the role of religious conservatives -- white evangelical Protestants and traditional Catholics, in particular -- in the primary battles between Citizen Donald Trump, Sen. Ted Cruz, etc. Do you think journalists could write such a story without including strong references to the prominent role of evangelical leaders in the #NeverTrump camp, as well as old-guard Religious Right folks in team Trump?

Actually, we sort of know that political-desk journalists at the Washington Post can meet that challenge, or one very similar to it. You see, they have already done that. See this earlier post: "Hey Washington Post czars: Evangelicals and Catholics are irrelevant in #NeverTrump camp?"

Now, here is Challenge No. 3: Go to Denver and cover the RedState Gathering for conservative leaders -- note that Trump was not invited -- and produce a report that includes zero information about the views of #NeverTrump religious and cultural conservatives.

Yes! The Washington Post political-desk pros are up to that challenge as well! See the recent feature that ran with this headline: "Once in control of their party, conservatives agonize over the election and beyond."

What does the word "conservative" mean in that equation? Honestly, after reading the story several times, I have no idea. Here is the overture:


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About that Pew survey on politics and the pulpit: So what makes an issue POLITICAL?

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Many Americans Hear Politics From the Pulpit

That was the takeaway from a recent national survey of thousands of churchgoers by the Pew Research Center.

This was the lede from Religion News Service:

(RNS) Most American churchgoers are hearing politics from the pulpits of their churches during this presidential election season, according to a new survey.
Nearly two-thirds of the respondents (64 percent) in the survey released Monday (Aug. 8) by the Pew Research Center say their clergy have spoken about at least one political or social issue in the spring and early summer.

And from the Los Angeles Times:

At wedding receptions, barbershops and on park benches, this year's unusual presidential campaign is often an unavoidable topic of discussion.
As usual in presidential races, it's also seeping into houses of worship across the nation. 

From Donald Trump to Hillary Clinton, and from abortion to immigration, many Americans are hearing politics from the pulpit, according to a survey released this week by the nonpartisan Pew Research Center. 

But here's my question: Are Americans really hearing political issues from the pulpit?


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Looking for other sources? Christian physicians join the emerging transgender debate

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Looking for other sources? Christian physicians join the emerging transgender debate

Suddenly transgender rights  is the hot “culture wars” topic. Religious folks with traditional convictions about such matters have been largely silent, or else many newswriters haven’t yet figured how to locate them in order to report the other side of this crucial debate.

Thus, there’s useful sourcing in the strongly-worded “Transgender Identification Ethics Statement” issued by the Christian Medical and Dental Associations.

This group is made up of 16,000-plus professionals who affirm “the divine inspiration and final authority of the Bible as the Word of God.” CMDA had Big 10 origins at the University of Illinois and Northwestern and went national in 1941. It’s one of many such U.S. fellowships for vocational and academic specialists.  Most of these were launched by Evangelical-type Protestants but have long since welcomed Catholic and Orthodox participants.

The transgender statement,  approved at a CMDA conference April 21 but publicized only recently, urges doctors to treat these patients with understanding and grace. On the other hand, CMDA champions professionals’ right to freedom of conscience, asserting that it is not “unjust discrimination” if a physician in conscience declines treatment that is considered “harmful or is not medically indicated.”

On the religious aspect, CMDA contrasts the Old and New Testament belief that “God created humanity as male and female” with current “confusion of gender identity.” “Gender complementarity and fixity are both good and a part of the natural order,” it says. The “objective biological fact” is that sex “is determined genetically at conception” and is “not a social construct arbitrarily assigned at birth or changed at will.”


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Citizen Trump in Orlando: Press must note evangelicals who attend and those who do not

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(Cue: audible sigh)

Do we really have to keep writing about Donald Trump and THE evangelicals? It would appear so, since he is headed to Orlando today to talk to a Florida Pastors and Pews event, organized by the American Renewal Project.

Once again, the team behind this story seems to think that we are dealing with Trump efforts to fire up THE evangelicals and THE "religious conservatives." That's kind of like saying a candidate is reaching out to THE Jews, THE Catholics, THE Muslims, etc.

That won't cut it. It's really crucial for journalists, when covering this kind of event, to give readers some of the details on who is taking part and who is not.

This is especially true for an event in Orlando, which is a hub city for evangelical megachurches and parachurch ministries. The Orlando area -- especially the suburbs -- is also a very important region in Florida (and thus national) politics, when it comes to gauging evangelical enthusiasm at the polls.

So let's look at the Bloomberg News report that The Miami Herald picked up about Trump's appearance. He is expected to say more about his opposition to the Johnson Amendment, the IRS rule that prohibits churches from endorsing individual political candidates, as opposed to making faith-driven statements about moral and cultural issues in public life.

I'll comment on that issue once we see the press coverage of what Citizen Trump has to say. However, it's important to stress that -- as is so often the cases -- there is no one evangelical camp on that topic. In fact, some evangelicals would like to see that rule enforced in a more consistent manner, affecting churches on the left as well as the right.

What's the first thing I noticed about how Herald editors handled this Bloomberg News report?


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Hillary, abortion and her Methodist beliefs: The Atlantic misses many of the key details

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So much has been written about Hillary Clinton’s Methodist beliefs, that it intrigues me when yet another publication takes a shot at them.

The Atlantic has just come out with a piece on “Hillary Clinton’s Moral Conflicts on Abortion,” which is news to those of us who heard the Democratic presidential candidate clearly state in June that her campaign “belongs” to Planned Parenthood and its supporters, donors and providers. Apparently there is some nuance here that is supposed to appeal to voters who are opposed to both abortion and Donald Trump.

During my first few years at the Washington Times in the mid-1990s, I was assigned to cover speeches, usually at the Mayflower Hotel in downtown DC, made by Clinton to abortion supporters on or before Jan. 22, the anniversary of Roe vs. Wade. Clinton stated her support for abortion a multitude of times during and after this time period.

So I was intrigued to hear in The Atlantic saying she has moral conflicts about the procedure. She never sounded conflicted to me, but all the same, read on: 

During the 2016 presidential campaign, Hillary Clinton has repeatedly spoken out in support of the right to abortion. Planned Parenthood president Cecile Richards has praised Clinton for treating reproductive issues as “more than just a sound bite” and the pro-choice organizations Emily’s List and NARAL Pro-Choice America have endorsed her. However, Clinton’s views on abortion are more nuanced and reflect her religious commitments to a greater degree than partisans on either side of the issue may realize.


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Classic M.Z. -- Once again, two elite newsrooms offer slanted coverage on a big abortion story

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Honestly, there was a time about a decade ago or so when I briefly thought that mainstream journalists were making progress when it comes to offering balanced, accurate, fair-minded coverage of abortion issues. At one point there even seemed to be a growing awareness that abortion was not one of those issues that could be labeled as a strictly GOP vs. Republican issue. I mean, there are pro-life liberals out there.

During that time, I had a chance to ask the progressive Catholic pundit E.J. Dionne a question related to this topic during a Pew Forum event inside the Beltway, focusing on faith and politics. I asked him why laws and court decisions here in America protecting abortion rights at all stages of pregnancy were stronger than those in Europe. I think my phrase was "how did America end up to the cultural left of Sweden on abortion?"

A key element of Dionne's answer was that abortion-rights supporters here continue to feel threatened by the strength of their opposition, especially among conservative religious groups. Thus, they resist all efforts at compromise. There is no middle option as, to some degree, there is in parts of Europe.

The news media plays a key element in this fight, of course. You can really see this whenever there is a new threat to the current abortion-rights regime. Take, for example, the the coverage of Catholic activist David Daleiden and the undercover videos released by his Center for Medical Progress project.

Honestly, in this case your GetReligionistas have needed some kind of standing art or logo pointing readers toward the classic "Abortion Bias Seeps Into News" series back in 1990 by media critic David Shaw of The Los Angeles Times. Once again, let me note that Shaw was a supporter of abortion rights and it's crucial that his work was published in a mainstream newspaper.

I could write another piece contrasting the level of press coverage of a grand jury in Texas indicting Daleiden with the coverage produced by the news that all of the charges had been dropped.

I could do that, but I really don't have to -- because M.Z. "GetReligionista emerita" Hemingway has already done a slam dunk on this issue, over at The Federalist.


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No moral questions involved? The National Post bungles report on 'selective reduction'

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I’ve done a fair amount of work abortion and pregnancy issues, including "fetal reduction" and the enormous moral issues it raises. Such “reductions” were first suggested for pregnancies of four, five or more but now people are aborting part of a set of twins. That’s right. And who’s going to explain to the survivor that they were once part of a pair and that they were the lucky one to not get the needle in the heart?

Because there’s been some debate over aborting one of a set of twins, I was interested in this National Post story out of Toronto over a Jewish hospital’s refusal to take part in this procedure. See how the Post handles this matter:

TORONTO -- A Toronto hospital’s refusal to reduce a woman’s twin pregnancy to one fetus — at least partly because of a doctor’s moral objections — has triggered a human-rights fight over the little-known but contentious procedure.
The Ottawa-area patient had been warned that carrying twins at her age could increase the risk of losing the whole pregnancy, and was referred to Mount Sinai Hospital for a “selective reduction.”
That means terminating at least one among multiple fetuses, akin to a partial abortion.
But the institution declined to provide the service, saying its practice was to only reduce triplets or more, unless one of the twins has some kind of anomaly.


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Your weekend think piece: Doing the math (think demographics) in post-Christian Europe

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Just when you thought it was impossible to find another new layer of meaning in the brutal murder of Father Jacques Hamel, who was slaughtered at the altar of a French church dedicated to the memory of the first New Testament martyr St. Stephen, columnist Ross Douthat of The New York Times dug a bit deeper.

This Sunday piece ran under this headline: "The Meaning of a Martyrdom." In it, Douthat -- a pro-Catechism Catholic, to one of my own pushy labels -- reflects on the current debates about whether Hamel was or was not a martyr for the Catholic faith. This also happened to be the topic of my Universal syndicate column this past week. Click here to check that out.

But in the midst of that discussion, Douthat made this blunt observation, noting that Europe, and our world today in general:

... is not actually quite what 1960s-era Catholicism imagined. The come-of-age church is, in the West, literally a dying church: As the French philosopher Pierre Manent noted, the scene of Father Hamel’s murder -- “an almost empty church, two parishioners, three nuns, a very old priest” -- vividly illustrates the condition of the faith in Western Europe.
The broader liberal order is also showing signs of strain. The European Union, a great dream when Father Hamel was ordained a priest in 1958, is now a creaking and unpopular bureaucracy, threatened by nationalism from within and struggling to assimilate immigrants from cultures that never made the liberal leap.

This reminded me of a sobering Catholic News Agency piece that ran recently at Crux about a blast of statistics from Catholic pews, pulpits and altars in postmodern Germany. To be blunt about it, Catholicism in Germany is not producing new babies or new believers, according to findings released by the German bishops' conference.

Check this out:


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