Bigotry and Abortion

Unlike many pro-life, Catholic writers who write primarily for a pro-life Catholic audience, I have for the past several years also been writing a weekly column of conservative viewpoint that's published in two secular Northern Virginia newspapers. This, of course, means that I get mixed reactions to what I write for those papers. Some people agree with me. Others, I think, hate me.

The articles I've written for these newspapers occasionally talk about two of my pet peeves, the abortion industry and Catholic bashing. My readers know I'm pro-life and have figured out that I'm Catholic. And I have deduced from some of their responses that what annoys the haters most is that I am both pro-life and Catholic. If I was Catholic and pro-choice, I doubt that I would be receiving any hate mail.

But being Catholic and pro-life seems to unhinge these people. In their defense of the indefensible, the abortion industry, the haters accuse me of being a narrow-minded "Grand Inquisitor" trying to impose my religious views on others. I get the impression from the hysterical tone of their letters and e-mails that the combination of my being both pro-life and Catholic is more than they can stand.

Where does the hate come from? Some of it is deep rooted. Anti-Catholicism has been a part of the American culture since the Puritans came over on the Mayflower. But I am convinced that the current impetus for it is driven by the culture of death, by those who worship at the altar of "choice." That conviction is based on the observations of my lifetime.

The open anti-Catholicism of my youth was limited primarily to people in bed sheets who burned crosses on other people's lawns. After the election of John Kennedy to the presidency in 1960 many of us believed that anti-Catholic bigotry in this country was finally a memory. It almost was. The bed sheet crowd was rapidly becoming an unfortunate memory, but we had no way of knowing that a new group of bigots with a totally different agenda than the cross-burners would by the end of the 1960s crawl out from under their rocks.

The new bigotry began in the late 1960s with the establishment, in New York City, of NARAL, which was then the National Association for the Repeal of Abortion Laws. (The organization is now called NARAL Pro-Choice America.)

 Thanks to a doctor named Bernard Nathanson, one of the three founders of NARAL, we know that as a matter of strategy NARAL set out to paint abortion as a "religious issue," and the opposition to abortion as coming exclusively from the Catholic Church. Using slogans like "Keep your rosaries off my ovaries!" NARAL deliberately set out to tap into that underlying strain of anti-Catholic, anti-Vatican prejudice that festers just below the surface of American culture, and they've been working the bigotry ever since.

Nathanson, who, in the early 1970s, ran the largest abortion clinic in this country, had a profound change of heart in the mid-70s, and broke with NARAL and the abortion movement. He later wrote a best-seller, Aborting America. I still have a copy of it. The book confirmed that the pro-abortion crowd lied routinely, and that NARAL deliberately targeted the Catholic Church for abuse as a matter of strategy.

As a right-to-life activist in the 1970s I got to see that strategy at work up close and personal. On more than one occasion, while talking to different groups of people about the abortion issue, I encountered opposition from people who assumed that the organization I represented, the New Jersey Right to Life Committee, was a wholly-owned subsidiary of the Catholic Church. Of course, it wasn't — but the people I was talking to didn't know that.

The strategy was highly effective then, and it's still working. It's at work every time the entertainment media attacks our Catholic faith (something that didn't happen when I was a child). It was at work when, in 1993, Surgeon General Jocelyn Elders, while addressing a pro-choice rally, stated that pro-lifers were conducting a "love affair with the fetus" at the behest of a "celibate, male-dominated church" — our Church. It was at work again a couple of years ago when Sen. Charles Schumer of New York opined that nominees for federal judgeships with "deeply held beliefs" cannot be trusted to render decisions based on the law. The nominees he was talking about were Catholic.

The strategy was working still earlier this year when, following the Gonzales v. Carhart partial-birth abortion decision, the Philadelphia Inquirer ran a cartoon depicting five Supreme Court justices wearing miters. And it's working every time I mention abortion in the secular press.

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