Mario Cuomo's abortion argument is a bloody legacy
Mario Cuomo’s soul, I pray, will spend eternity in the presence of God. Cuomo’s dogma on Church and State, grounded in rickety reasoning and having borne foul fruit for decades, belongs in the ash heap of history.
Cuomo was a dedicated statesmen, a fine orator, and a proud Catholic. When he passed away January 1, he was praised mostly for two speeches he delivered in his second year as governor. Most famous was his populist sermon, filled with barbs for Ronald Reagan and red meat for the party’s left wing, delivered at the 1984 convention.
Cuomo left a more lasting mark on American politics, though, with an address a few weeks later at Notre Dame. Amid intricate parsing of Church teaching, American history, and political philosophy, Cuomo made his central argument: a Catholic politician can, in good conscience, personally oppose abortion while politically fighting to protect it — including even subsidies for abortion.
If Catholics fight to ban abortion, Cuomo argued, we are “seeking to force our beliefs on others.”
To make this argument, Cuomo had to pretend that outlawing abortion is enforcing private morality — akin to laws against premarital sex, contraception, or working on Sundays. But abortion isn’t a purely self-affecting act. There’s an innocent baby involved. Cuomo tried to skate around this fact without acknowledging it.
First, he tried to diminish abortion’s importance. He compared pro-choice Catholics to conservative Catholics who “reject out of hand their teaching on war and peace and social policy.” He also analogized abortion policy to “food policy, the arms race, human rights, education, social justice and military expenditures.”
The implication: abortion is one of many issues where Catholic politicians disagree on how to implement Church teaching. But the Church doesn’t share this equivalency.
“To claim the right to abortion, infanticide and euthanasia,” Pope John Paul II would write a decade later, in his 1995 encyclical, Evangelium Vitae, “and to recognize that right in law, means to attribute to human freedom a perverse and evil significance: that of an absolute power over others and against others. This is the death of true freedom.”
The Second Vatican Council, in 1968, had made it clear that abortion was an exceptionally serious matter. "Life once conceived, must be protected with the utmost care; abortion and infanticide are abominable crimes.”
Cuomo’s second dodge was an appeal to political prudence. His analogy: even in opposing slavery, the Church at times favored political compromise.
Ramesh Ponnuru dealt with this comment well in his book on abortion: "It is a mark of the strength of contemporary liberalism's commitment to abortion," Ponnuru wrote, "that one of its leading lights should have been willing to support temporizing on slavery in order to defend it.”
As tortured as was the reasoning that went into Cuomo’s Notre Dame talk, much worse was the fruit that it bore over the next three decades.
Cuomo claimed that day he shared the pro-life goal of moving America towards an end to abortion. But his speech — and his years in politics — did the opposite.
Cuomo’s Notre Dame argument became a pillar of the Democratic Party. Catholic Democrats pointed to Cuomo in declaring themselves “personally opposed to abortion,” but politically pro-choice. The governor had written a blank check for politicians to don the mantle of the Church, but ignore its hard and fast teachings.
With that blank check in hand, Cuomo’s party became extreme on abortion. Pro-life speakers were effectively banned from the podium at Democratic Conventions. The current Democratic President raised money off his defense of partial birth abortion, and opposed state laws to protect children who survive abortion attempts. The abortion lobby is at the heart of the Democratic fundraising apparatus.
And on other Catholic teachings, Cuomo’s party has no use anymore for tolerance, now trying to force nuns to provide contraception coverage, and curb the free exercise of religion when it clashes with elite sexual morality.
Read Cuomo’s speech closely, and you see the seeds of this intolerance — this compulsion cloaked in the rhetoric of pluralism. Cuomo in 1984 wasn’t merely defending legal abortion — he was defending taxpayer-funded abortion. The political issue on his plate in Albany wasn’t an abortion ban, it was abortion coverage under Medicaid.
In Catholic terms, the policy decision to spend taxpayers' money on abortions is “formal cooperation in evil.” Forcing people to do so against their will is hardly “help[ing] create conditions under which all can live with a maximum of dignity and with a reasonable degree of freedom,” as Cuomo said a good statesman should do in a pluralistic society.
In 2014, his son, New York Gov. Andrew Cuomo declared that “extreme conservatives who are right-to-life… have no place in the state of New York.”
When you preach tolerance of the abominable — taking a baby's life — you reap something foul.
Timothy P. Carney, The Washington Examiner's senior political columnist, can be contacted at tcarney@washingtonexaminer.com. His column appears Sunday and Wednesday on washingtonexaminer.com.
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