MARIO CUOMO - THE CINOP BRAIN - 1

MARIO CUOMO - THE CINOP BRAIN -1

The pursuit of the truth access – cinops be gone - Wednesday, Jan. 7, 2009

It is an honor to return to the Catholic author, David Carlin and his book, “Can a Catholic Be a Democrat.” This is the 23rd letter in about 600 in our blog. Mario is the patron saint of the CINOP. Here is David Carlin’s analysis: 201-2

Cuomo proceeds to offer a fourfold defense of the right of Catholic politician to support pro-choice public policies despite his pro-life religious convictions.

*The Pluralism defense: “I protect my right to be a Catholic,” he says, “by preserving your right to believe as a Jew, a Protestant, or nonbeliever, or as anything else your choose. We know that the price of seeking to force our belief on others is that they might someday force theirs on us.

As an American, I’m free, Cuomo grants, to press for a law banning abortion. “But should I? Is it helpful? Is it essential to human dignity? Does it promote harmony and understanding? Or does it divide us so fundamentally that it threatens our ability to function as a pluralistic society?”

He answers these question by saying, “Our public morality … depends on a consensus view of right and wrong. The values derived from religious belief will not – and should not – be accepted as part of the public morality unless they are shared by the pluralistic community at large, by consensus.”

This answer has a number of defects. First, although he doesn’t precisely (or even approximately) define how broad a “consensus” has to be to qualify as a consensus, Cuomo seems to have something like this in mind: that any group constituting a good-size or important minority in society has in effect the right to exercise a veto.

Hence the presence of secularism, almost all of whom support a legal right to abortion, and liberal Christians, most of whom support such a right, would be enough to establish that there’s no “consensus” in the United States in favor of abortion-restricted legislation.

But by this standard, Cuomo would have to say that the Civil Rights Act of 1964 was illegitimate since it wasn’t based on a “consensus” – being strongly opposed by white racist, who certainly at the time constituted a good size and important minority in American society. And for the same reason, the Supreme Court’s Brown vs. Board of Education ruling of 1954 would have to be judged illegitimate. And so would the Court’s 1973 Roe v. Wade decision, since at the time the decision was handed down, almost all religious conservative – Catholics, Protestants, Mormons, Orthodox Jews, and others – disapproved of the ruling. Ironically, using his “there must be a consensus” standard, Cuomo should have denounced as illegitimate the Court decision that created the legal right to abortion that he was now defending as public policy.

Second, while Cuomo insists that Catholics have no right to create a “public morality” that includes values not accepted on a consensus basis, he doesn’t apply this rule the other way around: he doesn’t equally insist that secularists have no right to create a public morality that includes values not accepted on a consensus basis. Secularists don’t accept anti-abortion values; hence, says Cuomo, Catholics mustn’t make anti-abortion values part of our public morality.

But he has no objection when secularists (with the very generous help of the U.S. Supreme Court) make pro-abortion values part of our public morality. .. To be continued.
George H. Kubeck