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Revealed truth: Bring on the emails

Christine M. Flowers

By Christine M. Flowers Philadelphia Daily News/(TNS)

Published Oct. 10, 2016

The Closing of the American Mouth

This column is partly about abortion and mostly about hypocrisy. I put that out there at the beginning to save some of you the trouble of reading on. I'm focusing on those folk who define themselves as "unwilling to impose their values on others." I want to save you from slogging through an essay that finds your position to be untenable and dishonest. You would do better to click on something at the Huffington Post or Salon, places that call such moral confusion "tolerance." Really, I won't mind if you stop reading after this sentence.

But you won't, will you? You never do, even after fair warning that I'm about to discuss my belief that abortion is murder and that those who support it are, in their own way, complicit in murder. I think you keep reading every time I raise the subject because it somehow makes you feel morally superior to the crazy religious zealot who just happened to thaw out enough frozen gray cells to get a law degree, but who is really incapable of rational thought. And speaking of religion, you sometimes accuse me of shoving my Catholic principles down your throats and, as we already agreed at the beginning of this column, that troubles the Mario Cuomo "I'm personally opposed but I wouldn't tell anyone else what to do" types.

So this column, which is nominally about abortion but really about the things we do to be able to look at ourselves in the mirror without wincing, probably will annoy you. And yet, judging from the emails I get every time one of them appears, you will pay close attention to my words, so you can quote them back to me and then ask such rhetorical questions as, "So you want to force a 12-year-old rape victim to give birth to her attacker's baby!"

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We've danced this dance before.

So why am I writing another one of these columns, and why are you reading it? Because we are, despite our attempts to deny it, people who cherish the image of ourselves as moral beings. We are not nihilists of the Nietzche mold. Of course, some of us think religion has nothing to do with morality and choose to define ourselves as "spiritual" as opposed to religious. Poor organized religion, it's gotten a bad rap this century.

Which brings me to Tuesday evening. When Mike Pence and Tim Kaine sat at a table and became surrogates for their running mates, they did the country a great favor. It's not only that they were more human and authentic and had less baggage than either Donald Trump or Hillary Clinton. They also gave us a chance to listen to two decent men discuss the relevance of faith in their, and our, lives. Instead of stupid, mean-girl allegations from Clinton about overweight beauty queens or ridiculous statements from Trump about how not paying taxes made him smart, we had two men who are devout Christians prepared to grapple with some fundamental issues.

Before the debate, some said they hoped there wouldn't be any talk about "social stuff." These are the type of people who basically think the price of gas is more important than the value of an unborn human life. Fortunately, the two vice presidential candidates are not like them.

I listened intently as the debate moderator asked each candidate about an instance when he struggled to balance personal faith with a public policy decision.

Kaine responded first, and said that his greatest challenge was when, as governor of Virginia, he had to sign death warrants even though he personally opposed the death penalty. He said that he had to "grapple" with his Catholicism, which called him to oppose capital punishment, but that he promised the voters of his state he would comply with the laws. He ended by saying he didn't think that those with "deep faith lives" could "substitute our views" for those who don't share those views.

That was a "wow" moment for me. Not because Kaine said anything particularly earth-shattering, but because of what he chose not to say. The elephant in that room was not the electric chair or a syringe filled with poison. Ever since he was chosen as Clinton's running mate, the issue that has dogged the senator from Virginia is his position on abortion. Kaine has channeled Cuomo by saying he is personally against abortion but wouldn't impose his yadda, yadda, yadda.

But he was there, front and center, agonizing over the death penalty. Executing murderers was excruciating. Killing unborn children, well, that was a woman's choice, and it needed to be respected (his words, not mine).

Then Pence took over. And this is what he said: "For me, the sanctity of life proceeds out of the belief, that ancient principle where God says, 'Before I formed you in the womb, I knew you.' " He addressed the horror of partial birth abortion, and said that the very idea "that a child that is almost born into the world could still have his life taken from him is just anathema to me." And he talked about how Clinton now wants our tax dollars to pay for abortions.


Kaine rebutted that this was a "fundamental question," but that he supports the constitutional right of American women to "make their own decision about pregnancy." He said he "trusts American women" to do that.

Kaine calls himself a Catholic. So does Pennsylvania Senate hopeful Katie McGinty, who hasn't even described herself as personally opposed to abortion (even though I tried to get an answer to that question, in vain).

The fact that Kaine agonized over executing murderers, but wants to leave it up to the mother whether an innocent child is destroyed, is telling.

The fact that, hours before the debate, I stood outside of a Planned Parenthood clinic at a pro-life rally where men and women, young and old, all faiths and races came together to pray and work to end the barbarity of abortion put Kaine's response in stark relief for me. How can a man so easily peel away the fundamental principle of his faith when he steps into the voting booth?

In the end, the debate changed nothing. We all came away with our preconceptions and our prejudices. But at least we got an honest view of how two otherwise good men wear the garment of their faith: One takes it off at the door to his home, not willing to inconvenience those who don't like its cut or color, while the other carries it on his shoulders, up the step, into his workplace and throughout the rest of his life.

Now that's a clear choice. Bring on the emails.

Christine M. Flowers
Philadelphia Daily News
(TNS)

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Christine M. Flowers is a lawyer and columnist for the Philadelphia Daily News.

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