Matt Bowman: “Abortion-philes and Religion-phobes turn the Constitution upside down”
________________ Abortion advocates are furious. More so than usual. On November 7, Democrats in the House were forced to allow a pro-life ban on government funding of abortion insurance in their health care reform bill, consistent with 30 years of federal government policy. The funding ban passed 240-194, with 64 Democrats voting in favor. That margin parallels the 71% of Americans who oppose government funding of abortion, and the majority of Americans who positively identify themselves as pro-life. In their outrage, abortion enthusiasts have officially adopted the strategy of attacking Christians, by fuming that the funding ban is a violation of the mythical “separation of church and state.” They claim that the health care debate should not be about abortion, yet as usual they are happy to turn the debate into an attack on religion. Their favorite target is the US Catholic Bishops, who supported the pro-life amendment. Borrowing a common intimidation tactic from their anti-Christian allies, a member of Congress actually called for the Catholic Church’s tax exempt status to be revoked. Law professor Marci Hamilton decries the pro-life amendment as an unconstitutional establishment of a federal religion. And leaders of pro-abortion political special interest groups are firing indiscriminately against the Church, signaling that their strategy to achieve free abortion on demand will be explicitly and virulently anti-Christian. While these emotional outbursts rely on flawed logic, they nevertheless give insight into the extreme views of abortion advocates. In Politico, Nancy Keenan, the President of the National Abortion Rights Action League, and Jon O’Brien, President of the self-styled “Catholics for Choice” (which the Catholic Church has repudiated many times), argue that Christian groups are hypocritical for accepting government funding for their social services. They blast the Bishops for successfully opposing a fake compromise on abortion wherein the government would have paid abortionists in health insurance while simply declaring that the money was not “federal.” According to their analogy, if government can fund a social service by hospitals, schools, or soup kitchens who also engage in religious activities, then the government should be able to fund health insurance that also covers abortion. So in their analogy, abortion is the equivalent of prayer and sacrament. And to them, facilitating Christian activities is as odious as assisting the killing of innocent children. Telling. This has always been their view, but it is rare to see them admit it. Keenan and O’Brien also presume with their ACLU counterparts that free abortion is a “right,” constitutionally and morally, while religion in social services is a wrong. This same religion-phobia leads government academics like the University of Wisconsin to freely fund all student group activities to evangelize their ideas, but to deny funding if those ideas happen to be religious (see, ADF press release). But, this perspective turns American law and tradition upside down. There’s nothing unconstitutional or offensive about giving government assistance to schools, hospitals, soup kitchens and student groups that are religious, if the funding is given out in a fair, non-sectarian, and equal fashion which doesn’t force organizations to abandon their religious identity. And regarding abortion, the Supreme Court has repeatedly upheld government decisions not to fund abortion, and even to promote life over abortion. There is no requirement for government assistance in support of abortion, while there is no constitutional ban on government assistance to religious groups. Abortion advocates have it completely backwards. Prof. Hamilton argues that because the Bishops and some legislators who voted for the pro-life amendment are religious, the amendment violates the First Amendment’s prohibition on a governmentally established religion. In layman’s terms this argument can be summarized as, “because you disagree with me, you are not only wrong, you are prohibited from lobbying your congressman.” The Supreme Court has rejected this view in multiple contexts, such as in Board of Education v. Mergens when it said that “what is relevant is the legislative purpose of the statute, not the possibly religious motives of the legislators who enacted the law.” 496 U.S. at 249 (1990). Neither the court nor the American people adopt the extremist views against religion assumed by abortion advocates and their ACLU allies. Meanwhile, Americans increasingly oppose even incidental support of abortion by their government. There’s nothing hypocritical about this position. Abortion is not health care at all, much less a necessary component of health reform as pro-abortion special interests contend. And our country’s tradition places great value on religious based services, and does not require that groups purge their religious character in order to receive government funding. Hamilton and other law professors also argue that the pro-life restriction on funding abortion insurance is unconstitutional by violating a woman’s right to privacy and equal protection and imposing an “undue burden.” But the same equal protection arguments were rejected over 30 years ago in Maher v. Roe, 432 U.S. 464 (1977), allowing states to refuse to fund elective abortion. Three years later the Court let the federal government deny funding even to medically “necessary” abortions. Harris v. McRae, 448 U.S. 297 (1980). The Court reaffirmed this precedent, and rejected Hamilton’s privacy argument, when it allowed the government to impose onerous restrictions against merely indirect funding of abortion groups, and declared that the government can “selectively fund a program to encourage” childbirth and discourage abortion. Rust v. Sullivan, 500 U.S. at 193 (1991). And the Court declared that the legal test applied to abortion funding restrictions is the extremely lenient “rational basis” test, not the “undue burden” test of its prior Casey decision. Bray v. Alexandria Women’s Health Clinic, 506 U.S. 263 (1993). The Supreme Court’s recent decision in the partial birth abortion case gives the government even more leeway to stand on the side of life. The constitution and the Supreme Court explicitly allow state and federal governments to favor life and to completely sever their ties from abortion, even while they do not mandate that religious groups be quarantined from government funding. This is a bitter pill to swallow for outraged abortion advocates. But, much to their dismay, most Americans believe that religion is healthy while abortion is not. |
