New York Times Makes Up Fairy Tale About Politics of Abortion (UPDATED)

No one ever went broke underestimating the intelligence of front page articles in the New York Times about the culture wars.

The excrescence entitled "Abortion Issue Again Dividing Catholic Votes" [1], appearing in the September 17 Times (the same number featuring Institute for America's Future's full-page ad [2]), opened by introducing us to Matthew Figured, a Sunday school teacher at the Holy Roman Rosary Roman Catholic Church in Scranton, Pennsylvania—a member of the classic swing voting bloc in a classic swing city in the classic swing state of Pennslyvania, a town where, it's not unreasonable to believe, thousands of voters are on the bubble between voting for the Democrats because of Central Pennsylvania's mounting economic anxieties, or the Republicans because of the Central Pennsylvania's long-standing cultural anxieties. This Matt Figured, for one: he's an economic liberal, down the line. But after his local bishop "plunged into the fray, barring Senator Joseph R. Biden Jr. of Delaware, the Democratic vice-presidential nominee, from receiving communion in the area because of his support for abortion rights," the Sunday school teacher began leaning McCain. "People should straighten out their religious beliefs before they start making political decisions," he explains to the Times .

How well the Democrats honor Catholic voters' antipathy to abortion, runs the article's argument, may just determine the outcome of the presidential election. You would never know reading this article, though, that there is no objective basis for this conclusion whatsoever. The underlying narrative is simply made up, a figment of pundits' fervid imaginations, fed by right-wing propaganda.

See here [3]. In 2004 voters were queried, "Would you support or oppose the Catholic Church denying communion to Catholic politicians who are in favor of legal abortion?" Among the general public—Catholics, Protestants, Jews, Hindus, Zoarastrians, Wiccans, heathens like me, et al—68 percent were opposed to the idea of the Church denying communion over abortion. What were the numbers among Catholic respondents? 72 percent and 22 percent. Catholics are more likely to be offended by the Catholic hierarchy inserting itself into this political issue than the general public as a whole.

(Another poll [4] on the same question found the same result, only stronger.)

Listen to Kathy G [3]:

Indeed, contrary to popular belief, Catholic voters are not any less pro-choice than the rest of the population. The most recent good survey I could find on this subject, done by Pew in 2007, found that 16% of Catholics thought abortion should be legal in all cases, 35% thought it should be legal in most cases, 26% thought it should be illegal in most cases, and 18% thought it should be illegal in all cases. Those numbers are virtually exactly the same among the general public, where the percentage for each category is 17%, 35%, 26%, and 17%, respectively. According to that same poll, 59% percent of Catholics support stem research, as compared to 51% of the general population.

These results, of course, are national. In Scranton, maybe it's precisely as the Times' David Kirkpatrick says: maybe the city happens to be populated by some bizarre sort of Catholic who thinks entirely differently than Catholics anywhere else in the country.< That would be one theory. Here's another: people like Matt Figured, stepping to their bishops' command about how they should vote, are statistical outliers—narratively convenient outliers backing up a conservative argument of convience with no basis in the facts, propped up unthinkingly by the mainstream media.

The article is absurdly biased in other ways as well. Kirkpatrick reports that Catholic pro-choicers like Biden and Nancy Pelosi have been defending their position via the arguments of, of all embarrassing things, Catholic theologians like St. Augustine and St. Thomas Aquinas.

Silly liberals! Don't they know that only conservatives are allowed to talk about God?

Well, some liberals apparently have got that message. Kirkpatrick finds a progressive Catholic leader, Chris Korzen, from a group "running television commercials that emphasize the church's social justice teachings," to say he's offended by Biden's and Pelosi's attention to the keepers of their faith: "Getting into Augustine and Aquinas—it is just not helpful. It would be wise for them tofocus on how policies they are going to implement as leaders are going to move forward the church teachings they say they believe in."

Pause a moment: "church teachings they say they believe in." Looks like this "progressive" was quoted by Kirkpatrick using language that could be interpreted as implying Democratic leaders are phony and insincere. What's more, the next quotes a conservative who, handily, is also a McCain advisor, and who, doubly handily, is quoted giving right-wing talking points about how the issue is supposedly wedging progressive Catholics: "The Democrats have actually given back some of the progress they had made" wooing fickle pro-life Catholic voters. Both the progressive and conservative sources get quoted in ways that suggest intractable divisions among Democrats.

Next up to be quoted: three Scranton Catholics who also say they usually vote Democrat, but just not this year. It's unanimous! And of "a half dozen others gathered around the rectory kitchen," fie were "lifelong Democrats who supported Mrs. Clinton in the primary" and "now lean toward McCain."

Then Kirkpatrick gives time to the right-wing group Catholic answers and their invocation of five "nonnegotiable" issues for "faithful voters": abortion, embryonic stem-cell research, human clonging, euthanasia, and same-sex marriage. Not a word on Catholics who might deploy their faith to chose other nonnegotiable issues: say, government officials who are figuratively in bed with predatory banks, and literally in bed with oil company lobbyists. Nothing about the fact that many Catholic theologians might agree that Aquinas and Augustine may reasonably be understood as siding with the latter nonnegotiables as opposed to the former.

Then the kicker. Only at the very tail end of the article do we learn that, well, the church hierarchy seems to agree: "last fall, the bishops revised their official statement on voting priorities to explicitly allow Catholics to vote for a candidate who supports abortion rights if they do so for other reasons. And it also allowed for differences of opinoin about how to apply church principles."

In other words, the plain evidence provided in this front page New York Times article debunks its own argument, that Democrats will lose the most loyal Catholics over the abortion issue, and in fact provides up elements for a case that the Scranton Catholic voter absent from this article who's leaning toward Obama for economic reasons is actually more obedient to the spirit and letter of the church hierarchy's ruling than, yes, the dissident abortion-baiting bishop of Scranton.

Ladies and gentlemen, your newspaper of record.

(Actually, it's far worse than I realized; this article is incoherent beyond measure. As Mike the Mad Biologist [5] points out, all the voters depicted as having switched to McCain are identified as former Hillary Clinton supporters—in other words, in an article about defections over abortion, we're given voters who've defected from Obama after supporting a candidate, Clinton, who was as pro-choice or perhaps more pro-choice than Obama! Why did at least some of them switch? At least one of these pious souls is straightforward enough to admit it to the Times reporter: he would vote for McCain because he happens to be white. "'Are they going to make it the Black House?' Ray McCormick asked.")