Talk Elections

I affirmed in a post(-2004)-election sermon that “I’m a professing Christian among many who, on religious grounds, is pro-choice on abortion and in favor of gay marriage.”

At the talkback after the sermon, a Stanford student asked me to explain my statement that I’m pro-choice on abortion on religious grounds. He could understand how I might be pro-choice on pragmatic grounds, or on the basis of a political philosophy that we shouldn’t legislate what other people can do in their private sexual lives. But he’d certainly never heard anyone defend a pro-choice position on explicitly religious grounds.

[...]

Yet fetus as “person” or “human being” has never been a settled question within Christianity or Judaism. There are large segments of the Judeo-Christian world that, historically and currently, see the embryo or fetus as potential human life, but not as fully human until birth or until some stage in fetal development well past conception.

[...]

There’s nothing explicitly said in the Bible about induced abortion. Zero. The Jewish position begins with Exodus 21:22: “When people who are fighting injure a pregnant woman so that there is a miscarriage, and yet no further harm follows, the one responsible shall be fined what the woman’s husband demands, paying as much as the judges determine.” So, only a fine; no punishment for homicide. On the basis of this passage, the rabbis argued in the Talmud that a fetus is not considered adam (human) and has no legal standing as a person. Killing a fetus is not murder and it is not treated that way. The mainstream Jewish position historically and today is that human life or personhood begins at birth, when we take our first breath. There are a number of biblical passages that have been cited by rabbis over the years as connecting the breath and human life, starting with the creation story in Genesis 2:7: “The Lord God formed man from the dust of the ground, and breathed into his nostrils the breath of life; and the man became a living being.”

[...]

For most of the history of the Catholic Church, one did not become a human being or a person until well after conception. Saint Augustine in the fourth century adopted the Aristotelian belief that the human soul didn’t enter the fetus until forty to ninety days after conception. In roughly the same era Saint Jerome emphasized human shape: “The seed gradually takes shape in the uterus, and it [abortion] does not count as killing until the individual elements have acquired their external appearance and their limbs.” The Apostolic Constitutions of the late fourth century allowed abortion if it was done both before the human soul entered and before the fetus was of human shape. Saint Thomas Aquinas of the thirteenth century followed Augustine in not considering the abortion of a non-ensouled fetus to be murder. Pope Innocent III, earlier in the same century as Aquinas, emphasized that the soul enters the body at the time of quickening—when a prospective mother first feels movement of the fetus. When Pope Gregory XIV affirmed the quickening test for ensoulment in 1591, he set the time for it as 116 days into pregnancy, or the sixteenth week. The great reversal came with Pope Pius IX in 1869. He assumed ensoulment at conception, and by 1917 church canon law had been revised, dropping the prior distinction it had upheld between “animated” and “inanimated” fetuses. Pius’s position has been maintained by the Roman Catholic Church ever since.

While money is used to finance speech, money isn't speech (plain & simple). Those financial activities shouldn't receive precisely the same constitutional protections as speech itself.

Well, just b/c the Court said it doesn't mean that the Court hasn't made a disastrous wrong turn ...

recent string of campaign finance rulings, [t]he voter is now less important than the man who provides money to the candidate.

Chief Justice Roberts started his controlling opinion w/ a characteristically crisp & stirring opening sentence: "There is no right more basic in our democracy than the right to participate in electing our political leaders." But that's misleading. That first sentence there isn't really about what the case is about.

[A] constitutional amendment [would] reaffirm what's already in the Constitution: that the right to vote belongs to people, & not corporate, nonprofit, or private entities whose money is drowning out votes by actual U.S. citizens.

<side note> Is it necessarily a bad thing to only appoint Supreme Court justices who'd make it a priority to overturn Citizens United & who understand that corruption in politics means more than just quid pro quo AS LONG AS that person is indeed well qualified to sit on the Supreme Court (based on the person's integrity, professional competence, & judicial temperament)?? </side note>

According to you, because of the Court's

How so? Because a big campaign contribution works effectively as a bribe? That's a pretty common accusation that gets made by people who support campaign finance reform: financially helping a candidate is the moral equivalent of bribery. It's a popular, and populist, theory. I don't buy into that theory, and I understand why the Court did not do so either. But your theory is what: that when a wealthy businessman like Shaun McCutcheon contributes millions of dollars to various politicians around the country, he is effectively trying to coerce those politicians into doing legislative things that the politicians who received the money did not want to do, and/or their voters do not want them to do? Mr. McCutcheon was trying to financially help many candidates to campaign -- to try to persuade voters to "vote for me (the candidate)." The people who spend the most money do not always win the elections, and I simply do not see how contributions make the contributors more important to the politicians than the voters.

I disagree that adopting a constitutional amendment to say Congress and the states may regulate campaign financing is to adopt something that is already in the Constitution. It would be a first-time ever exception to the principle of Freedom of Speech. I am ready to adopt that. I also disagree that money is drowning out the votes of actual U.S. citizens; see above.

Yes. People should be appointed to the Supreme Court for reasons exactly like the reason why Herbert Hoover crossed party lines and appointed Benjamin Cardozo to the Supreme Court. The Court is supposed to be made up of the nine most highly objective interpreters of law that can be found anywhere in the country, and I do not think it wise to choose someone because that person thinks Citizens United was a disaster. That person is highly unlikely to be objective.