A new activist organization, Catholics in Alliance for the Common Good, issued a voter guide that is nothing more than a slick attempt to get the abortion albatross off the necks of Catholic Democrats. However, the noose is still there.
Instead of dropping opposition to parental notification laws and support for keeping partial-birth abortion legal, the best Catholics in Alliance can do is say it is opposed to abortion. But it makes it painfully clear that it will never join efforts to ban any abortions, including partial-birth. Alexia Kelley heads the new group. In 2004, she worked as a religion advisor to John Kerry (who advocates keeping partial-birth abortion legal) in the closing weeks of his campaign.
On page 9 of the booklet, the group criticizes many pro-life candidates (putting the term pro-life in quotes, as in so-called pro-life candidates) who are nothing but talk. “On the other hand,” it reads, there are pro-abortion politicians who “support effective measures to promote healthy families and reduce abortions by providing help to pregnant women and young children.” So it’s okay for a Catholic politician to give a green light to a practice that kills a baby 80-percent born, just so long as he’s against trans fats.
Catholics in Alliance has no statement urging anyone to vote against partial birth abortion (the best it can do is say it opposes the “root causes” of abortion), but the group did issue a news release over the summer urging the Senate to raise the minimum wage (an issue the Catholic Church has no official position on). Despite what Catholics in Alliance says, there is a moral hierarchy of issues, and as important as ending poverty is, it does not rival the right of a child to be born.
