American Papist posts on Doug Kmiec’s latest fogbound rationales. I channeled Mark Shea and Zippy and contributed some comments, but then I realized I missed a detail in Kmiec’s words (My emphasis):
The president’s rationale was motivated by Third World conditions, and we need to ask ourselves how we in opposition would formulate an answer for the millions of non-Catholics who were at risk of fatal illness in developing countries for lack of non-abortifacient, contraceptive services that were swept within the previous policy.
And there is that same darn thing I keep running into. I’ve heard it from conservatives. I’ve heard it from middle-of-the-roaders. And I’ve heard it from moobat lefty RCIA directors–that as long as a contraceptive is non-abortifacient, it is ok to use. That ain’t the teaching. The teaching does not stand of fall on abortifacient properties. Perhaps this explains the bewildering Catholic support for the “reducing abortions” marketing scam as Obama rolls back every pro-life success he encounters. Kmiec and others need to either demonstrate that they know the correct teaching and affirm it (in which case they have lots of splainin’ to do to make their craptacular proposals make a lick of sense), or they need to confess they dissent on Church teaching (in which case their proposals make a little more sense but add the feature of being DEAD WRONG.)
And…
Are these people really so stupid that they don’t know that “family planning” money _is going to go_ for plain-old surgical abortion (and everything else under the sun–not just condoms & diaphragms but IUDs, birth-control pills, surgical sterilization, everything)? I mean, I take the point you are making, but what occurs to me even to begin with is that you’d have to have had your brains sucked out by zombies to think that the Obama administration is carefully going to restrict money to some particular types of birth control, nothing else, including no funding for abortion. That’s totally nuts. In fact, that’s what the overturn of the Mexico City policy _means_–that American money is going to fund organizations that promote _abortion_ as a means of birth control.
I’ve been thinking more about the whole paragraph by Kmiec, and it just gets more incoherent the more I think about it. Is Kmiec totally ignorant? America was funding _boatloads_ of condoms during the Bush administration. The Mexico City Policy only meant that an organization couldn’t get the money if it promoted abortion as a means of birth control. So what does Kmiec even think he’s saying? That it was okay to overturn Mexico City so as to get _more_ non-abortifacient birth control out there in the Third World, since the organizations cut out of money by Mexico City _also_ provide other forms of birth control? But no, he says he was “disappointed” (a milquetoasty word, but some expression of disapproval) by Obama’s overturning Mexico City.
So I’m completely flummoxed as to why he’s even bringing up all this stuff about Third World conditions and “non-abortifacient birth control” in the context of Mexico City, as if it were some sort of response to criticism or mitigation of Obama’s action. The paragraph makes no sense.
Kmiec’s brain is turning to mush, I think, from defending Obama.
I know very little about Kmiec. I only learned about him when bloggers starting reporting on his support for Obama. I don’t want to slam a guy I don’t know much about, but the more I read from him, the more I am astounded that he was ever considered a pro-life advocate in the first place.
Used to write for First Things. But that was a long time ago, and I don’t remember anything about his articles. At the moment, I’m just reflecting on the bizarre nature of what he says in the section quoted by American Papist.