I once told the Blackstone legal Fellows, if you knew that Roe v Wade was coming down the pike, wouldn’t you throw yourself in front of a train to stop it? Archbishop Joseph Kurtz is making the same argument here:
Saying “today is like 1970 for marriage,” Archbishop Joseph E. Kurtz of Louisville, Ky., urged his fellow bishops Nov. 15 to look at the challenges to traditional marriage as if they could see Roe v. Wade on the horizon.
One of the important similarities is that Roe v Wade tried to remove abortion from the realm or ordinary politics by declaring it a fundamental right, that could not be overturned by elections. The result was that abortion has become the most politicized issue of our time, poisining vast parts of our public discourse, corrupting decisions about the judiciary, and whole branches of philosophy. At the same time, the ordinary political process of deliberation, give and take, trial and error, has been short-circuited. Communities that want to regulate abortion are hamstrung by the judiciary, so that there is very little wiggle-room for local variations in policy. In effect, Roe v Wade nationalized sexual policy.
That is why Archbishop Kurtz’s observation is so important:
Speaking on the first day of the bishops’ annual fall meeting in Baltimore, Archbishop Kurtz made the comments as chairman of the Ad Hoc Committee for the Defense of Marriage, which was just upgraded to a subcommittee of the bishops’ Committee on Laity, Marriage, Family Life and Youth….
He likened the situation for laws about marriage to the period just before Roe legalized abortion in 1973. “If you had seen Roe v. Wade coming three years out, what would you have done differently?”
Bishop Kurtz has just been elected the Vice President of the US Conference of Catholic Bishops.