Catholic pro-life Constitutional law professor and author Douglas Kmiec joined the swell of support for pro-abortion, pro-infanticide Barack Obama this year, and has been hard at work defending his new position ever since. His pro-life former comrades aren't buying it. One website labeled the recent fratricide "the pro-life circular firing squad."
Given that his abortion views are increasingly indistinguishable from those of Chemerinsky et al, one wonders if Christian law schools will continue to use Kmiec's Constitutional Law casebook, or rebuke him by replacing it in the curriculum.
The Increasingly Bizarre Doug Kmiec
by Matthew Miller
Nov. 8, 2008
For those of you who haven’t been paying attention, some months ago Catholic lawyer and former Romney supporter, Doug Kmiec took the bold step of endorsing Barack Obama. In succeeding installations defending his decision, Kmiec confessed that he felt Barack Obama would be more “pro-life” then John McCain. Really. At which point, he became a laughing stock in the conservative movement.
Now, in Slate’s post-election analysis from “conservatives” (i.e, idiosyncratic sometimes/once-were-right-leaning moderates), the Atlantic’s Ross Douthat has a few unkind words for Kmiec. He writes:
What I don’t understand at all is Kmiec’s position, which seems to be that the contemporary Democratic Party, and particularly the candidacy of Barack Obama, offered nearly as much to pro-lifers as the Republican Party does.
I am sure that Kmiec is weary of being called a fool by opponents of abortion for his tireless pro-Obama advocacy during this election cycle, but if so, then the thing for him to do is to cease acting like the sort of person for whom the term “useful idiot” was coined, rather than persisting in his folly.
Those seeking a primer on the case against Kmiec’s putatively pro-life position on Obama and abortion can begin here or here or here. Suffice to say that what he calls “outright lies and falsehoods” about Obama’s views were, in fact, more or less the truth: The Democratic nominee ran on a record that can only be described as “very, very pro-choice,” and his stated positions on abortion would involve rolling back nearly all the modest — but also modestly effective — restrictions that pro-lifers have placed upon the practice, and/or appointing judges who would do the same.
There may have been reasons for anti-abortion Americans to vote for Barack Obama in spite of his position that abortion should be essentially unregulated and funded by taxpayer dollars. But Kmiec’s suggestion that Obama took the Democrats in anything like a pro-life direction on the issue doesn’t pass the laugh test. (And nor, I might add, does his bizarre argument that because the goal of placing a fifth anti-Roe justice on the court is somehow unrealistic, the pro-life movement should pursue a far more implausible Constitutional amendment instead.)
I suppose I could find a thing or three to agree with in Kmiec’s longer list of ideas for how the party he abandoned could win back his vote. But frankly, I don’t see the point.
I understand that the pro-life position on abortion does not command majority support in the United States and that people of good will can disagree on the subject. And I have no doubt that the Republican Party can profit from greater dialogue between its pro-life and pro-choice constituents—and do a better job, as well, of addressing itself to both pro-lifers and pro-choicers who aren’t already inside its tent.
But I can’t begin to fathom why the GOP should consider taking any advice whatsoever from a “pro-lifer” who has spent the past year serving as an increasingly embarrassing shill for the opposition party’s objectively pro-abortion nominee.
Douthat is normally an interesting, but genteel writer, so even these few hints of venom are spicy. He’s, of course spot, on, but Kmiec doesn’t quite see it that way. Here’s, in part, his reply:
I am stunned by the coarseness of your writing, Ross. While we have not met, so little of what you have written is in any way respectful or acknowledges that you are addressing not some abstraction but a fellow human that I can only pray that if any of your family or closest friends come into contact with this commentary that they reach out to you in the most gentle and understanding way, without precondition, to calm an anger that is harmful to the soul.
Genuine love and affection do not reside on the Internet, so I cannot extend it to you, but in my heart, I forgive your great unkindness. I do hope you can free yourself from its enslavement. Realize that your meaning is bound up in the occasions in your life to be of service. Ross, once you allow yourself to see your dependence upon others, and their need for you, I am certain you will appreciate the cruelty of what you have written. To the extent that Slate accepts Ross’ submission as appropriate commentary directed toward helping the Republicans find their bearings, it must be accepted as a counter example from that which is ultimately desired. Ross’ anger is as unexplainable as it is wrong. Yet Kathleen suggests that Sarah Palin perhaps embodied exactly such anger; the anger of the “ordinary” person. One could sense that anger in the mobs riled by Mrs. Palin’s tirades about Obama being in a conspiracy of some sort with Bill Ayers. It was frightening to see on tape, and it is even uglier to see it rear its head here.
Ross, you are not ordinary in God’s eyes; nor are the women facing abortion as a tragic answer to a dismal, impoverished, and near-hopeless existence. Ross, you and she are brother and sister made in God’s image and are expected to be of help to one another. That is a lesson for the Republicans.
If it be useful idiocy to save even one child from death by lifting up the economic or social prospects of the mother, I accept the title as an honor among men. It is pro-life. If it is hypocritical not to want to treat as criminal the woman abandoned by the selfishness of an abusive spouse, I embrace the hypocrisy. It, too, is pro-life.
Surely this is parody. It reads like the dialogue from a B movie. I suspect the embarrassingly overwrought writing is a defense mechanism to obscure the indefensible. I don’t know too many women who’ve had abortions, or who admit it openly. I do know that in the United States, there are very few people, of any type, who can be fairly described as having a “dismal, impoverished, and near-hopeless existence”. This is not a third world (or should I say “developing”?) country. Doug would have us believe all 1.2 million American women who have abortions each year are digging through garbage piles for food and using water from puddles to bathe. Many women who have abortions ARE in truly heartbreaking situations, but Kmiec’s appeal to pity is obfuscation at best.
How precisely does it follow that because many women are struggling, or to accept Doug’s ludicrously stronger formulation, “in a near hopeless state of existence”, they should be permitted to have abortions? Where is the logical connection between pregnancy and a hopeless state of existence? Is Doug claiming that being pregnant is a hopeless state of existence? Or is he, rather, arguing that women who are already in a hopeless state of existence are becoming unwittingly pregnant? If the former… well I find his claim to be “pro-life” dubious. If the latter, I guess I’m supposed to conclude that ending a pregnancy (and thereby ending a person’s life) will substantially improve a woman’s previously hopeless existence. One moment, she’s cleaning her hair with her spit, while living out of a 3 wheeled Winnebago; the next she’s enrolling in night school, acing the bar, and taking up a satisfying croquet habit. Abortion as a rejuvenator. Or something.
If Kmiec means something else by this bizarre exposition, if he means instead that because women who have unwanted pregnancies often suffer, we ought to have compassion for them and seek to offer counseling and easy alternatives to abortion, then he has no quarrel with Douthat. Or me. Or John McCain. This is what the pro-life movement has substantially focused on-especially post-Casey when it looked as though future abortion litigation was DOA-for decades. It, more then any attempt to overturn Roe, dominates the energies of on the ground pro-life activists. Kmiec knows this, given that he ostensibly counted himself among them as little as a year ago.
He goes on, of course, to demonize pro-lifers and conservatives. Pro-lifers and conservatives don’t want to “lift up the economic or social prospects of the mother”. No mention that pro-lifers and conservatives believe that broadly conservative economic policies, combined with private charity and compassion, “life up all boats”. Pro-lifers want to “punish women who have been abused by their husbands”. No mention here that not a single mainstream pro-life politician has advocated “punishing” the women and that this is a canard of the left. This is all really more then one should have to bear from a man who’s now taken to arguing that justices Breyer and Souter advance the pro-life cause. I don’t begrudge Douthat his anger in the face of such raving nonsense. And I don’t believe Douthat is the one who needs prayer. Something is not right with Doug Kmiec.
