Churches for Abortion

RCRC, formerly known as the Religious Coalition for Abortion Rights, was founded in 1973 with funding from the Playboy Foundation (and later from the Ford Foundation), to organize religious supporters of legalized abortion. RCRC is absolutist in its rejection of any restriction on abortion, defending the legality of partial-birth abortion, and opposing parental-notification laws, as well as other sensible restrictions…

In all their unctuous demonstration-marching and statement-making, the pro-abortion-rights church community has not considered the effect of their advocacy on their own demographic health.

Conservatives have often chided the mainline Protestant denominations for their dramatic membership losses, faulting the controversial liberal political advocacy of their churches' officials. No doubt there is truth in this. Most mainline Protestants are still conservative leaning, despite the chronic leftism of their church hierarchies. Many react in frustration by leaving.

But the demographic implosion may also have other, deeper contributing factors. One out of every six Americans belonged to a mainline denomination 40 years ago. Today it is one out of every 15. Writing for The American Journal of Sociology several years ago, Catholic priest (and romance potboiler author) Andrew Greeley, with two other sociologists, asserted that mainline Protestant decline is actually created by decades of declining birthrates in comparison to those for conservative Protestants and Roman Catholics.

Though Greeley et al. did not address it directly, mainline Protestant hierarchs long championed legalized abortion before Roe v. Wade, culminating in their founding of RCRC in 1973. Undoubtedly this had some impact on abortion rates among their own flocks. The lower birth rate among mainline Protestants can probably be explained, at least partly, by some level of increased moral ease with and resort to abortion (the "Roe Effect").

So perhaps unrestricted abortion is fueling the decline of the very same churches who have most championed it. The irony is a sad one.

Mark Tooley
National Review

http://www.nationalreview.com/comment/tooley200602100924.asp

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The Gatekeepers

Who decides who can teach at religious schools?

Tabloid readers might have noticed the case of Michelle McCusker, fired in November from her job teaching at a Catholic school in Queens, N.Y., for becoming pregnant out of wedlock. She has filed a complaint with the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission, and her attorneys at the New York Civil Liberties Union say that, regardless of the commission's findings, Ms. McCusker plans to sue the school. There is no scarlet letter involved, but the whole business has created a rare modern moment: a scandalous pregnancy.

Further along in such a legal proceeding is Michele Curay-Cramer, fired from her job teaching at a Catholic school in Wilmington, Del. She had signed a petition supporting abortion rights and volunteered at a Planned Parenthood facility. Ms. Curay-Cramer's case was just heard by the Third U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals.

There are a number of differences in the cases of the two Michelles, but they both illustrate some legal confusion in the matter of "religious liberty." The words usually bring to mind individuals who wish to do something as an expression of their faith — pray in school, wear a beard at work — and find themselves prevented from doing so by an institution's policies. But the reverse is becoming more common: institutions claiming that their own religious liberties are being violated by individuals who insist on wandering outside religiously guided rules and requirements.

Frank DeRosa, a spokesman for the diocese that oversees Ms. McCusker's school in Queens, explains the reasoning this way: "The parish reluctantly dismissed Ms. McCusker because, as a nonmarried woman who was expecting a child, she could not adequately convey the faith to the children in her charge." As a religious institution, the school is legally allowed to discriminate in its employment practices on the basis of religion.

But the NYCLU charges that the school engaged in gender discrimination, not the religious kind. "Our view," says executive director Donna Lieberman, "is that the school only applies its religious doctrine regarding nonmarital sex to women." The McCusker case "is not about whether a school can impose its religious beliefs on its teachers." It's about whether a religious school is applying its doctrine "even-handedly." Sensibly, Ms. Lieberman notes that a woman can't sue for being denied a position as a priest.

But Anthony Picarello, a lawyer at the Becket Fund for Religious Liberty, believes it is not the business of courts to decide how and when its principles may be applied to employees.

Naomi Schaefer Riley
Opinion Journal

http://www.opinionjournal.com/taste/?id=110007948

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The Impact of Feminism

Feminism arose on the left, but it succeeded in large part because its primary goals were so congruent with the broad sweep of capitalism: eroding barriers to market production. Today, thanks to feminism, anything a woman wants to do that she can do on her own — or with the help of the market — she is now more free to do. But anything that requires social support to accomplish — such as getting stably married and having children — has become immeasurably harder.

The problem that feminism has never yet named is that women want to have children, and children compete with our ability to throw ourselves wholeheartedly into market production. Our children, by turning us into mothers, make us vulnerable, economically and emotionally.

Orthodox feminism's most persistent answer to this problem has been to call for a network of daycare centers. Well, we have them now. Certainly affluent, educated women have no problem with access to child care, and yet the problem of motherhood remains. The problem is that love, care, connection and intimacy with our children compete for our time and energy with ambition, power, glory and money, in ways that are different for mothers than for fathers.

Orthodox feminism's secondary solution, to make men more involved in children's lives, has been stymied by its simultaneous commitment to divorce, unwed parenting, and female sexual "autonomy" as signs of social progress. If men aren't in the home, they can hardly do any of the housework, can they?

Until feminism can come to grips with sexual reality — with the ways in which men and women differ — it will remain flummoxed and silent about some of the most important problems women now face.

We come into this world not only as human beings, but as boys and girls who long for and need a culture that affirms the value of both male and female. The sex roles of the 1950s were unsatisfying to too many women, and so in need of reform. But to jettison the idea of sex itself, to make androgyny the goal, was feminism's fatal mistake.

We are still waiting for the next generation's Betty Friedan to lead us anew.

Maggie Gallagher
Townhall

http://www.townhall.com/opinion/column/maggiegallagher/ 2006/02/08/185802.html