Chip Bok's Bokbluster

Tim Kaine says he’s personally pro-life but supports the constitution which, he says, supports abortion. In fact, in order to become Hillary’s running-mate, Kaine had to take a vow of silence about late-term partial birth abortion.

Kevin Williamson in NR Online thinks Kaine is pro-stupid. And he has an interesting take on personal beliefs:

I very much doubt that I am the only person in the world who is Catholic in part because he is pro-life, and not the other way around. My religious views have changed over time, but my opposition to abortion never has. One of the things that drew me to the Catholic Church years ago was the mystery of how that particular corporation, practically alone among the important institutions of the world, fully appreciated the inhumane violence of abortion, understood the ways in which that violence echoes far outside of the local Planned Parenthood abattoir, and placed that knowledge at the center of its public affairs.

Intellectually, Tim Kaine’s argument about abortion is incoherent and indefensible; it is, in fact, illiterate. He argues that while his own Catholic devotion points him in a pro-life direction, the fact that we are a pluralistic society with a constitutional guarantee of religious freedom precludes him from supporting initiatives that would enshrine certain Catholic preferences in law. That did not stop him from campaigning against capital punishment and from using his gubernatorial powers to that end (the Catholic position on the death penalty is not absolute and, given the history of the church, hardly could be; its prohibition of abortion is absolute) any more than the First Amendment has stopped any cookie-cutter progressive with an Italian or Irish surname from citing the example of Jesus when arguing for this or that social-welfare program. (Never mind, for the moment, that this misconstrues that example.) Back in the ancient days when he was running for president, Barack Obama cited his faith in explaining his opposition to homosexual marriage. But it is not the hypocrisy that rankles so much as the stupidity: There are millions, perhaps billions, of people on this planet who oppose abortion who are not Catholics, who are not bound by Catholic practice, who are not informed by Catholic teaching. There are pro-life Jews, Protestants, Mormons, Muslims (though those who denounce the so-called Religious Right as the “Christian Taliban” would do well to appreciate how liberal sharia actually is on the question of abortion), Hindus, pagans, agnostics, atheists, chiropractors, witch-doctors, and people who believe in horoscopes. My friend and colleague Charles C. W. Cooke is a pro-life non-believer.