RELIGION AND THE DEMOCRATIC PARTY

Your missionary to Capitol Hill, Washington, DC, Rob Schenck, reporting:

There’s been a lot of religious language and uncharacteristic moralizing here at the Democratic National Convention, a lot of it at that opening exercise I wrote about, the “Interfaith Gathering” on Sunday. I heard more today at the Democrats for Life of America (DFLA) Town Hall Meeting. DFLA executive director Kristen Day presided over a discussion that followed remarks by a long slate of speakers including Pennsylvania’s Senator Bob Casey, North Carolina’s Congressman Heath Shuler, controversial sociologist and Democratic Party Platform Committee member Tony Campolo and my fellow National Pro-Life Religious Council board member and African-American activist Rev. Clenard Childress.

The very fact this event happened without opposition from party leaders indicates an extraordinary shift in culture and attitude among Democrats. It was only a few years ago the late Pennsylvania Governor Bob Casey, a staunchly pro-life Catholic, was banned from the podium. (His son, Senator Robert Casey, acknowledged that today from that very podium.) Many here credit this change to Barack Obama’s openness to those who disagree with him. (He is a firm supporter of Roe v. Wade and has promised Planned Parenthood that his first act in office will be to erase all state restrictions on underage and late-term abortions.)

Still, pro-lifers were at least heard this year at the convention and in the earlier platform committee meetings. At the Democrats for Life event, Tony Campolo defended his willingness to negotiate on abortion by pointing out 51% of Americans are pro-choice, a reality, he said, both parties must live with. (Rev. Childress later gently questioned that claim.) I asked Tony if numbers don’t become irrelevant when it comes to questions on the dignity and intrinsic value of the human person. Who cares, for example, what percentage of the American public is racist when it comes to shaping policy? I noted Martin Luther King’s philosophy that during his time, while the American people weren’t quite ready to end racist practices, time had run out for them. There were no more days to be counted. Injustice could not continue for a single day more than it already had.

I actually expected Tony to somehow excuse his compromise, but he didn’t. He was quite candid. He explained that politics demands compromise, but he wouldn’t attempt to morally justify it, nor would he criticize those who remain intractable on principle. (Like me!)

Perhaps it’s because my parents believed in non-negotiables that I couldn’t sit in the seat Tony occupies. Mom and Dad sided with civil rights activists who were done negotiating with politicians, police and business owners for a place at the table. Maybe that’s what made me uncomfortable—at times even distressed—listening to the presenters that Democrats for Life had assembled. They all spoke the language of negotiation, the language of compromise.

Don’t get me wrong. I support what Democrats for Life is doing in principle. (I even left a hefty financial contribution.) I like the idea they’re making sausage, even if I don’t have the stomach for how they make it. After recently reading the autobiography of the great abolitionist and former slave, Frederick Douglas, I was reinforced all the more in my conviction that one more day of human suffering, indignity and injustice can never be tolerated. Douglas and King spoke and acted with absolute urgency. Of course, the political machinery took more than a century to catch on.

I hope and pray it won’t take a century for the Democratic Party to catch up to the pro-life voices they heard during this convention. I’m sure glad they heard them, though. Prophets may be ignored, pilloried or even vanquished during their lifetimes, but inevitably the truth breaks through and they are vindicated.

Years ago I toured what’s left of the Dachau concentration camp in Germany where tens of thousands of innocent children, women and men were exterminated by Adolf Hitler’s Nazi killing machine. As I walked in silence through a hideous photo gallery of inhuman medical experiments conducted on prisoners, I heard an elderly woman weeping nearby. I asked if there was anything I could do for her. She answered in a thick German accent, “I was a little girl living near here. I knew what they were doing. I smelled the corpses, but I did nothing. I always feel so guilty.”

In each generation there has and will be human suffering. It’s only a question of how many must suffer while the rest of us work out compromises in our own hearts and minds--and with each other. Then there’s the question of the consequent scale of the burden we must bear for it in our future regret.

I do plenty of my own compromising--each time I pick and choose what mentally ill homeless person I’ll take care of outside the commuter rail station in Washington. The truth is if I stretched myself I could take care of many of them, but I usually compromise by saying I’ll do this one today and another tomorrow. Or, I’ll rationalize that others must do their part, too.

Perhaps the negotiation between the folks at Democrats for Life and their “pro-choice” party and candidates is like my moral compromise with the homeless, only writ large on the massive American political screen--then again, maybe not. If not, I’d sure like to help lead them to a better moral resolution, for the sake of those who will suffer on both ends of the negotiating table.

More to follow . . .

Rev. Rob Schenck

Faith and Action

www.faithandaction.org

109 2nd Street, NE, Washington, DC 20002

202-546-8329