Moral Combat
Page 28
Although a warm and gentle man by accounts of those who knew him, and usually courteous to his foes no less than to his allies, Moody did not refrain from vocal criticism of Catholic anti-abortion activism. In the spring of 1972, fighting a battle against New York’s Catholic leaders, who were attempting to repeal the liberal New York abortion laws, Moody spoke out with vehemence at a press conference called by the National Association for the Repeal of Abortion Laws (NARAL):
I deplore the vicious and scathing attacks on our mothers, sisters and wives being castigated as guilty of murder and the most unspeakable of crimes against humanity made by leaders of the Roman Catholic Church and their “right to life” followers. Coming from an institution whose history is replete with the killing of innocent people in the name of God, I find little grace and no charity in their wanton attack upon people who view “life” and “death” differently than they do. The Cardinal, the bishops, and the pastors of the church are sowing the seeds of sectarian hatred that can only lead to religious divisiveness and warfare in this nation. It is a sign of acute desperation that the Church has seen fit to turn an issue on which honest persons disagree into a religious battle ground where righteous protectors of life and God are battering the demonic forces of murder and mayhem.45
In the same year, Moody grounded the pro-choice side in the cherished national ideal of religious freedom, again lashing out at Catholic leaders:
The principle of religious liberty that grants all persons the freedom to follow the practice of one’s own religion or conscience in matters of faith and morals touches the abortion issue precisely at the point of a woman’s freedom to follow her conviction that abortion is morally permissible even thought for her co-religionist it may be a sin. The Roman Catholic Church and whatever religious allies it has in the attempts to destroy the law are forsaking the basic tenets of our living together in an open, pluralistic society. The issue is not when does life begin in the womb but rather where does freedom of choice and conscience end in society? A more important question than whether feticide is homicide may be whether any one group may impose its moral and religious beliefs by legal sanction upon all society.46
Less than a year later, the US Supreme Court issued its decision in Roe v. Wade, finding that states could not criminalize abortion in the first trimester and could curb it only within strict bounds beyond that. Moody’s side had apparently won against the Catholic hierarchy, but he noted that abortion plainly was “a battleground that would take its toll on human civility and religious tolerance for years to come.”47
In fact, Roe had an intriguingly close link to CCS. Sarah Weddington, the young Texas lawyer who successfully argued the case before the Supreme Court, was the daughter of a United Methodist pastor and described herself as “the traditional preacher’s daughter: I sang in the church choir, played the church organ and piano, gave Sunday devotionals and was a youth leader in the church community.”48 She attended McMurry College, a small Methodist school in Abilene, before heading to law school at the University of Texas. After graduating in 1968, she became active in feminist activities in Austin that included an abortion referral project. Project workers collaborated closely with the network of ministers and rabbis who made up the Texas chapters of the Clergy Consultation Service, including one Methodist pastor who was a friend of her father. Like these clergymen, Weddington felt a responsibility to help others that she believed came out of the “gospel of ‘Christian social concern’” in which she was raised—the very sense of responsibility that led her to challenge the Texas anti-abortion law all the way to the Supreme Court.49
When the Roe decision eliminated barriers to safe and legal abortion across the nation, the practical work of the CCS essentially ended. Women seeking to end a pregnancy could turn to reputable doctors and clinics, and if many continued to seek pastoral care in making this decision, they did not need clergy referrals. CCS clergy could and did focus on other issues. Over his career, Moody took bold stands on a number of large social questions, all of which were, to him, chiefly moral in nature. He worked in the civil rights movement, opposed the Vietnam War, advocated the decriminalization of marijuana, served as a member of New York’s Democratic Reform movement, initiated an AIDS task force at Judson Memorial Church, and championed the reform of drug laws. He would become a vocal advocate for queer men and women, after living among and working with so many in the LGBT community in Greenwich Village.
In the immediate aftermath of the CCS, Moody and his parishioners, along with Carmen, established the Judson Church Prostitution Project, which reached out to the “working women” of Manhattan who performed sex for pay at massage parlors and on the street. Moody’s approach to this work closely resembled his approach to women seeking abortions and again reflected his strong view that women were victims of the Christian tradition’s long history of harshly judging female sexuality. He and his coworkers sought out local prostitutes to offer much needed health services, help with child care and housing, and above all be present in a way that would “let the women know that a congregation of people who made no judgment about their profession cared about them as human beings.” They worked on the street and on a bus, from which they served hot food, kept a bulletin board on which women proudly posted photos of their children, and offered space for conversation. They learned of the economic deprivations, sexual abuse, and desperation that had led some of these women into prostitution, and they were determined to help them find dignity and happiness. Moody baptized several of the women’s children, held baby showers and weddings for some women, and performed memorial services for several prostitutes who were murdered. He and his associates also came weekly to witness arraignments of prostitutes at Manhattan Criminal Court, convinced that simply “being there” for the women was “an important component of our ministry.” Judson Church even published a newspaper for working prostitutes, called The Hooker’s Hookup: A Professional Journal; among other things, it printed the women’s own written thoughts on their profession as well as their poetry and creative prose.50
Moody’s ultimate goal in this work, like his work on behalf of pregnant women seeking abortions, was to eradicate the laws that made prostitutes into criminals and that worked ultimately to endanger the women’s lives and complicate the lives of their children. In the interim, it was critical to see and treat each prostitute as a unique human being and to establish connection so as to understand more about her life. The prostitute was hated by many “square” women (including both feminists and those on the religious right), wrote Carmen and Moody, because she represented sexual freedom and the fantasy of full control over her own body. But this hatred did horrific psychological damage to women who worked in the sex trade, analogous to that done to women who sought abortions or to people engaging in same-sex relations during the time when all of these activities were viewed as criminal and immoral. Consistent with his broader moral stance on sex and human personhood, in short, Moody refused to consider prostitutes as sexual deviants, dirty sinners, or lawbreakers, regarding them instead as dignified human beings who perhaps needed help but nonetheless merited thoroughgoing respect. Moody was adamant in believing that the immorality in question was not sex for pay but the double standard—“which grew, let us remember, out of the theology of the church”—and brutality sanctioned by the law.51
Yet what may have horrified church authorities most, Moody believed, was the fact of “serendipitous sex”—based on the attitude, exemplified in the prostitute-client relationship (among others) that sex could be “as casual as a friendly handshake.” In the prostitute’s work world, sex appeared not as the “holy, set-apart activity appropriate only in the most restrictive context” idealized by Jewish and Christian ethics; instead, it was “desacralized” and “deromanticized.” Prostitutes laughed about sex, telling stories that were alternately sad and hilarious about their patrons’ sexual dysfunctions, hang-ups, and kinky desires. There was nothing holy, mysterious, or unique about any sexu
al encounter performed for pay; it was not “some momentous, secret act with which we are going to consummate our humanity.” This “offhand view of sex” was, Moody believed, what most frightened the religious and political conservatives who were committed to the status quo and who deeply opposed all sexual activity outside of heterosexual marriage; for if sex was a mundane rather than sacred activity, neither “dehumanizing” nor miraculous but simply ordinary and not immutably tethered to any special set of emotions, then there was no longer any urgency to keep it under such strict control. The prostitute, like any unrepentantly promiscuous man or—especially—woman, served as “a living, walking threat to every traditional moral and religious belief that asserts romantic love, or monogamous marriage or relationships to be the exclusive fitting forms for any sexual activity.” It was for this reason that prostitutes, much like women seeking abortions, were so ostracized by conservative church leaders, who rightly saw them as “a genuine threat to the church’s major teachings about sex” as well as to broader American attitudes toward human sexuality that had been so thoroughly shaped by Christianity.52
IN THE AFTERMATH OF ROE, it was quickly apparent that opponents of abortion were galvanizing to create what would become a powerful crusade that they would call the right-to-life or pro-life movement, which aimed to overturn the ruling and to recriminalize abortion. Catholic leaders were at the forefront of this effort from the very start, some repeatedly warning that any Catholic who had or helped another person procure an abortion would be punished with excommunication. Anti-abortion activism did not, of course, start with Roe.53 Organizations such as the Catholic-founded Human Life Center and the Society for a Christian Commonwealth had been working on abortion starting in the late 1960s, often as part of a broader agenda that included birth control, traditional marriage, and other issues. But Roe catalyzed a new phase of activity, inspiring repeated attempts to gather local and state-level organizations into a massive force that would successfully protect the life of the unborn.
The National Council of Catholic Bishops’ Family Life Bureau had created the National Right to Life Committee in 1968, and while it was no longer under the church’s control by 1973, it was still dominated by Catholics. The group met in Washington, DC, less than a week after Roe to determine its next steps. It took only eight days from the Supreme Court’s ruling for a member of the US House of Representatives, a divorced Catholic from Maryland, to introduce a constitutional amendment declaring the fetus a “person” from the moment of conception, a move that would presumably render abortion illegal regardless of context. In August, Catholic leaders protested an episode of the CBS sitcom Maude, when the title character’s abortion was the focal subject, and in November, the National Council of Catholic Bishops voted to establish a National Committee for a Human Life Amendment (NCHLA), affirming that the passage of a pro-life amendment to the US Constitution was “a priority of the highest order.”54 The first national March for Life took place in January 1974 in Washington, DC, and two months later, four Catholic cardinals—John Cody, John Krol, Timothy Manning, and Humberto Medeiros—testified before a Senate subcommittee to argue for a constitutional amendment banning abortion under all circumstances. As Cardinal Manning put it in his testimony, “The stark fact is that the unborn are being destroyed in our country at an unprecedented rate, and the destruction goes on because there is no adequate protection in the law. No one who cherishes this nation’s historic commitment to human rights can contemplate this situation with complacency.”55
In November 1975, the National Conference of Catholic Bishops voted to approve a “pastoral plan for pro-life activities” that called for the creation of pro-life groups in every congressional district in the United States to persuade congressional representatives to vote for a constitutional amendment banning abortion. These groups would collaborate with diocesan pro-life groups that already existed, but whereas the purpose of the diocesan groups was “pedagogic and motivational,” the congressional groups were organizational. Each unit “can be described as a public interest group or a citizens’ lobby,” wrote the bishops. “No matter what it is called, its task is essentially political.” They urged Catholics to work with non-Catholics on this plan, as this was not merely a Catholic issue. New York’s Terence Cardinal Cooke, the chair of the committee that drafted the plan, called the Supreme Court’s ruling a “disaster,” telling an audience at a news conference, “We have been subjected to a brain-washing by people pushing abortion.”56 The church’s anti-abortion campaign was its biggest ever in the United States, and it greatly accelerated and strengthened the grassroots political movement against abortion.
Pro-life women protest the increased access to abortion that followed the Supreme Court’s Roe v. Wade decision, 1973. KEYSTONE-FRANCE/GAMMA-KEYSTONE VIA GETTY IMAGES.
In 1976, a Catholic US senator from Illinois, Henry Hyde, sponsored a piece of congressional legislation that banned the use of federal funds to pay for abortion. Introducing the legislation in June 1976, Hyde emphasized that American taxpayers should not be forced to pay for “the killing of innocent preborn human life.” Since this provision would primarily affect those receiving health care through Medicaid who could not afford the cost of an abortion, congressional opponents accused Hyde of targeting the poor, to which he responded, “I would certainly like to prevent, if I could legally, anybody from having an abortion, a rich woman, a middle class woman, or a poor woman.”57 Congress passed what came to be called the Hyde Amendment that year, tinkering with it periodically afterward and much later adding exceptions for abortions needed to save the woman’s life or for pregnancies resulting from rape or incest. In the years to come, it would be a focal point for activists on all sides.
In the same year the Equal Rights Amendment failed to get ratified to become part of the US Constitution, 1979, the anti-abortion movement got a major public boost. Leaders in the burgeoning Christian right were organizing themselves into something like an actual movement to stand against abortion and other forces of feminism that they believed threatened the traditional family and American values. In June, the fundamentalist Jerry Falwell founded the Moral Majority, a conservative religious group resolved to combat the atheistic secular humanism seen as plaguing the land. The organization played a critical role in strengthening a social agenda within the Republican Party that actively opposed not only abortion and feminism but also homosexuality and pornography. Epitomizing what one historian calls a “union of deep religious commitment with legal consciousness,” Beverly LaHaye that same year founded Concerned Women for America for much the same purpose and expressly to counter through lobbying and legal action abortion as well as sex education, pornography, and what she called the “blatantly pro-lesbian tactics of radical feminists.”58
For all of these resolutely conservative Christians and their innumerable allies and followers, feminism and abortion were twin evils, two sides of the same dirty coin. By the 1980s, the politics of abortion reverberated in federal and state elections across the country. Ronald Reagan, who campaigned openly in support of the Christian right and advocated for a constitutional amendment against abortion, badly beat the incumbent Democratic president, Jimmy Carter, in 1980. And abortion only intensified as a wedge issue in that decade, fueled by religious and political players on all sides.
Pro-choice religious activism also continued, in organizations such as the Religious Coalition for Abortion Rights, a successor to CCS that had been founded in December 1973. But it wasn’t only pro-choice Protestants and Jews who spoke out; pro-choice Catholics who dissented from the Catholic hierarchy’s teaching on this issue did too. In fact, a few Catholics created one of the most important religious pro-choice groups in the post-Roe years. In 1973, three Catholic lay women—Joan Harriman, Patricia Fogarty McQuillan, and Meta Mulcahy—established Catholics for a Free Choice (CFFC). The organization came out of New York-based Catholics for the Elimination of All Restrictive Abortion & Contraceptive Laws, a pro-choice
lobby group formed at the height of the New York legislative abortion battles in 1970.
These pro-choice Catholics wanted other Catholics to remember that their church had not always equated all abortion with homicide; they insistently explained that centuries of church leaders—including such greats as Augustine and Aquinas—had promoted the view that abortion prior to “ensoulment” was a minor offense, one more akin to using birth control than to murder. Those church leaders had taken this view from pre-Christian thinkers: Aristotle, for instance, argued that in the early days of gestation, a human embryo does not yet have a living soul but rather an inanimate “vegetable soul.” A fetus would only be animated with a living soul some weeks after conception; this process of “ensoulment” occurred, Aristotle believed, forty days after conception for males and ninety days after conception for females. Later Christians offered different views on this concept of ensoulment, some agreeing with Aristotle’s timeline and others arguing that ensoulment occurred as early as during conception or as late as the time of quickening. Christian thinkers routinely condemned abortion after ensoulment as sin, but there was wide variance, for centuries, as to when this occurred, and hence many accepted early abortions.