Home Rule wasn't Rome Rule

As Dubya's inauguration approaches, it's hard not to ponder the double standards of the punditocracy being deeply troubled (as Daily Howler would say) about a President lying about an affair, but blithe about a President whose time in office has seen executions, war, poverty, and torture. It's especially bizarre that the moral values veneer has attached to the latter and we were looking for some way to tie a few ruminations into a post.

Our first hook was going to be a Michael Novak piece in Friday's Wall Street Journal; Novak has carved out a niche as a leading pro-Dubya Catholic intellectual and we previously posted about this leading him into forgetting his St Augustine in seeking to explain to the Vatican how it was wrong about the Iraq war. In the WSJ article, he tells us of his trip to Sudan to speak about religion to rebel groups, and how he inspired disillusioned Muslims with tales of Catholic progressivity:

Why, one of them asked, when we want only to be devout Muslims, do the radicals in Khartoum quote against us some text from the Koran and tell us we are opposing the Prophet? Why must we practice the barbaric punishments of the seventh or 11th century?

"I am no expert in Islam," I replied, "but I can tell you how we Catholics have come to reject practices that were common centuries ago among our own ancestors."

Given his support for Dubya's war and its associated policies, we'll take this sentiment about as seriously as if he'd explained that the iron maiden used to be an instrument of torture, but now it's just the name of a heavy metal band. Anyway, with our mind already on these issues, we are delighted to participate in the blog division of labour by taking up a query of Sullywatch (which seems to be our thing recently):

not only can you not find a democratic country that remained democratic while recriminalizing abortion, you cannot find a country that took on both the death penalty and abortion with equal vigor (Ireland doesn’t count — we don’t know when its last hanging was, but abortion had never been legal in Ireland before its constitutional amendment to begin with).

This was a de facto continuation of an earlier post in which Sullywatch had asked "Does proscribing abortion do anything to promote a greater social respect for human life?" To the contrary, SW says, arguing that recriminalisation of abortion usually reflects a fetishisation of "life" that goes hand-in-hand with a peculiar disregard for actual living people, not least the mothers of the children-to-be.

In that regard, to SW's list of distasteful regimes that have dated life to conception, we'd add the bizarre mentality of Argentina's dirty war thugs, who didn't drop pregnant left-wing dissidents out of helicopters until after they'd given birth, with the babies going to military families looking to adopt.

Anyway, we have enough of an Irish angle in this collection of issues to run with. First, on the death penalty: last used in the 1950s, remained on the books with theoretical applicability to the murder of a police officer, but formally abolished in 1990, and now in effect impossible to bring back, as a result of a constitutional amendment in 2001 and EU Treaty obligations. And sitting near our constitutional ban on the death penalty is a constitutional ban on abortion.

So the Republic does nominally offer an example of a country with a more "Catholic" alignment of pro-life laws than the USA. But does this provide any inoculation against the charge of moral values hypocrisy -- that the pro-life position is usually just a cudgel aimed at pregnant women, while other examples of devalued life are ignored? Is the Republic an example of anti-abortion law implemented for progressive motives, motives that reflect themselves in other areas of policy?

Absolutely not. First, as SW notes, the bans on the death penalty and abortion evolved from very different sources. The lapse in the death penalty mirrored secular post-war trends in Europe, while the 1983 constitutional ban on abortion just reiterated a legislative ban on abortion from the 19th century.

As for the motives for the 1983 ban, picture a polarising leader looking for an issue to get a big bloc of voters worked up as a necessary distraction from corruption and economic mismanagement. Dubya and his moral values voters in 2004, Charlie Haughey and the pro-lifers in 1982 [the amendment was proposed and written by Haughey's government in 1982, but actually put to the people by a rival coalition in 1983].

Furthermore, the Republic's abortion politics reflect the luxury of having a liberal abortion regime in Britain, so all the predictable downsides of illegal abortion -- the world of Vera Drake -- are avoided. Indeed, our neighbours in Northern Ireland have exactly the same luxury of moral superiority without consequences.

The final irony is that the Republic's 1983 ban, written with "due regard to the equal right to life of the mother" has been interpreted by the not very radical Irish courts as creating, at least on narrow grounds, a right to abortion for Irish women which did not exist before. Not for the first time, the doctrinaire Catholic position got outflanked by an Irish solution to an Irish problem.