File Under "Toothless Moral Opposition"

I don't know that I completely accept the premise of this post at Catholic Light, that Gay Anglican bishops will of necessity be pro-abortion Anglican Bishops. As gays tend to be of the political left, that's generally an acceptable rule, but exceptions are not impossible.

What I am truly interested in is the logic that this particular Anglican Bishop, gay or no, uses to arrive at a pro-choice position:

"Abortion," he said yesterday, is "not just a matter between a woman and her body. This is not like removing a mole. On the other hand, no one should interfere with a woman's right to choose."

Let us parse this:

The first part of this "Abortion is not just a matter between a woman and her body. This is not like removing a mole," suggests that a fetus posesses a moral worth greater than a mere appendage of the body. One could be forgiven for inferring that the fetus has a value intrinsic to itself. Human entities (and, being a fetus inside a human woman's body, we can only label this a human fetus) which possess intrinsic value are generally referred to as "persons", and, as a matter of law and habit, considered worthy of protection, by other humans, and by the law.

The second part "On the other hand, no one should interfere with a woman's right to choose," seems to say that no one may come between a woman and the choice she makes regarding what goes on inside her body. That which no one may interfere with, human beings have habitually termed "sacred." So, an abortion is a sacred matter concerning a woman and her body. Many will find that term inappropriate, but the speaker here is a Bishop of the Anglican church, and thus, for Anglicans, one empowered to speak as to which matters are sacred and which are not.

So the fetus is a person, deserving of protection, and abortion is a sacred matter involving no one but a woman and her body. Which is exactly the opposite of what the bishop said.

I may be rhetorically reaching, but it is to prove a point: is there anyone out there who actually believes that Bishop Robinson is in any way troubled by abortion? Does anyone believe he's actually spent a half-hour's reflection on the suffering inflicted on pre-neonates, and the physical and emotional damage done to the woman? In fairness, I don't know the man, and he could be sincere on the subject, but I doubt it.

And if he isn't, what does he bother stating anything that even sounds like a moral judgement against abortion? You know why: it's a rhetorical shibboleth, designed to soothe the other side's opposition into a go-along-to-get-along situation. But it goes nowhere towards teaching or persuading anyone to adopt the Anglican view of abortion as something impermissible for "birth control, family planning, sex selection, or any reason of mere convenience." In fact, judging from some of Bishop Robinson's later remarks (follow the link), I doubt very much he'd deem aborting a fetus because you wanted a girl instead of a boy a sin.

This kind of thinking runs parallel, to my mind, with the people who say they thought Saddam was a murderous bastard and they're glade the Iraqis are free, but detest the mechanism that brought that about. It's a child of "9/11 was awful, but..." It is a declaration of moral awareness hamstrung by a refusal to take the action that awareness demands, and therefore amounts to nothing more than an expression of aesthetics, not morality.

Now, any good leftist can point out where people of my camp to the same thing, but with different issues (poverty being the leadoff hitter, the death penalty perhaps batting cleanup). And I don't know that they'd be wrong to do so. And this is where alternative proposals are so important. There are ways of dealing with poverty other than the bureaucratic spawn of the dead command economies. But if abortion and terrorism and Saddam Hussein are such bad things, what do you plan on doing about them?