Discriminations

I have a new essay on City Journal, “A Double Standard on Faith: Democrats and Catholicism.”

If after reading it you wish I’d written more (??), don’t worry. I have. In fact, this essay was a good deal longer before very talented editors wisely compressed it. But there is one paragraph on the cutting room floor that I wish had survived — this one, which would have gone just before the last paragraph:

Abolitionist is a revealing term here, since in his Notre Dame speech Cuomo went to great lengths to justify the failure of Catholic bishops before the Civil War to join the movement to abolish slavery, an obvious precedent of his own failure to join those who wanted to abolish abortion. Twenty years later Cuomo wrote a book, Why Lincoln Matters: Today More Than Ever, but as I argued at the time, “Cuomo Praises Lincoln But Sounds Like Douglas.” The whole tone and thrust and substance of Cuomo’s speech, I argued, “can be read—in fact, should be read—as a restatement of the stance Lincoln’s great opponent, Stephen A. Douglas, took on the issue of slavery.” Slavery, Douglas believed, “must be treated impartially as a question of public policy, although he privately thought it was wrong and hoped it would be eliminated some day.”

For better or worse, I”ve been writing on this issue for a good while. Some of you may recall the following. If you don’t, or for some reason you never read them, here is more than you want to know about the contradictions of being a Catholic Democrat: