Church Boycotts Democracy

I wonder if the Bush administration will stand by its announced commitment to democratic ideals, or will it criticize the Vatican for asking Italian voters not to vote.....

Barely 26% of Italian voters participated in a referendum yesterday -- and so the referendum failed. In order to pass, at least 50% of the voters would have had to fulfill their civic duty.

The Pope and other leaders of the Catholic Church feared that the referendum would pass, so they adopted the somewhat cynical strategy of asking Catholic voters to stay home, abstaining from the vote altogether. Presumably, had the Church hierarchy felt more confident, they would have encouraged Catholics to vote in large numbers. But, they might have lost if people went to the polls, so.....

I don't know which is more offensive -- having the Bishops tell you how to vote, or having them tell you not to vote at all. Good thing they don't try that here -- it just sounds so un-American.

The referendum sought to overturn four sections of law: one that grants the same rights to an embryo as to a child; one that bans most experimentation on fetuses; one that allows couples to create no more than three embryos, all of which must be implanted at one time without genetic testing; and one that bans couples from using eggs or sperm donated by other people.

Given the President's commitment to defend the lives of frozen microscopic embryonic stem cells, maybe he would like to propose a bill to mirror the Italian law.

Can you imagine Americans accepting such limits on their access to in vitro fertility assistance? Even if he got all the bishops to stand with him, he could never sell such strict rules to the aspiring parents of America. No way.

We tend to think a culture of life is one in which anyone who wants a baby that is genetically their own should have access to the doctors and petri dishes -- even if hundreds of thousands of excess frozen embryos are discarded as unwanted a few years later. No problem.

Besides, with our tradition of church-state separation, it would be unthinkable for an American bishop to try to tell people how to vote, let alone to stay home. Right?

Ahh. The march of freedom continues.

Neil

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