The BigHo writes about the Catholic Kerry’s internal conflict with the American secularist Kerry.

He defends the dissonance between Kerry’s private and public lives:

I admire the fact that Kerry is taking a principled stand. Maybe some will disagree: “By publicly affirming and privately denying a woman’s right to choose, Kerry merely confirms that he’s a flip-flopper,” they’ll say. But I’m not sure what else Kerry can do. Something has to give. The question is whether Rome will indeed push ahead with excommunication. I’d be interested to see how Kerry would react to that.

Kerry may be Catholic, but he’s acting according to his conscience– something we Protestants can appreciate, given the crucial role we ascribe to conscience regarding matters of faith.

I strongly suspect that Kerry’s stand is anything but principled. I would even posit that it cannot be principled. As I have argued previously, if one believes that life begins at conception, one is morally mandated to oppose abortion. Genuflecting before America’s public secularity isn’t principled: it is calculated.

In 1855, many Northern Protestants had reached the conclusion that slavery was incompatible with Christianity. Even though their agitation to end the peculiar institution was religiously based, it would have been immoral of them to say: “Well, my reading of the Bible leads me to believe that slavery is wrong, but since America is publicly secular, I won’t try to impose my religious beliefs on other people.”

It would be wrong for Christians to try to force Muslims to say a Christian prayer in schools. It would be wrong for Christians to mandate public schools teach the doctrine of Creation (Anything but) Science. Those are issues of faith. But if one believes that murder is occurring, one is morally bound to oppose it, with NO exceptions (er - only one exception - the Maximum Leader has made a good case for situations in which the life of the mother is endangered).