Abortion and the "Catholic Right"

Human Life Review, Spring 2007 by Hitchcock, James

After the Supreme Court's decision on partial-birth abortions, Likoudis wrote a front-page article headlined "Supreme Court Ruling Might Not Prevent One Abortion" (April 26), in which he quoted a law professor, Charles Rice, as calling the decision "grotesque," because it did not outlaw abortion completely, and a pro-life activist named Judie Brown saying that "If pro-lifers consider this a victory, then someone should check to see what they are putting in their coffee." (Like pro-abortionists, Likoudis referred to partial-birth abortion in quotation marks, as though the term is somehow misleading.)

These reactions help explain The Wanderer'?, seeming indifference to the likely effect of elections on the abortion issue-if anything short of the complete reversal of Roe v. Wade must be rejected, and if such reversal is at present scarcely realistic, then pro-lifers are in effect being advised to base their votes on other issues.

A weekly feature of The Wanderer is "From the Mail" (FTM), where letters from anonymous readers are published with replies from an anonymous editor. As one can discern from its obvious passion, FTM takes a view of the world that has economics at its center, and it defines economic relationships as essentially a conspiracy of the rich against the poor, offering few specific proposals for change but expressing an apocalyptic sense of doom. Almost every week the anonymous editor warns that American economic conditions are getting steadily worse, to the point where "working people" can scarcely even survive (one reader could not find a house costing less than $863,000; people pay over 26 percent monthly interest on their credit cards). When a reader complained (November 16) that the paper was slighting religion in favor of economics, FTM replied in exasperation, "Where does one begin?" and asked sarcastically whether the paper should ignore "the two-party political charade that enables Washington to fatten while Michigan and Ohio go on economic life support."

If politics makes strange bedfellows, none are stranger than the alliances forged by FTM, which sometimes cites left-wing commentators like Gabriel Kolko (December 7) to prove that the United States is collapsing. Kolko, now half-forgotten but at one time a leading New Left historian, was described by FTM as "America's preeminent historian of U.S. wars and warfare," and readers were directed to his essay '"As an Economic System, Capitalism Is Going Crazy': Factors in Our Colossal Mess," predicting a disaster for which, not surprisingly, the Bush administration is largely responsible. FTM also quoted extensively from a newsletter that advocates investment in precious metals, on the grounds that the dollar is sinking to the point of worthlessness, and has predicted (January 18) that the American economy will "implode" during 2007.

Marxists like Kolko have a vested interest in the collapse of capitalism, since Marx based his entire system on that supposition and, for 150 years, Marxists have repeatedly proclaimed various economic crises as heralding that collapse. But-far as it is from Marxism philosophically-FTM seems to have an equal vested interest in seeing that prophecy fulfilled. Sobran predicts (November 9) that America is "heading for total ruin" and that Communism might after all be "the wave of the future."