Catholic neocon George Weigel starts off a short piece (about Nancy Pelosi of all things) praising Philadelphia in the 50s as “a town of ethnic neighborhoods in which Catholic kids unselfconsciously identified themselves by parish… dang, it was great. Or, as another product of that period, Garry Wills, once wrote, ‘Not a bad ghetto to grow up in.'” A few lines later he’s attacking those who wanted to maintain ethnic and religious boundaries in Philadelphia and praising open housing legislation as the Catholic equivalent of opposing abortion. Is there something he hasn’t thought through completely?
civil rights
Weigel seeks to conflate open-housing and abortion as “civil rights issues.”
In Weigel’s immanent brain, this sacralizes the issue; the only road open to endow abortion as a question of importance is to embed it within the folds of “civil rights.”
It doesn’t occur to Weigel, or perhaps it is to embarrassing to utter—especially when the easy veil and language of “civil rights” is available—that abortion may be a spiritual, religious, transcendental, ontological, anthropological, cultural, or human question.
And once one embarks on this course, then open-housing legislation is obviously of a par with abortion. And, Nancy Pelosi should see this!