In a response (albeit slightly delayed) to the Supreme Court decision banning late term abortions, Frances Kissling, former president of Catholics for Free Choice, has a lovely piece up at Salon.
She points out that by making this decision the justices have injected Catholic dogma doctrine into the law and that is in fact unconstitutional.
Apparently the five Supreme Court justices in the majority, all of whom are Catholic, agreed with the senators. […] The opinion, written by Anthony Kennedy, who is considered the least orthodox of the five, was devastating. Beyond outlawing a method of abortion it deemed only possibly needed by a few women, the decision injected orthodox Catholic teaching into the interpretation of constitutional rights. Kennedy’s opinion, which affirms “the government’s right to use its voice and its regulatory authority to show its profound respect for the life within the woman” as it cavalierly dismisses the need a few specific women might have for this procedure, could easily have been written by the late Pope John Paul II or the current Benedict XVI. Women are invisible in this decision as they are invisible in the writings of recent — and not so recent — popes. Now it’s impossible for me to remain silent.
And this little tidbit really hit the nail on the head. Bold mine.
Moralizing about women’s lives is not, of course, an exclusively Catholic habit, but we Catholic feminists(*) tend to sniff it out and want to snuff it out. When we see it in a Supreme Court decision our fear of being considered irrational fades. At the risk of providing yet another opportunity for that pit bull of Catholic orthodoxy, William Donohue, to cry anti-Catholicism, one must stress another aspect of orthodox Catholicism that is the foundation of the majority opinion in this case — its tragic view of women as either victims or sluts.
Those are a couple of nice parts but the whole piece is great. Go read it yourself.
* Until pretty recently, I never knew such a thing existed.