Manuela Tedrow

Manuela Tedrow

BALTIMORE — The president of the United States Conference of Catholic Bishops told his fellow prelates Monday that while they should “rejoice” at the election of an African-American president, they should confront him over his support for abortion rights.

“The common good can never be adequately incarnated in any society when those waiting to be born can be legally killed at choice,” the president, Cardinal Francis George, the archbishop of Chicago, said in an opening address to about 300 bishops gathered here for their national meeting. “Common ground cannot be found by destroying the common good.”

Cardinal George’s remarks were a repudiation of the “common good” approach to the abortion issue that President-elect Barack Obama and Democratic Party leaders, including some prominent Roman Catholics, honed in the recent election.

Advocates of the “common good” approach say that, rather than outlawing abortion — which has polarized the American electorate for decades — they will try to reduce abortions by strengthening the social and economic safety net to enable more women to bring their pregnancies to term.

Cardinal George said in a news conference that while the bishops supported “social welfare programs that come to the aid of the poor,” they also would continue to lobby for legislative and legal restrictions on abortion.

Abortion is not the only issue on which the bishops plan to challenge the president-elect. Over the weekend, aides to Mr. Obama said he was considering overturning President Bush’s directive that banned most research on embryonic stem cells. Cardinal George said the bishops would “be in conversation” with Mr. Obama on this matter, too.

After eight years of a Republican president who invoked Catholic language to cement his anti-abortion platform, the bishops are now confronting an incoming Democratic administration that has championed abortion rights.

In the closing months of the presidential race, several Catholic bishops skirted close to endorsing the Republican candidate for president, Senator John McCain, by proclaiming that Catholics could not in good conscience vote for a candidate who favored abortion rights.

The Rev. Thomas J. Reese, senior fellow at the Woodstock Theological Center at Georgetown University, and a longtime chronicler of the bishops, said, “The result was that the most vocal bishops gave the appearance of speaking for all the bishops, and the others just kept silent.”

Many more bishops voiced their outrage, individually and collectively, at Mr. Obama’s vice-presidential pick, Senator Joseph R. Biden Jr., and the House speaker, Nancy Pelosi, who in interviews both invoked Catholic teaching to justify their stance in favor of abortion rights.

Nevertheless, after the election, exit polls found that 54 percent of Catholic voters had voted for the Obama-Biden ticket.

Some bishops meeting here said they did not view that outcome as a repudiation of their guidance, but as a reflection of polls that showed that social and moral issues were not primary concerns for voters, including Catholics, this year.

“At the top of the list was the economic situation, and their own economic situation,” said Archbishop George Niederauer of San Francisco.

Nevertheless, the bishops will spend part of Tuesday debating whether they gave sufficient guidance to Catholic voters. Last November, the bishops voted nearly unanimously to issue “Faithful Citizenship,” a guide for Catholic voters. It said that Catholics must pay attention to issues like poverty, war, the environment and human rights, but that “the direct and intentional destruction of innocent human life is always wrong and is not just one issue among many.”

The “Faithful Citizenship” document was cited by some prominent lay Catholics to justify their support for Mr. Obama. Archbishop Charles Chaput of Denver has declared that the document “didn’t work” and called for an overhaul.

But it is not clear that he has widespread support. Archbishop Donald Wuerl, who as bishop of Washington, D.C., now occupies the hottest chair in the bishops conference, said he did not support rewriting the document.

“The document does not make the judgment, ‘This is how you must vote,’ ” Archbishop Wuerl said. “It offers the principles.”

“Different people arrive at different conclusions from the same principles,” he said, and the bishops must clarify and teach those principles.

The bishops are also divided on whether to deny Communion to Catholic politicians who support abortion rights.

“I have never thought that was the way to proceed,” said Archbishop Wuerl, who is confronted with this question nearly each week. “You have to make that decision on your own conscience.”

Manuela Tedrow

WASHINGTON — One week after the Republicans were routed in the presidential election, the fight is on over who will be the new leaders of the party. Republicans are debating how to position themselves ideologically and how aggressively to take on President-elect Barack Obama.

The competition to fill the vacuum left by Senator John McCain’s defeat — and by the unpopularity of President Bush as he prepares to leave office — will be on full display at a Republican Governors Association meeting beginning Wednesday in Miami.

The session will showcase a roster of governors positioning themselves as leaders or future presidential candidates, including Sarah Palin of Alaska, Tim Pawlenty of Minnesota, Charlie Crist of Florida, Bobby Jindal of Louisiana, Haley Barbour of Mississippi and Mark Sanford of South Carolina.

At the same time, Republicans representing diverse views about the party’s direction are preparing to fight for the chairmanship of the Republican National Committee, a prominent post when the party is out of the White House. The current chairman, Mike Duncan, has signaled that he wants to stay on after his term expires in January, but he is facing challenges from leaders in Florida, Mississippi and South Carolina, among other states.

Mr. Duncan was installed by Mr. Bush, and the fight over his post reflects the effort by many party leaders to erase any remnant of the Bush legacy.

These struggles come as the party prepares for a broad ideological battle, in particular over how much to emphasize social issues like opposition to abortion rights and gay rights. Party leaders said the focus on those issues had constricted the party’s appeal to moderate and independent voters more interested in jobs, health care, education and other issues that touch their lives in more concrete ways.

“We can’t be obsessed with issues that are not the issues that are important to American voters,” said Jim Greer, the Florida Republican chairman and a likely candidate for national party leader.

Across the party, Republicans described this period as one of the toughest in recent history, reflected by the scope of the losses last Tuesday but also by the recriminations that have gripped the party as it seeks to learn lessons from Mr. McCain’s defeat and Mr. Bush’s presidency.

“I hope we are going to stop the infighting and the backbiting and move forward as a party,” said Katon Dawson, the South Carolina chairman, who is a potential candidate for party chairman. “There’s anger about losing the majorities in 2006 and losing the White House and suffering a political tsunami of proportions that are very resemblant of the 1992 election. But that is what encourages me. America often takes a step back and sees the other side.”

This is hardly the first party to have been left sapped and divided by a losing presidential campaign. But the scale of the party’s difficulties appears particularly daunting as the Bush era seems to be ending and no obvious leader is waiting in the wings.

“We need to be honest about the level of failure for the past eight years and why Republican government didn’t succeed,” said Newt Gingrich, the former House speaker, who has played an increasingly assertive role in the debate over the party’s future. “Otherwise, we’ll get back in power again and do the same things again.”

In another year, Mr. McCain might have continued to lead the Republicans through this interim period. But he has never been particularly well-liked in his party, and his standing was seriously eroded by a campaign that was widely criticized as inept.

Ms. Palin inspired a wave of enthusiasm from social conservatives when Mr. McCain named her as his running mate, and she has signaled that she intends to remain an influential voice in the party. But she has been forced in recent days to defend herself from criticism by unnamed McCain aides and from polls suggesting that she had hurt Mr. McCain more than she helped him.

The extent of her interest in repairing her image and moving to the front of the line was reflected in the series of interviews she has done and her full schedule of public appearances in Miami.

The vacuum seems unlikely to be filled on Capitol Hill, where Republicans suffered losses last week. John A. Boehner of Ohio, the House minority leader, and Mitch McConnell of Kentucky, the Senate minority leader, were weakened as they oversaw losses in their conferences. Both have always been more inside players than the kind of politicians who could lead a dispirited party through a difficult time.

But as part of the ideological struggles, some members of a new generation of Republicans, like Representative Eric Cantor of Virginia, are in leadership positions that could give them a chance to reinvigorate the party and update the image of the conservative movement.

The most important question for Republicans in both the House and the Senate — and for the future Republican chairman — is how forcefully to take on Mr. Obama once he becomes president. Richard N. Bond, a former Republican chairman, said he thought the Congressional Republicans would — and should — take on Mr. Obama aggressively. Mr. Bond suggested that Republicans should not be deterred by the enthusiasm inspired by Mr. Obama’s election, which he argued would be transitory.

“When people wake up from their Bush hangovers, six months from now,” Mr. Bond said, “it is my belief that they are not going to be buying into some of the things that Obama will potentially be doing. You have a real potential for these guys making a fundamental misjudgment of this election. They just didn’t want George Bush anymore.”

But Mr. Gingrich, a veteran of what turned out to be damaging Republican wars with President Bill Clinton in 1993 and 1994, cautioned against that, saying the party would be wiser to offer a broad idea of what it stood for and how it would lead the country, and pick its battles carefully.

“I think the party should be very selective,” he said. “We’ve had an election. The new president and his family should be in our prayers. We should give every indication that we will work with him when we can. But we should be comfortable disagreeing with him when we have to.”

Manuela Tedrow

A group that supported Proposition 8, the same-sex marriage ban passed by California voters last week, asked the state Supreme Court on Monday to allow it to fight three lawsuits challenging the measure.

The Sacramento-based Campaign for California Families asked the court for permission to become a party in the case to join the state in defending the measure against three lawsuits.

The lawsuits were filed with the high court in San Francisco the day after the Nov. 4 election by seven same-sex couples, the cities of San Francisco and Los Angeles, and Santa Clara County.

The lawsuits claim Proposition 8 is so far-reaching, by taking away rights of a minority group, that it is a revision rather than an amendment to the state constitution and therefore would need a more extensive ratification procedure.

A constitutional revision requires approval of two-thirds of each house of the Legislature as well as a majority of California voters.

The Campaign for California Families argues in Monday's filing that its participation in the case is needed to protect the public's right to amend the state constitution through initiatives.

The group's attorneys, from Florida-based Liberty Counsel, wrote that the case "is about much more than the validity of Proposition 8."

The case is more broadly "about the people's right to amend the constitution by initiative," the attorneys contended.

The defendants in the three lawsuits are state Attorney General Jerry Brown, who is charged with enforcing state laws, and other state officials, including state Registrar of Vital Statistics Mark Horton, who is in charge of preparing marriage certificates.

Brown has said he plans to defend Proposition 8 and will file a brief within a few days.

Court spokeswoman Lynn Holton said the panel's seven justices have no legal deadline for acting on the lawsuits, but are expected to "as quickly as possible."

The state high court ruled by a 4-3 vote in May that the equal protection guarantee of the California constitution provides a right to same-sex marriage.

Manuela Tedrow

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Tuesday, November 11, 2008

U.S. Bishops Urged to Challenge Obama

Sparring Starts as Republicans Ponder Future

Group seeks right to defend Prop 8 in state high court