By Rich Barlow, Boston Globe, July 30, 2024.
When it comes to abortion, Americans pause our intolerance of nuance. Three-quarters of my fellow Catholics, recognizing that unborn life is still life, say abortion should be illegal in some cases but legal in others. JD Vance’s opposition to abortion in cases of rape or incest aligns more with official Catholic teaching than do my views. (He has fallen line with Donald Trump’s less-absolutist stance since joining the Republican ticket). But his position horrifies those who don’t believe 10-year-olds should bear their rapist’s child. Including, possibly, Vance’s running mate.
Donald Trump wiped his shoes on Project 2025, the 922-page presidential agenda released by The Heritage Foundation. (Trump called parts “absolutely ridiculous and abysmal,’’ even though 140 of his best political friends helped draft the document.) The former president didn’t specify what nauseated him in Heritage’s omelet of uber-right priorities. But one observer speculates that it was eggs hatched by the religious right, particularly proposed reforms for the Department of Health and Human Services. If so, Trump shouldn’t have been surprised. The author of that section worked for him.
Roger Severino directed HHS’s Office of Civil Rights during Trump’s presidency. He is the more culturally ferocious half of a conservative Catholic power couple who have been antiabortion activists for decades. When the Supreme Court overturned Roe v. Wade in 2022, he especially applauded Justice Clarence Thomas’s concurrence, which also questioned legal protections for contraception and same-sex marriage.
Project 2025 doesn’t explicitly endorse no-exceptions abortion bans. But Severino, in the HHS section he authored of the Project 2025 document, uses language that could comport with Catholic teaching along those lines. That would go beyond what most Americans, including the abortion-averse, could stomach. On other issues, Severino flushes nuance into the sewer.
Given questions as to whether Trump sincerely objects to a plan written by his allies, voters should pay attention to the ridiculous and abysmal. They’ll find that Trump’s adjectives are spot-on, even if he doesn’t really mean them.
This is Severino on abortion: “From the moment of conception, every human being possesses inherent dignity and worth, and our humanity does not depend on our age, stage of development, race, or abilities. The Secretary must ensure that all HHS programs and activities are rooted in a deep respect for innocent human life from day one until natural death: Abortion and euthanasia are not health care.’’
He puts bite behind his bark by urging the rescinding of approval of mifepristone, the pill used to perform half of US abortions; ending insurance mandates covering Ella, the week-after contraceptive pill; and requiring destination states for abortions to report where their patients live to discourage “abortion tourism.’’
Elsewhere in the Project 2025 document, Severino veers even harder to starboard. Nine years after the Supreme Court protected same-sex marriage, Severino calls for state to genuflect to church, demanding that HHS “maintain a biblically based, social science-reinforced definition of marriage and family. Social science reports that assess the objective outcomes for children raised in homes aside from a heterosexual, intact marriage are clear: All other family forms involve higher levels of instability.’’ (Wrong.)
On trans rights, Severino damns “harmful identity politics that replaces biological sex with subjective notions of ‘gender identity’ ’’ and “threatens American’s [sic] fundamental liberties as well as the health and well-being of children and adults alike.’’ Caution with transitioning care for children and teens should indeed be the default; exhaustively researched concerns about its effectiveness and reversibility spurred Britain to ban puberty blockers for those under age 18.
But we’re reverencing nuance here. And most nuanced critics of gender-affirming treatment for children still think adults have the right to transition and that we should treat “rare instances [of] consistent, insistent, persistent’’ childhood gender dysphoria. Severino, however, evidently assumes that God doesn’t err when assigning birth gender, although the Almighty also permits genetic diseases and numerous natural abortions by miscarriage.
Severino doesn’t call for banning pornography. But Heritage’s president does, in Project 2025’s introduction, where he wraps “omnipresent propagation of transgender ideology’’ in his definition of porn. He also makes no distinction between the vilest raunch and pornography that has public health benefits. (That’s not a typo.)
Trump speaks more about God these days, understandably. All people of good will — right and left, professing or creedless — rejoice with him that he escaped the assassin’s bullet. Our embrace of nonviolence is Catholic. The Catholic right’s constipated view of human rights is anything but.
<italic;”>Rich Barlow writes for BU Today and WBUR’s opinion page.</italic;”>Image Credits: public domain
