"Rhetorical Strategy and Reality Reduction"

I know I lamented in my previous post that certain groups of individuals produce problematic copy at a rate that far exceeds my freedom and ability to refute it, but I can take a stab at one or two as time provides.

Michael Sean Winters always provides plenty of opportunities, like his short essay "legislative strategy and abortion reduction" published a couple days ago in the National Catholic Dissenter.

It appears that liberal Catholics have all agreed among themselves in recent weeks that it's time for them to come out of the closet about supporting contraception, or at least the distribution of contraceptives when the alternative - supposedly - is pregnancies resulting in abortions.

As brief backstory, there are currently two bills being discussed which focus on reducing abortion.

Winters comes out - surprise, surprise - against the US bishops and supports the Ryan-DeLauro bill ("The Reducing the Need for Abortion and Supporting Parents Act", which is bad) over the bill introduced by pro-life Democrats ( "The Pregnancy Women Support Act", which is good).

Winters admits his Ryan-DeLauro bill "includes funding for contraception and extensive sex education." Now I bet, at this point, we are all somewhat aware of the sorts of things which are considered acceptable in public school sex ed. classes (Clearly, we need more lessons in pornography and masturbation in our highschools!). That last sentence in parentheses was sarcasm, by the way.

I could point out Winters' sly rhetorical attempts to make the case for legislative pragmatism, to remind us that politics is the art of the possible, and recommend to us that compromise is the best path to progress, but really all his points boil down to the same thing - "give up your principles."

I'll let him say that in his own words:

"Compromise is not always a bad word and on the urgent matter of reducing the abortion rate, made more urgent by the economic downturn and consequent rise in the abortion rate, Catholics can in good conscience support a bill that is not their first preference but is still preferable to doing nothing."

Why is this bill preferable to doing nothing? It floods the market with (more) contraceptives (which Winters apparently sees no problem with - sorry Pope Benedict and the Magisterum); the bill is far-and-out preferred by radical pro-abortion groups as a way to further their agenda (here's one example); and at the end of the day the bill is basically a massive money infusion for parasitic organizations like Planned Parenthood, who see abortion as darn good business.

In the social encyclical Pope Benedict released this week, he says in Paragraph 28:

One of the most striking aspects of development in the present day is the important question of respect for life, which cannot in any way be detached from questions concerning the development of peoples ... [and] questions connected with the acceptance of life, especially in cases where it is impeded in a variety of ways.

Not only does the situation of poverty still provoke high rates of infant mortality in many regions, but some parts of the world still experience practices of demographic control, on the part of governments that often promote contraception and even go so far as to impose abortion.

Now, I don't think I'm stretching the pope's words one jot when I claim that Pope Benedict thinks it's a bad idea for governments to promote contraception. Frankly, it's more than bad - it's evil. As in never-to-be-done evil.

Winters thinks its preferable for Catholics to support a bill that allows the government to promote contraception than for them to do nothing. And he doesn't even seem to admit the possibility that Catholics and other pro-lifers, standing strong, could lobby behind a far-better bill that doesn't have the same flaws I mention above.

I disagree with him on both counts, and I would argue that I have the Pope and the bishops on my side. 

What exactly does Winters have on his?