>On a slightly different note, the question you raise
>about the Catholic social teaching
>was faced in real terms by the fledgling Labor Party.
>We had gained the endorsement of a farmworkers
>organization, in Ohio I believe, of mostly religiously
>devout Hispanics. Some other endorsing union locals
>had a similar religious composition. If the LP took
>the standard, industrial strength position on abortion,
>it was expected that these folks would have walked away.
>So they didn't, giving rise to some controversy in the ranks.
>I took it as a sign of seriousness.
Or a sign that a woman's right to an abortion just isn't that important? Is that what you mean by serious? And people thought Judith Butler was delusional when she said:
"This resurgence of Left orthodoxy calls for a 'unity' that would, paradoxically, redivide the Left in precisely the way that orthodoxy purports to lament. Indeed, one way of producing this division becomes clear when we ask, which movements, and for what reasons, get relegated to the sphere of the merely cultural, and how that very division between the material and the cultural becomes tactically invoked for the purposes of marginalizing certain forms of political activism? And how does the new orthodoxy on the Left work in tandem with a social and sexual conservativism that seeks to make questions of race and sexuality secondary to the 'real' business of politics...."
Doug