Joe Doakes from Como Park emails:

In the Vice Presidential debate, Candidate Paul Ryan was asked what role his Catholic religion played in his personal views on abortion. Chad the Elder at Fraters Libertas linked to a piece by George Weigel that imagines a different answer from Ryan. That got me to pondering what role my faith played in my views on abortion? It turns out the answer is: “None at all.”

I believe all people are endowed by their Creator with certain inalienable rights; that among these are life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness; that to secure those rights, governments are instituted among men, deriving their just powers from the consent of the governed.

Do those words ring a bell at all? Remind you of Eighth Grade Civics, perhaps? They should – they’re straight out of the Declaration of Independence, the written explanation to the world of what the Founding Fathers were trying to accomplish and why they believed their actions were just. Those are not Catholic beliefs; they’re American beliefs that form the intellectual and moral basis for our nation.

Government’s job, first and foremost, is to protect innocent life. And an unborn child, well, life doesn’t get more innocent than that. A government that fails to protect the lives of its unborn children is failing its essential purpose. A government that forces its citizens to subsidize the deaths of their own unborn children . . . that’s unspeakable.

Some object that the Constitution gave no votes to women, and counted slaves as even less, so the Founders clearly didn’t believe in their own stated principles and neither should we. That claim asks us to believe the Founding Fathers were pro-choice, they actually meant to include a woman’s right to kill her unborn child as a fundamental right protected by the Constitution, but they had trouble articulating the concept so they left it implied in the emanations and penumbras of the Bill of Rights. That analysis doesn’t square with what we know of the people who helped write the document itself and the pamphlets describing it. And it doesn’t relate to the Catholic faith, which is the question at hand. Whatever defects hindsight lets us see in the Founders or their work, their concept of what good government is intended to do must reflect their own opinions, not projections of ours.

If you lined up the Founding Fathers and told them the President of the United States believes dead babies are not a tasteless joke but official government policy, required – required, mind you, by the very Constitution those Founding Fathers gave us – they would weep for shame.

It is the law in the United States today that taxpayer funded, partial-birth abortions for under-age girls, without parental notification, are a Constitutionally protected right. President Obama definitely would appoint Supreme Court Justices to preserve that system. Candidate Romney might not. Given that my choice realistically is limited to those two, I stand with the Founding Fathers. I stand with innocent life. I choose Romney.

Joe Doakes

Como Park

I’d be pro-life even if I weren’t a Christian, based on the grounds above, as well as what I wrote way back when; even pro-choicers can’t decide when a “fetus” is “viable”