Hadley Arkes, You are My Stephen A. Douglas.

It's only fair for me to flip my cards at the very beginning: I have the utmost respect for Hadley Arkes as a serious Catholic thinker and, moreover, a man of great heart and geniality. That being said, he has no love at all for the Yale Political Union, an institution to which I was, for four years including six months as its speaker, gay married. (The Union is obviously a dame.) I don't think that my disagreement with his latest column has anything to do with an impulse to protect my lady's honor, but I think it's good baseball to mention it.

The upshot of his column is that abortion is the defining issue of our time in the way that slavery was the defining issue of the mid-nineteenth century. Lincoln and Douglas spoke as if slavery were the only issue that mattered, and that was correct for them; Catholics who vote on the single issue of life/choice are also correct.

There is, in the world of politics, such an animal as the defining issue, a question which cannot be answered in isolation but which necessarily defines the terms we use to talk about every other matter. Abortion may or may not be such a thing—I tend to think not—but slavery definitely wasn't. Allow me to toss it to Gene Genovese:

Orthodox theologians demonstrated that neither the Old nor the New Testament condemned slavery as sinful. The abolitionists, displaying no small amount of intellectual dishonesty, never succeeded in making the Word say what they said it did, and eventually they had to spurn the Word for the Spirit. In consequence, they virtually reduced the Holy Spirit to the spirit (the conscience) of individuals. I do not say that an antislavery Christian theology remains an impossibility...[b]ut, as a historian, I do insist that the abolitionists failed to construct one and that, so far as I know, no one has yet improved on their performance.

The question "Is the black slave a man?" was answered in the affirmative by everyone who mattered. It is the follow-up question—"Is he nevertheless fit to be enslaved?"—that Arkes hold up as inescapably fundamental. However, the question only rates first priority if it is theological, but the question is not theological but moral; a matter of Spirit, not Word. That's a little unclear, so let me put it plainer: If someone disagrees with me on who counts as a human being, I can't really have a productive conversation with him, much less vote for him; if he disagrees with me on how to organize labor in our society, that's no kind of deal-breaker.

I am filled with uncharacteristic optimism about the human race when I think that everyone in America looks back on the debate over slavery and thinks that the answer should have been obvious. Truly it should have been. Still, it's wrong for Arkes to invoke it as the classic example of a simple, clear-cut controversy; there was much more to it than "Who's 'people?'" (Furthermore, his claim that slavery and Christian morality can't coexist is flatly false. I refer you to Adrian Thatcher, Dale Martin, or, better yet, the Epistles.) The question was far more complicated, and pro-slavery side far more sophisticated, than his telling of it lets on. Let that affect your reading of his abortion argument accordingly.

Hat-tip on the Arkes piece to Touchstone's Mere Comments.