(UPDATE, 1/18/2009: This is a diary on its 4th appearance- first at dKos, then crossed over here after a time, and then re-posted again last year. It’s not that I think its so great, but its a message I’m determined to get out into the world, and every now and then something brings it up.

But the whole thing reminded me again of how Christian “traditionalists” have no understanding of their own tradition, and of how the church hierarchy has dishonestly overwritten it an almost Orwellian, the-enemy-has-always-been-Eurasia, manner.   – promoted by odum)

From a diary of mine at Daily Kos from the pre-GMD days (hopefully the links are still good):

Mon Jan 23, 2006 at 10:59:16 AM PDT

It’s a day after the anniversary of Roe vs. Wade, and we may be about to see an anti-Roe majority on the Supreme Court.

The media has had very little to say on this 33rd anniversary of the Roe v Wade decision, but what more do they need to say? We know the narrative. Slowly but surely, the “liberal” states – as part of a process of public secularization, expanded access to abortion. Finally, in an archetypal liberal decision – Roe v Wade – this secularization and the process moving away from tradition into a more “enlightened” public sphere was federalized uniformly nationwide, whether or not the more traditional states wanted it. What we’ve seen unfold is a steady backlash that has been returning this issue (and others) into a more traditionally Christian context — basically, “Christian traditionalists vs. liberals” – advantage them…. right?

What do you think? This is the media’s narrative, and has been for some time. So naturally, this is wrong, wrong, wrong, and the longer we’ve let them get away with it, the more tenuous our position has become.

As with any history, its complicated – but suffice to say there has rarely – if ever – been consensus on the issue. Still, this history informs the debate, and the false history that’s now been fully riveted into the brains of the American public is one of the anti-choice movement’s most powerful weapons, even if they’re ignorant of it themselves (which – in most cases – I’m willing to bet they are).

Here’s a nutshell version with some links to follow for more details.

Few influenced the perspective of the early church more than Aristotle, and the Aristotelean view of the soul in the unborn was the “delayed ensoulment” – that is, the fetus isn’t animated with a human soul until 40 days after conception for males, 90 days for females – both having a vegetable soul before then. In fact, there are early Greek texts and advice on how to perform abortion, so this is the history that Aristotle’s views emerged from and which informed early Christian thinking.

When the Church became more organized, opinions started changing. As a theological narrative took shape in th mid 2nd Century into the 4th, more Christian thinkers began to equate abortion with infanticide. St. John Chrysostom called it “murder before the birth” (Homily 24 on Romans).  Worth noting here is that thinkers like St. Jerome (infamous for, among other things, blaming women for the fall from grace) and St John Chrysostom (women are “a necessary evil”) are also responsible for hardwiring some of the most disturbingly anti-woman theology into early Christianity – presenting women as something other than human, and sexuality as evil, or at least the pathway to evil. It’s no coincidence that, even at this early date, anti-choice extremism goes hand-in-hand with misogyny.  Still even Jerome – while saying some of the most awful garbage about women in recorded history, was not as hardcore about abortion as today’s Religious Right, writing “The seed gradually takes shape in the uterus, and it [abortion] does not count as killing until the individual elements have acquired their external appearance and their limbs (“Epistle” (121, 4))”

Neither were early church organizational meetings unanimous. The Synods of Elvira and Ancyra (306 ACE, 314 ACE) explicitly called abortion a sin, while the Apostolic Constitutions (380 ACE) disallowed it only after the fetus took on a “human shape.”

Although eastern Christianity vectored toward an absolutist stand, the western church did not. St. Augustine refocused the church on the Aristotelan delayed ensoulment model (“On Exodus”, (21, 80)), and by this time the church was a much more defined hierarchy, leaving less room for disagreement.

In the early 7th Century, the Church began codifying what it considered sexual sins and abortion made the list, but was well behind the “sins” of birth control, oral sex, and anal sex. In fact, the punishment for oral sex was at least 7 years of penance, while the punishment for abortion was a mere 120 days.

In the centuries that followed, Popes came on the scene with widely varying viewpoints – changing and re-changing the rules as the mitre passed on. Significantly, Pope Innocent III in the early 1200s ruled that the fetus had no soul until it was “animated” (the “quickening” – when the mother can feel the fetus’ movements, usually around the 24th week). In his ruling – and this is significant — a monk was found not guilty of homicide for aborting his lover’s unborn child under this argument. Pope Sixtus V in 1588 made all abortions illegal, but was reversed again by Pope Gregory XIV, codifying abortions at up to 16 ½ weeks as not equivalent to the killing of a human being, as no soul was present.

Even St. Thomas Aquinas himself – arguably the most influential theologian in Roman Catholic Christianity, did not consider a fetus human until the quickening.

This was the way it was for the most part until – and are you sitting down for this? – 1869. That’s when Pope Pius IX declared all abortion to be homicide. That’s right, for nearly the entire history of Christianity, the Catholic Church was officially tolerant of first trimester abortion. The change was well after the Enlightenment, after the Civil War, and into the modern scientific era. In fact, it was only as recently as 1983 that all vestiges of the distinction between the “fetus animatus” and “fetus inanimatus” were quietly purged from Canon Law. (Yes, that was 1983… only 23 years ago)

So much for the traditional Christians versus those pesky godless, postmodern liberals, eh?

And its not just the Catholics, but Protestants as well. English Common Law did not recognize abortion as a crime before quickening, and was only a misdemeanor afterwards. This began changing in 1803 with a series of changes to the written Law, but it is largely this fact that has lead many legal scholars  to suggest that Roe v Wade should have been argued based on English Common Law rather than a debatable, “inferred” right of privacy.

Of course these scholars make the argument based on legality, but I’d argue such a common-law based decision would have, perhaps more importantly, gone a long way to framing the debate. After all, it would be far more difficult to perpetuate the notion that a right to an abortion is based on the whims of “liberal activist judges” if it was based on arguments that rise from the very foundations of our American legal system.

So anyway, the point is that WE are the “traditionalists” here, and the supposedly monolithic, unchanging, “old-fashioned” party line from the Catholic Church and other protestant institutions are anything but traditional and unchanging.

The next time you hear a politically conservative Catholic saying that anyone suggesting that abortion may be permissible publicly should be denied Communion, ask them if that would include Saints Jerome, Augustine and Thomas Aquinas.

FYI: There are a lot of links on the web for more detailed back ground information. I drew a lot of my information from the nice tidy roundup at this site, But this one, this one, and this one are fantastic, as well as this site on the Common Law issue.

So what’s up with Rumsfeld, Cheney, Rice and Bush’s orchestgrated new reference point linking their war to 1939 and WW2 against the Nazis. (Interesting that this rhetoric seems to be a replacement for analogies to the Cold War against godless communism.) There are a lot of semiotics in that language:
1. The Nazis were evil people, therefore, our opponents are evil people.
2. The Nazis were the aggressors that started WW2, therefore our opponents are the aggressors in this war.
3. The Nazis were anti-Semitic racists who persecuted the Jews, therefore opposition to Israel’s policies in Labanon and the occupied territories is anti-Semitic and racist.
4. The world was united (except for Italy, Japan and for a while the Soviet Union) against the bad guys and won, therefore, if the world – especially US voters – would unite in support of the Bushies against the bad guys, we will “win.”
5. Appeasement in 1939 encouraged the Nazis to invade Poland and begin WW2, therefore  “appeasement” (i.e. US withdrawal from Iraq) will encourage more attacks on us.
6. The legal climate of a Congressionally formally declared war against sovereign nations allowed FDR to do things that would never have been allowed otherwise – e.g. interning Japanese-American citizens in concentration camps, holding military tribunals, instituting a draft…, therefore Bush should have the same authorities in the war against terrorism.

None of these associations are made explicit in the speeches, and they are so wrong at so many levels, they fall apart under even the most superficial historical scrutiny, but the unspoken associations have power that shapes attitudes.  And these guys know how to shape the debate using this kind of rhetoric.