Jim Wallis Inevitably Steers the Debate on Stupak to Religious Persecution.

I've already written too much about Jim Wallis' apologia for the odious Stupak-Pitts amendment. Suffice it to say that if we were to take Wallis' argument seriously, we wouldn't need health-care reform at all: After all, the current system doesn't literally ban private insurance for people who can't afford it, so access must not be a problem, right? Still, this strawman demands a response:

But some of the most hysterical comments from the Left this week have suggested the problem is that progressive religious groups have been listened to by the Democratic Party; some members of the Left long for the good old days when their party was avowedly secular and properly hostile to religion and all this talk about those annoying moral values voters.

Truly a definitive example of this kind of argument. First of all, the "good old days" when the Democratic Party was "hostile to religion" don't exist. (When was this exactly -- when it was led by the Southern Baptist Bill Clinton? The Southern Baptist Jimmy Carter? For the decades in which its most influential member of Congress was the devout Roman Catholic Ted Kennedy? Help me out here.) Secondly, when you invoke "hysterical comments" indicating that people of faith need to be driven from the Democratic Party, you really need to name names and cite examples, or people can safely assume that your examples are either trivial or don't exist at all.

But most important, the debate over Stupak-Pitts isn't about the influence of religion -- it's about people who want to restrict access to abortion, whether motivated by religious or secular reasons. Democratic leaders who tried for a less restrictive amendment were seeking to protect the party's core values of equality for women and reproductive freedom, not trying to drive people of faith out of the party. This conflation of religious belief with reactionary social policies is both false and plays directly into Republican talking points. Just as it was people opposed to a women's right to choose -- not pro-choicers -- who introduced a cultural wedge issue that threatened to derail health-care reform, it's Wallis who wants to make this a debate about the Democratic Party being "avowedly secular."  And while I can understand Wallis' reluctance to defend his position on the merits, that's simply not the issue here.

--Scott Lemieux