What’s on your mind this weekend, Bleeding Heartland readers? This is an open thread.
Former New York Governor Mario Cuomo passed away on New Year’s Day. He was a hero to many liberal Democrats during the 1980s, thanks to the policies he promoted in New York and especially his legendary keynote address to the 1984 Democratic National Convention. I’ve posted the video after the jump, along with some excerpts from the full text and from obituaries. It has been ranked the 11th best American political speech of the 20th century.
I was unable to watch Cuomo’s keynote live, because I spent July 1984 at summer camp. But listening to it this week brought back many emotions. Liberals felt discouraged and embattled during the Reagan years. Cuomo gave voice to those frustrations. He focused on economic inequality in particular: “There is despair, Mr. President, in the faces that you don’t see, in the places that you don’t visit in your shining city. In fact, Mr. President […] you ought to know that this nation is more a tale of two cities than it is just a shining city on a hill.” Cuomo’s words speak to me more than anything I’ve ever heard from Barack Obama, including the “Yes We Can” speech and his vaunted 2004 DNC address.
By the way, this line from Cuomo’s speech is as true now as it was 30 years ago: “Now we’re proud of this diversity as Democrats. We’re grateful for it. We don’t have to manufacture it the way the Republicans will next month in Dallas, by propping up mannequin delegates on the convention floor.”
Only on reading Cuomo’s obituaries did I learn that in September 1984, he spoke at Notre Dame University and explained why a devout Catholic could support a woman’s legal right to an abortion. The full transcript from that speech is here. I’ve posted excerpts below.
Former Iowa Lieutenant Governor Art Neu passed away on January 2. After Governor Bob Ray and Congressman Jim Leach, Neu was Iowa’s most prominent moderate Republican of the 1970s and 1980s. I enclose below a few comments on his passing.
Having been raised by a “Rockefeller Republican,” I remember when moderates were a real force within the Iowa GOP. Now there is not a single pro-choice Republican in our state’s legislature, and only a handful of elected Iowa GOP officials accept marriage equality. In recent years, Neu made headlines primarily when breaking ranks with the conservatives who now dominate his party. He opposed the campaign to recall three Iowa Supreme Court justices in 2010 and endorsed Christie Vilsack for Congress over GOP incumbent Steve King. Neu caucused for Mitt Romney in January 2012 but said he would vote for Barack Obama in the general election, in part because of the abortion issue.
Excerpts from the transcript of Mario Cuomo’s 1984 DNC keynote:
Ten days ago, President Reagan admitted that although some people in this country seemed to be doing well nowadays, others were unhappy, even worried, about themselves, their families, and their futures. The President said that he didn’t understand that fear. He said, “Why, this country is a shining city on a hill.” And the President is right. In many ways we are a shining city on a hill.
But the hard truth is that not everyone is sharing in this city’s splendor and glory. A shining city is perhaps all the President sees from the portico of the White House and the veranda of his ranch, where everyone seems to be doing well. But there’s another city; there’s another part to the shining the city; the part where some people can’t pay their mortgages, and most young people can’t afford one; where students can’t afford the education they need, and middle-class parents watch the dreams they hold for their children evaporate.
In this part of the city there are more poor than ever, more families in trouble, more and more people who need help but can’t find it. Even worse: There are elderly people who tremble in the basements of the houses there. And there are people who sleep in the city streets, in the gutter, where the glitter doesn’t show. There are ghettos where thousands of young people, without a job or an education, give their lives away to drug dealers every day. There is despair, Mr. President, in the faces that you don’t see, in the places that you don’t visit in your shining city.
In fact, Mr. President, this is a nation – Mr. President you ought to know that this nation is more a “Tale of Two Cities” than it is just a “Shining City on a Hill.”
Maybe, maybe, Mr. President, if you visited some more places; maybe if you went to Appalachia where some people still live in sheds; maybe if you went to Lackawanna where thousands of unemployed steel workers wonder why we subsidized foreign steel. Maybe – Maybe, Mr. President, if you stopped in at a shelter in Chicago and spoke to the homeless there; maybe, Mr. President, if you asked a woman who had been denied the help she needed to feed her children because you said you needed the money for a tax break for a millionaire or for a missile we couldn’t afford to use.
Maybe – Maybe, Mr. President. But I’m afraid not. Because the truth is, ladies and gentlemen, that this is how we were warned it would be. President Reagan told us from the very beginning that he believed in a kind of social Darwinism. Survival of the fittest. “Government can’t do everything,” we were told, so it should settle for taking care of the strong and hope that economic ambition and charity will do the rest. Make the rich richer, and what falls from the table will be enough for the middle class and those who are trying desperately to work their way into the middle class.
You know, the Republicans called it “trickle-down” when Hoover tried it. Now they call it “supply side.” But it’s the same shining city for those relative few who are lucky enough to live in its good neighborhoods. But for the people who are excluded, for the people who are locked out, all they can do is stare from a distance at that city’s glimmering towers.
From the New York Daily News editorial on Cuomo’s passing:
Still, the benefits of Cuomo’s lasting accomplishments have become clearer with time.
He directed the largest prison expansion in New York history, a fact he regretted; put the state behind redeveloping Times Square, an effort that years later helped transform the Crossroads of the World from a sleaze capital to a magnet for visitors from around the globe; he oversaw construction of Battery Park City; and he scuttled a nuclear power station planned for Long Island.
Additionally, Cuomo signed the nation’s first seatbelt law, enacted health insurance for children of the working poor and overhauled New York’s top court with highly regarded, bipartisan appointments that included the panel’s first female and first Hispanic judges.
From Mario Cuomo’s September 1984 lecture at Notre Dame University, “Religious Belief and Public Morality: A Catholic Governor’s Perspective.”
The Catholic Church is my spiritual home. My heart is there, and my hope.
There is, of course, more to being a Catholic than a sense of spiritual and emotional resonance. Catholicism is a religion of the head as well as the heart, and to be a Catholic is to say “I believe” to the essential core of dogmas that distinguishes our faith.
The acceptance of this faith requires a lifelong struggle to understand it more fully and to live it more truly, to translate truth into experience, to practice as well as to believe.
That’s not easy: applying religious belief to everyday life often presents difficult challenges.
It’s always been that way. It certainly is today. The America of the late twentieth century is a consumer society, filled with endless distractions, where faith is more often dismissed than challenged, where the ethnic and other loyalties that once fastened us to our religion seem to be weakening.
In addition to all the weaknesses, dilemmas and temptations that impede every pilgrim’s progress, the Catholic who holds political office in a pluralistic democracy — who is elected to serve Jews and Muslims, atheists and Protestants, as well as Catholics — bears special responsibility. He or she undertakes to help create conditions under which all can live with a maximum of dignity and with a reasonable degree of freedom; where everyone who chooses may hold beliefs different from specifically Catholic ones — sometimes contradictory to them; where the laws protect people’s right to divorce, to use birth control and even to choose abortion.
In fact, Catholic public officials take an oath to preserve the Constitution that guarantees this freedom. And they do so gladly. Not because they love what others do with their freedom, but because they realize that in guaranteeing freedom for all, they guarantee our right to be Catholics: our right to pray, to use the sacraments, to refuse birth control devices, to reject abortion, not to divorce and remarry if we believe it to be wrong.
The Catholic public official lives the political truth most Catholics through most of American history have accepted and insisted on: the truth that to assure our freedom we must allow others the same freedom, even if occasionally it produces conduct by them which we would hold to be sinful.
I protect my right to be a Catholic by preserving your right to believe as a Jew, a Protestant or non-believer, or as anything else you choose.
We know that the price of seeking to force our beliefs on others is that they might some day force theirs on us.
This freedom is the fundamental strength of our unique experiment in government. In the complex interplay of forces and considerations that go into the making of our laws and policies, its preservation must be a pervasive and dominant concern.
But insistence on freedom is easier to accept as a general proposition than in its applications to specific situations. There are other valid general principles firmly embedded in our Constitution, which, operating at the same time, create interesting and occasionally troubling problems. Thus, the same amendment of the Constitution that forbids the establishment of a State Church affirms my legal right to argue that my religious belief would serve well as an article of our universal public morality. I may use the prescribed processes of government — the legislative and executive and judicial processes — to convince my fellow citizens — Jews and Protestants and Buddhists and non-believers — that what I propose is as beneficial for them as I believe it is for me; that it is not just parochial or narrowly sectarian but fulfills a human desire for order, peace, justice, kindness, love, any of the values most of us agree are desirable even apart from their specific religious base or context.
I am free to argue for a governmental policy for a nuclear freeze not just to avoid sin but because I think my democracy should regard it as a desirable goal.
I can, if I wish, argue that the State should not fund the use of contraceptive devices not because the Pope demands it but because I think that the whole community — for the good of the whole community — should not sever sex from an openness to the creation of life.
And surely, I can, if so inclined, demand some kind of law against abortion not because my Bishops say it is wrong but because I think that the whole community, regardless of its religious beliefs, should agree on the importance of protecting life — including life in the womb, which is at the very least potentially human and should not be extinguished casually.
No law prevents us from advocating any of these things: I am free to do so.
So are the Bishops. And so is Reverend Falwell.
In fact, the Constitution guarantees my right to try. And theirs. And his.
But should I? Is it helpful? Is it essential to human dignity? Does it promote harmony and understanding? Or does it divide us so fundamentally that it threatens our ability to function as a pluralistic community?
When should I argue to make my religious value your morality? My rule of conduct your limitation?
What are the rules and policies that should influence the exercise of this right to argue and promote?
I believe I have a salvific mission as a Catholic. Does that mean I am in conscience required to do everything I can as Governor to translate all my religious values into the laws and regulations of the State of New York or the United States? Or be branded a hypocrite if I don’t?
As a Catholic, I respect the teaching authority of the bishops.
But must I agree with everything in the bishops’ pastoral letter on peace and fight to include it in party platforms?
And will I have to do the same for the forthcoming pastoral on economics even if I am an unrepentant supply sider?
Must I, having heard the Pope renew the Church’s ban on birth control devices, veto the funding of contraceptive programs for non-Catholics or dissenting Catholics in my State? I accept the Church’s teaching on abortion. Must I insist you do? By law? By denying you Medicaid funding? By a constitutional amendment? If so, which one? Would that be the best way to avoid abortions or to prevent them? […]
As a Catholic, I have accepted certain answers as the right ones for myself and my family, and because I have, they have influenced me in special ways, as Matilda’s husband, as a father of five children, as a son who stood next to his own father’s death bed trying to decide if the tubes and needles no longer served a purpose.
As a Governor, however, I am involved in defining policies that determine other people’s rights in these same areas of life and death. Abortion is one of these issues, and while it is one issue among many, it is one of the most controversial and affects me in a special way as a Catholic public official.
So let me spend some time considering it.
I should start, I believe, by noting that the Catholic Church’s actions with respect to the interplay of religious values and public policy make clear that there is no inflexible moral principle which determines what our political conduct should be. For example, on divorce and birth control, without changing its moral teaching, the Church abides the civil law as it now stands, thereby accepting — without making much of a point of it — that in our pluralistic society we are not required to insist that all our religious values be the law of the land.
Abortion is treated differently.
Of course there are differences both in degree and quality between abortion and some of the other religious positions the Church takes: abortion is a “matter of life and death,” and degree counts. But the differences in approach reveal a truth, I think, that is not well enough perceived by Catholics and therefore still further complicates the process for us. That is, while we always owe our bishops’ words respectful attention and careful consideration, the question whether to engage the political system in a struggle to have it adopt certain articles of our belief as part of public morality, is not a matter of doctrine: it is a matter of prudential political judgment.
Recently, Michael Novak put it succinctly: “Religious judgment and political judgment are both needed,” he wrote. “But they are not identical.”
My church and my conscience require me to believe certain things about divorce, birth control and abortion. My church does not order me — under pain of sin or expulsion — to pursue my salvific mission according to a precisely defined political plan.
As a Catholic I accept the church’s teaching authority. While in the past some Catholic theologians may appear to have disagreed on the morality of some abortions (it wasn’t, I think, until 1869 that excommunication was attached to all abortions without distinction), and while some theologians still do, I accept the bishops’ position that abortion is to be avoided.
As Catholics, my wife and I were enjoined never to use abortion to destroy the life we created, and we never have. We thought Church doctrine was clear on this, and — more than that — both of us felt it in full agreement with what our hearts and our consciences told us. For me life or fetal life in the womb should be protected, even if five of nine Justices of the Supreme Court and my neighbor disagree with me. A fetus is different from an appendix or a set of tonsils. At the very least, even if the argument is made by some scientists or some theologians that in the early stages of fetal development we can’t discern human life, the full potential of human life is indisputably there. That — to my less subtle mind — by itself should demand respect, caution, indeed . . . reverence.
But not everyone in our society agrees with me and Matilda.
And those who don’t — those who endorse legalized abortions — aren’t a ruthless, callous alliance of anti-Christians determined to overthrow our moral standards. In many cases, the proponents of legal abortion are the very people who have worked with Catholics to realize the goals of social justice set out in papal encyclicals: the American Lutheran Church, the Central Conference of American Rabbis, the Presbyterian Church in the United States, B’nai B’rith Women, the Women of the Episcopal Church. These are just a few of the religious organizations that don’t share the Church’s position on abortion.
Certainly, we should not be forced to mold Catholic morality to conform to disagreement by non-Catholics however sincere or severe their disagreement. Our bishops should be teachers not pollsters. They should not change what we Catholics believe in order to ease our consciences or please our friends or protect the Church from criticism.
But if the breadth, intensity and sincerity of oppostion to church teaching shouldn’t be allowed to shape our Catholic morality, it can’t help but determine our ability — our realistic, political ability — to translate our Catholic morality into civil law, a law not for the believers who don’t need it but for the disbelievers who reject it.
And it is here, in our attempt to find a political answer to abortion — an answer beyond our private observance of Catholic morality — that we encounter controversy within and without the Church over how and in what degree to press the case that our morality should be everybody else’s, and to what effect.
I repeat, there is no Church teaching that mandates the best political course for making our belief everyone’s rule, for spreading this part of our Catholicism. There is neither an encyclical nor a catechism that spells out a political strategy for achieving legislative goals.
From Governor Terry Branstad’s official comment on Art Neu’s passing:
“Iowa lost a dedicated public servant today with the passing of Art Neu,” said Branstad. “I had the honor of succeeding Art as lieutenant governor of Iowa. Art’s passion for his home community of Carroll was always evident. I offer my deepest condolences to his family.”
Neu served as lieutenant governor of Iowa from 1973-1979. Prior to being elected lieutenant governor, Neu served in the State Senate from 1967-1972. He served on the Iowa Board of Regents from 1979-1985 and as Mayor of Carroll, Iowa, from 1982-1985.
Senator Chuck Grassley’s official comment:
“Art Neu was a dedicated public servant and leader for Iowa. As a fellow legislator, I knew him as a tough competitor who always put first the interests of Iowa and his community. Barbara and I send our thoughts and prayers to his family.”
From William Petroski’s article for the Des Moines Register:
Neu continued to serve in a number of other key policy roles for many years, including service on the Iowa Board of Corrections, on the Iowa Public Radio Board, and on the board of St. Anthony Regional Hospital. He was a graduate of Northwestern University Law School who still maintained a law practice in Carroll at the time of his death, and he regularly offered his views on public policy issues. […]
Former Gov. Ray said Neu will be missed and remembered by many Iowans, not just for the offices he held, but for how long and well he served Iowans.
“As Lieutenant Governor, he always gave me unvarnished advice usually with his great sense of humor,” Ray said. “Democrats and Republicans liked and respected Art, because he was principled, fair, modest, and willing to listen to others. We need more people like Arthur Neu in public life in our communities, our state, and nation. Billie and I are sad because of Art’s loss, but we will smile whenever we think of him.”
Neu was known as a moderate Republican in a party that tilted much further to the right after he left elected office. He endorsed Mitt Romney for president prior to the January 2012 Iowa Republican Party caucuses, but later endorsed President Barack Obama, a Democrat, for re-election in November 2012. He cited Obama’s leadership in bringing the nation back from the brink of economic collapse, ending the war in Iraq, his plan to end the war in Afghanistan, and his record of fighting terrorism.
Unnamed “Old Beaverdale Guy” comment to the Des Moines Register’s “Your Two Cents’ Worth” section:
The passing of Art Neu marks a sad day for Iowa and civility in our political process. Regardless of your political affiliation, the passing of this true gentleman and public servant will be regarded as a loss by all who knew him or remember him for his service.