But in a democracy, everybody -- including religious believers -- gets to play that game. In fact, to be healthy, the political process demands it. So for Catholics to be silent in an election year about easy abortion laws and pro-abortion campaign agendas out of some misguided sense of good manners is actually a form of theft from our national conversation.

If Catholics really believe in the sanctity of human life, then there’s no way we can stand by while some people choose -- or allow others to choose -- to kill their unborn children. There’s no way we can disassociate ourselves from 40 million abortions since 1973. If we don’t try to end abortion, not just socially but legally, we become complicit in that violence.

Now we may lose the political battle to change our abortion laws, but fighting that battle is the nature of the legal process. Fighting it is thoroughly American. For religious believers not to advance their convictions about public morality in public debate is not an example of tolerance. It’s an example of cowardice.

If we believe that abortion is gravely wrong -- that it kills an unborn child and attacks the common good – then we have a duty, not just a religious duty but also a democratic duty, to punish the candidates who want to allow it. Failing to do that is an abuse of power on our part, because that’s where we exercise our power as citizens most directly – in the voting booth.

I think we can agree that the many religious believers who worked against slavery and segregation, or in favor of farm worker rights and industrial labor justice, served their country very well. They did what they did because their view of human dignity was shaped by their religious faith.

If Martin Luther King had not worked to “impose his religious views” on society, the world would be very different and worse. So we need to see that criticism for what it really is: a modern version of “Four legs good, two legs bad.” People who fear and dislike religious faith don’t want it to be part of our public discourse. But if we allow that to happen, we not only delude ourselves about the nature of American politics; but we also only have ourselves to blame.

The same applies to the idea that “separation of Church and state” somehow means that religious believers should shut up about legislative issues, the appointment of judges and public policy. To Catholics with a sense of recent American history, “separation of Church and state” has a uniquely anti-Catholic ring to it. Lurking behind those words in the 1960 presidential campaign was the hint that Roman dogma might somehow trump the American Constitution if Kennedy were elected.

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