Back in Sunday School, as Miss Knowles taught us the Ten Commandments, she didn’t know, nor did I, that her lesson on “Thou Shalt Not Kill” would be an epiphany for me.

One of the kids asked her if the commandment meant he couldn’t swat a fly. Another asked about killing animals raised for meat.

Lois Knowles — she was also the fourth-grade teacher at school, so her words bore authority — replied that what God meant when he gave Moses the Ten Commandments was that we should not kill other human beings.

The light bulb went on and has been shining ever since. Even when its words are simple and seem straightforward, the Bible bears interpreting.

And theologians, not to mention the faithful, agnostics and atheists, started interpreting it almost before the ink dried on the parchment. Comes now the U.S. Conference of Catholic Bishops stomping boldly into politics to declare that President Biden should be denied the sacrament of communion because he supports a woman’s right to abortion.

The Bible never mentions abortion — no doubt one or another form of abortion has been practiced since before we started writing down stuff — but the Church has declared it a moral evil. Period. Biden opposes abortion but says he won’t impose his beliefs on others.

It’s clear that the bishops’ statement is political and not theological. As The New York Times explained on Monday, the bishops’ conference has no power to bar Biden from communion. That power belongs to the pope and local bishops. Cardinal Wilton Gregory of Washington has said he won’t order priests to bar the president from the sacraments.

Interesting to note that the vote to draft the condemnation statement was approved 166-55, a whopping margin. But the conference of all active and retired bishops has 433 members, so only 51% of the members even voted.

This is not the first and surely won’t be the last step into politics by a religious body. We have fundamentalist preachers in Maine whose real game is politics. Ken Graves of Calvary Chapel in Orrington comes to mind. We have Liberty University (the Jerrys Falwell) “deorganizing” the College Democrats because they were (gasp!) Democrats.

And, fundamentalists will remind us that the civil rights movement of the 1950s and ’60s was fomented and its strategies worked out largely in Black churches, even during worship services. That’s true. It was, and they did.

As with Catholics opposing abortion, Blacks seeking the vote and open public accommodations sought to make public policy parallel the lessons of their faith.

It’s difficult to support the civil rights movement and oppose the Catholic church on abortion. But I do. One goal is to grant civic rights to everyone, the other goal is to limit the activities of some. (Even 56% of Catholics believe abortion should be legal.)

Rest assured that if abortion were illegal, plenty of people would still find a way to obtain one. I won’t even try to tell you how many women I know who had abortions before they were legal. No, I was not romantically involved with any of them.

As so often happens, we are hung up on words rather than deeds. I may never again write this, but on abortion Bill Clinton was correct. Abortion should be “legal, safe and rare,” he said. Problem is, he never did anything to put those words into effect.

Back along a decade or so, there was some movement toward achieving Clinton’s goal. Abortion-rights and anti-abortion types began working together to reduce the demand for abortions. Note that the number of abortions has fallen steadily. These figures for 2011-2017 from the Guttmacher Institute: Total number of abortions a year fell to 862,000 from 1,058,000, and the abortion rate per 1,000 women aged 15–44 fell to 13.5 from 16.9.

Then the right-wing cancel culture got in the way and resumed trying to cancel progress.

Here are the words of “Chicks on the Right.” Miriam Weaver and Amy Jo Clark wrote in Time magazine, “If our ultimate goal is to drastically reduce the number of abortions . . . we must exercise some flexibility in our tolerance of contraception.”

They wrote that they support not only contraception but also the “morning-after pill (Plan B)” because it prevents fertilization before pregnancy, which is by definition when the egg implants in the wall of the uterus. They also note that 60% of released eggs never implant. Weaver and Clark are my kind of conservatives. They say let’s do, not just say.

Let’s not just oppose abortion. Let’s work to continue to reduce the demand for it. Would that the Catholic bishops — is it unfair of me to note that they want to make the rules for a game that they don’t play? — had as much common sense as the Chicks on the Right.

Bob Neal has followed religion and the politics of religion for decades. But he still doesn’t know how many theologians can dance on the head of a pin. Neal can be reached at turkeyfarm@myfairpoint.net.

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