Douglas Kmiec is a devout Roman Catholic with impeccable pro-life credentials.  Furthermore, he is a Republican stalwart who recently co-chaired Mitt Romney’s presidential campaign.  Kmiec’s conservative triple-A rating explains why he regularly gave legal advice to presidents Ronald Reagan and George H.W. Bush.  So you can’t blame Mary Schmich with the Chicago Tribune for asking what a guy like Doug Kmiec is doing endorsing Barack Obama?

This surprising story was brought to my attention by a reader who, Like Mr. Kmiec, teaches at Pepperdine University.  I was disturbed to learn that, shortly after endorsing the Democratic presidential candidate, Kmiec was refused communion by a Roman Catholic priest who, in his homily, warned his flock against the grievous sin of voting blue.

Politics, as they say, makes strange bedfellows, and that has never been truer than in the 2008 electoral season.  When asked if we are Democrats or Republicans, Tony Campolo says, we should answer, “On what issue?”

Kmiec still calls himself a Republican.  He will likely die a Republican.  He thinks his party has it right on the abortion issue.  But Kmiec knows that abortion, however important, is one issue among many.  Roman Catholic moral theology has been called “a seamless garment” because one consistent ethic of life informs a range of issues from abortion to war to capital punishment. 

David Brooks, a Jew, was impressed to learn that Barack Obama has a nuanced grasp of Protestant theologian Reinhold Niebuhr’s Christian realism.  Douglas  Kmiec is voting for Obama because the Chicago politician thinks like a Catholic.

Both presidential candidates this year are eclectic pragmatists who like workable solutions.  John McCain’s “Mavericky” streak (to quote Tina Fey) makes him the only Republican candidate capable of beating Obama (or Hillary Clinton) in a year when all the cards are falling for the Democrats.  Obama, contra McCain, can’t be written off as a knee-jerk liberal. 

Given all the partisan animus in the air, it is refreshing to see voters with flexible and open minds.  But as the Kmiec story suggests, openness comes with a price.

GOP Catholic backs Obama
Mary Schmich

October 8, 2008

Doug Kmiec went to mass, as usual, at Our Lady of Malibu on Tuesday morning. Then he drove up the hill to his office to talk to me by phone about how a Republican Catholic opposed to abortion could endorse Barack Obama.

You may recognize Kmiec’s name. He teaches at Pepperdine University in California now, but he’s a Chicago guy. St. Pascal grade school, St. Patrick’s High School, Northwestern. From 1980 until 1999, he taught at Notre Dame Law School. In those years, while raising five kids with his high school sweetheart, he worked as legal counsel to Presidents Ronald Reagan and George H.W. Bush. This election season, he was co-chair of Mitt Romney’s failed campaign.

So why does a guy like that veer to the left and throw a political grenade into his church?

“One of the things I kept discovering,” Kmiec said, “was that Obama was sounding more Catholic than most Catholics I know.”

Obama talked about family wages. About the difficulty of health care. About the cost, in lives and dollars, of the Iraq War.

“Right down the line,” Kmiec said, “if I look at the social gospel side of my faith, Barack Obama was hitting a 10-strike almost every time he addressed one of those subjects.”

Kmiec read Obama’s books, listened to his speeches. He thought. He prayed. On Easter Sunday, he publicly endorsed Obama. He didn’t expect to make a splash, but among Catholics, his endorsement was an explosion.

The calls, the e-mails, the hand-written letters rushed in. How could he support a candidate who supported Roe vs. Wade?

He was invited to give a speech at a dinner of a Catholic business organization. During the homily at the mass before the dinner, the priest warned against endorsing Barack Obama. When Kmiec walked to the altar for communion, the priest put his hand over the ciborium that held the hosts and said, “Not you.”

Kmiec understands the concerns of Catholics opposed to abortion. He spent 30 years trying to reverse the Supreme Court ruling that legalizes it nationwide. Thirty futile years that convinced him there must be a better way.

“Is there an alternative way to be pro-life?” he wondered.

“I think,” he said, “Sen. Obama comes reasonably close to that alternative path. He is careful to say he’s pro-choice, not pro-abortion. There’s a significant difference that my church, in particular, should pay more attention to.”

Kmiec was drawn to Obama’s emphasis on using public resources to alleviate social conditions that correlate with abortion. Poverty, for example.

To help others understand his thinking, he recently published a book,

“Can a Catholic Support Him? Asking the Big Question about Barack Obama.”

It’s hardly a best seller, but it’s a talker among Catholics, who, as he notes, have voted for the winner in the last nine presidential elections.

“The heart of the country really is the working family,” he said. “Catholics are, by theology and cultural disposition, very much in touch with the needs of that family. So in any given election how that family goes-not the family of great wealth or the family of great poverty, but the family in the middle-that’s kind of the national temperature.”

Does Obama’s Chicago connection make him more attractive to Kmiec?

“My sense of people in Chicago,” he said, “is like all of the lyrical expressions of the city-big shoulders, the ‘I will’ spirit. We’re very practically minded. We like to solve problems. We’re good at heart, but we don’t like to be taken advantage of. We have pride of place.”

Obama fits the mold even if he didn’t grow up here.

“By coming to Chicago and wanting to lend a hand to people who were down on their luck-who were just trying to hold onto their homes or get a decent job-he earned a lot of credit in my book,” he said.

Kmiec has taken his argument on the road, campaigning in key states for Obama, talking mostly about faith.

And any day he’s home, he goes to mass at Our Lady of Malibu, where he receives communion.

mschmich@tribune.com