In addition to all the weaknesses, all the dilemmas, all the temptations that impede every pilgrim's progress, the Catholic who holds political office in a pluralistic democracy, a Catholic who was elected to serve Jews and Muslims and 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 even contradictory to them. Where the laws protect people's right to divorce, their right to use birth control devices 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, our right 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 that 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 be a Jew or a Protestant or a nonbeliever or anything else you choose. We know that the price of seeking to force our belief on others is that they might someday force their belief on us. 

In the complex interplay of forces and considerations that go into the making of our law and policies, its preservation, the preservation of freedom 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, because 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 about universal public morality.

As a Catholic, I respect the teaching authority of my bishops. But must I agree with everything in the bishop's 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 once again renew the church's ban on birth control devices as clearly as it's been done in modern times, must I, as governor, vetoe 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 that you do? By denying you Medicaid funding, by a constitutional amendment? And if by a constitutional amendment, which one?

Almost all Americans accept the religious values as part of our public life. We are a religious people. Many of us are descended from ancestors who came here expressly to live their religious faith free from coercion or repression. But we are also a people of many religions with no established church, who hold different beliefs on many matters. Our public morality then, the moral standards we maintain for everyone, not just the ones we insist on in our private lives, depends on a consensus view of right and wrong. The values derived from religious belief will not and should not be accepted as part of the public morality unless they are shared by the pluralistic community at large by consensus. So that the fact that values happen to be religious values does not deny them acceptability as part of this consensus. But it does not require their acceptability either.

 The arguments start when religious values are used to support positions which would impose on other people restrictions that they find unacceptable. Some people do object to Catholic demands for an end to abortion, seeing it as a violation of the separation of church and state and some others, while they have no compunction about invoking the authority of Catholic bishops and regard to birth control and abortion, might reject out of hand their teaching on war and peace and social policy. Ultimately, therefore, what this means is that the question whether or not we admit religious values into our public affairs is too broad to yield to a single answer. Yes, we create our public morality through consensus. And in this country, that consensus reflects to some extent the religious values of a great majority of Americans. But no, all religiously based values don't have a priori place in our public morality. The community must decide if what is being proposed would be better left to private discretion than public policy. Whether it restricts freedoms and if so, to what end? To whose benefit? Whether we'll produce a good or bad result. Whether overall it will help the community or merely divide it.

 I think it's already apparent that a good part of this nation understands, if only instinctively, that anything which seems to suggest that God favors a political party or the establishment of a state church is wrong and dangerous. 

The American people need no course in philosophy or political science or church history to know that God should not be made into a celestial party chairman. To most of us, the manipulative invoking of religion to advance a politician or a party is frightening and divisive. The American public will tolerate religious leaders taking positions for or against candidates. Although I think the Catholic bishops are right in avoiding that position. But the American people are leery about large religious organizations, powerful churches or synagogue groups engaging in such activities. Again, not as a matter of law or doctrine. But because, our innate wisdom and our democratic instinct teaches us these things are dangerous for both sides. Dangerous for the religious institution, dangerous for the rest of our society. 

Even a radically secular world must struggle with the questions of when life begins, under what circumstances it can be ended, when it must be protected. By what authority? It, too, must decide what protection to extend to the helpless and the dying, to the aged and the unborn, to life in all of its phases. Now, as a Catholic, I have accepted certain answers as the right ones for myself and for 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 deathbed trying to decide if the tubes and the needles no longer served a purpose. As a governor, however, I'm involved in defining policies that determine other people's rights in these same areas of life and death. 

I've concluded that the approach of a constitutional amendment is not the best way for us to seek to deal with abortion.  I believe that the legal interdicting of abortion by either the federal government or the individual states is not a plausible possibility. And even if it could be obtained, it wouldn't work. Given present attitudes, it would be prohibition revisited. Legislating what couldn't be enforced and in the process, creating a disrespect for law in general. And as much as I admire the bishops' hope that a constitutional amendment against abortion would be the basis for a full new bill of rights for mothers and children, I disagree very respectfully that that would be the result. 

I believe that more likely a constitutional prohibition, which you can't get, but if you could, would allow people to ignore the causes of many abortions instead of addressing them, addressing the causes, much the way the death penalty is used to escape dealing more fundamentally and more rationally with the problem of violent crime. All the legal options that have been proposed are, in my view, equally ineffective. 

 The Hatch amendment, by returning the question of abortion to the various states, would have given us a checkerboard of permissive and restrictive jurisdictions. In some cases, people might have been forced to go elsewhere to have abortions, and that might have eased a few consciences here and there, but it would not have done what the church wants to do. It would not have created a deep seated respect for life.  Abortions would have gone on, millions of them. Nor would a denial of Medicaid funding for abortion achieve our objectives. Given Roe against Wade would be nothing more than an attempt to do indirectly what the law says cannot be done directly. And worse than that, it would do it in a way that would burden only the already disadvantaged. Removing funding from the Medicaid program would not prevent the rich and middle classes from having abortions. It would not even ensure that the disadvantaged wouldn't have them. It would only impose financial burdens on poor women who want abortions. And apart from that unevenness, there's a more basic question. Medicaid is designed to deal with health and medical needs, but the arguments for the cut off of Medicaid abortion funds are not related to those needs. They're moral arguments. If we assume that there are health and medical needs, our personal view of morality ought not to be considered a relevant basis for discrimination. We must keep in mind always that we are a nation of laws when we like those laws and when we don't. The Supreme Court has established a woman's constitutional right to abortion, whether we like it or not. The Congress has decided that the federal government doesn't have to provide federal funding. But that doesn't bind the states in the allocation of their own state funds. Under the law,  the individual states need not follow the federal lead. And in New York, I will speak only for New York, not for Indiana or any other state. In New York I believe we cannot follow the federal lead. The equal protection clause in New York's constitution, as has been interpreted by courts as a standard of fairness that would preclude us from denying only the poor indirectly by a cutoff of funds of the practical use of the constitutional right as given to all women in Roe against Wade. 

While we argue over abortion, the United States infant mortality rate places us 16th among the nations of the world, the United States, 16 among the nations of the world. Thousands of infants die each year because of inadequate medical care. Some are born with birth defects that with proper treatment could be prevented. Some are stunted in their physical and mental growth because of improper nutrition. If we want to prove our regard for life in the womb, for the helpless infant, if we care about women having real choices in their lives and not being driven to abortions by a sense of helplessness and despair about the future of their child, then there is work enough for all of us, lifetimes of it. 

Mario Cuomo: The principle of abortion is life begins at conception. Great. What's conception? Well, you know, the egg, the thing they come together. Oh and that's human life right away. Yeah. That's right. Who says so? 

Richard Heffner: Your co-religionists, say so. 

 Mario Cuomo: Oh, really?

Richard Heffner: Don't they? 

Mario Cuomo: The Catholic Church says so. Absolutely. But the Catholic Church says a lot of things. They say there's a heaven. They say there's a hell. There's a lot of things, I believe because I choose to be a Roman Catholic and I accept it on faith. What is faith? Faith implies the lack of knowledge. If you could do it intellectually on knowledge, you wouldn't need faith. Faith is the willing suspension of your insistence on an intellectual proof. I can't prove the existence of God. Not even the old Aristotelian ways you know, seven tests of God. In the end, you take a leap of faith because it comports with the intellect without being compelled by the intellect. So that's called faith. So you want to be a Jew? Great. You're not a Jew, a Hebrew. Then you're a Hebrew. You want to be an Islamic believer, Muslim? Great. You want to be Roman Catholic? Great. I'm a Roman Catholic and they give me rules and I have to live by them to stay in the club. But that's different than saying to people who don't have a religion, you should believe it, because the priest told me to believe it and I chose to believe it. What they have a right to is proof. Give me a biologist. Give me a scientist who tells me human life is there in conception, as distinguished from life, because there's life in every cell. Give me some evidence. 

You want to talk about God? OK, what is God? Nobody really can define God. We all believe in God. Ninety one percent of us will say we believe in God. What we're really saying is we believe in some force up there that's more intelligent than we are, that's responsible for us in a way that we don't fully understand. And what it says to us is be good and don't do evil things. We understand that. And we feel guilt because we're offending that when we do a lot of bad things like stealing and this and that. OK, that's understandable. But what should the government be saying about God? The government should be saying I'm going to let you think about God any way you want to. I'm not going to tell you how to do it. I'm going to protect the way you do it as long as you don't hurt somebody else with it. That's great. But I will say that the government should be saying this. I will say this about all you people who believe in God. There are two rules, whatever your religion is, and even if you don't have a religion and call yourself an atheist, there are two rules that we find in every religion and we're trying to do it as a government. Number one, you're supposed to love one another, which means don't hurt one another unless you're defending your life. You're supposed to love one another. And I'm not talking about romantic love. I'm talking about being good, being kind, being happy. That's it. That's a rule. And I don't want to hear about a guy that says no hurt one another. And after that, what you're supposed to do is come together and make the whole joint better. Make the whole community better, your village, your town, your city, do everything you can to take care of the people who are sick, take care of those poor people who are desperate to work, but don't have the education, don't have the opportunity. Just help one another. 

92Y “Who is God?”