Prof. K's post also links to Fr. Neuhaus & Mike Uhlman on the same topic. It's not their religion per se that makes Catholics different; it's the openness to Reason, as someone noted in my combox:
of course there was no specifically religious rationale given by either side. It seems that Catholics are the one group who take "the laws of Nature and of Nature's God" as at least capable of providing insight into profound and troubling public questions. Which is to say that Catholics are the true heirs of the Founders of America -- who based their work on the laws and rights of nature, even though nearly none were themselves Catholics...One of history's many ironies.Not that Catholicism has a lock on the founding, of course. Fr. Neuhaus says:
It is not a peculiarly Catholic perception, but it is an emphatically Catholic perception, that legitimate law cannot be divorced from morality.More here.
