Pressing the Abortion Issue

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not favor the pro-life candidate was if he or she were "a babbling idiot."

Mondale, too, faced the boos of antiabortionists in a high school gym in Tupelo, Miss. Outside the school, black youths who favor Mondale and white students from a segregated Baptist academy got into angry shoving matches. Mondale got a helpful introduction from Tupelo Mayor James Caldwell, who said of him, "He doesn't have to talk about his beliefs. He practices them. He doesn't have to talk about prayer in school. He prays at home." But when a questioner described the Democratic platform as "antireligion," Mondale replied, "I have my faith, and it's my whole being. What makes America great is that our faith is between ourselves, our conscience and our God. We don't have to clear our faith by passing muster with some politician who happens to be running against us." On abortion, Mondale declared, "It's a question I've prayed about, and I cannot bring myself to support the amendment that seems to be the test. The use of the state in that matter is the wrong policy." At tunes, the mixture of boos and applause muffled his words.

Visiting Pennsylvania, President Reagan had a different reception. He toured the National Shrine of Our Lady of Czestochowa near Doylestown, where he gave a religious tapestry from Poland to the Pauline fathers who care for the Polish-American shrine. Crowds shouted, "Four more years! Four more years!" John Cardinal Krol of Philadelphia praised Reagan for supporting federal aid to religious schools. Reagan drew cheers by declaring, "Thank God for Pope John Paul II." The President said that he had sought the Pope's "advice and guidance on numerous occasions."

Vice President Bush, campaigning in South Carolina and Georgia, was dogged by reporters' questions about whether he fully agreed with Reagan that there should be no federal funding for abortions and that a constitutional amendment banning them should be enacted. In Charleston, S.C., Bush said that he not only opposes all public funding for abortion now but that "I always have." In Atlanta, he told reporters, "My position is like Ronald Reagan's. Put that down." Reporters, however, quickly turned up 1980 newspaper clippings and TV footage showing that Bush had supported federal funding for abortions in case of rape, incest and danger to the life of the mother, and had opposed an antiabortion amendment. "I don't recall it as being my posi tion then," Bush said about this evidence. Didn't that damage his credibility? "No," he replied. "There's an awful lot of things I don't remember."

Still, the most probing analysis last week of the dilemma facing public officials on religious issues came from Kennedy and Cuomo. Speaking at a New York City meeting of Coalition of Conscience, a Democratic political action group, the Senator argued that on issues such as abortion, school prayer and homosexuality "the proper role of religion is to appeal to the free conscience of each person, not the coercive rule of secular law." He warned that "we cannot be a tolerant country if churches bless some candidates as God's candidates—and brand others as ungodly or immoral." The logical separation between private morality and