To the news that President Obama has re-nominated Dawn Johnsen to head the Justice Department’s Office of Legal Counsel, the Catholic League’s Bill Donohue offers this comment:
Most of the critics of Dawn Johnsen focus on her strong pro-abortion record. While that is disturbing, a pro-abortion president can be expected to staff his administration with such persons…Dawn Johnsen is not someone who simply takes issue with the Catholic Church’s pro-life position: she wants to punish the Church. In the late 1980s, she joined a cadre of anti-Catholics to strip the Catholic Church of its tax exempt status. The charge? The Church was guilty of violating IRS strictures because it took a strong pro-life position. The lawsuit failed.
The case that Donohue refers to was is Abortion Rights Mobilization v. Baker, which lasted about eight years before the final appeal was exhausted for those attempting to prevent the Church from expressing its moral teaching of two millennia.
Johnsen, you may recall, is more famous for comparing pregnancy to slavery in a legal brief. In a footnote from the landmark 1989 Supreme Court case Webster v. Planned Parenthood, Johnsen made this argument in a footnote:
Statutes that curtail [a woman’s] abortion choice are disturbingly suggestive of involuntary servitude, prohibited by the Thirteenth Amendment, in that forced pregnancy requires a woman to provide continuous physical service to the fetus in order to further the state’s asserted interest.
