How you will never hear the seamless garment theory used

By Dr. Jeff Mirus ( bio - articles - email ) | Oct 02, 2025

In commenting on the Durbin-award controversy, when Pope Leo XIV made comparative remarks about related contemporary moral positions, he put it this way:

Someone who says I’m against abortion but is in favor of the death penalty is not really pro-life. Someone who says I’m against abortion but I’m in agreement with the inhuman treatment of immigrants in the United States, I don’t know if that’s pro-life.

I think the order of the clauses or phrases in this comment is not only typical but very significant. It indicates that the first instinct of many speakers is to emphasize the seamless garment of morality in ways which subtly but specifically criticize abortion opponents for being insufficiently seamless. I am sure that this is unintentional with Pope Leo, but it does demonstrate the influence of the dominant culture on the manner in which the seamless garment theory of morality is typically discussed and deployed.

In other words, nobody ever says this:

Someone who says I’m against the death penalty but is in favor of abortion is not really pro-life. Someone who says I’m against the inhuman treatment of immigrants in the United States but I’m not against abortion, I don’t know if that’s pro-life.

The vast majority of people who compare and contrast moral positions using the seamless garment approach do it almost instinctively in ways which single out opposition to abortion as insufficient. You never hear the argument expressed in a way that disqualifies opposition to the death penalty or opposition to restrictions on immigration (or anything else) on the grounds of insufficiency.

No, the argument is almost always used to diminish the moral integrity of those who oppose abortion, and not those who oppose any other evil. This is clearly a cultural thing, by which I mean that in our culture, abortion is the single evil that is reflexively considered most important to ignore, to the point that it has even affected how we express ourselves. Thus even our instinctive use of “seamless garment” phraseology in effect refuses to allow opposition to abortion ever to occupy the moral high ground.

I do not mean that everyone who falls into this trap has recognized that it is a trap. What I am suggesting is that at this point the trap is culturally ingrained. The way people phrase these moral comments, even when they may not intend that particular consequence, invariably reflects the dominant culture’s insistence that abortion must not be singled out as a particularly grave moral evil.

Think about what this means, because it is by now almost completely and often even involuntarily instinctive: Opposition to abortion must never be allowed to occupy the moral high ground—not even rhetorically.