Excommunicated?

You may recall a few months ago, a cannonical lawyer sued John Kerry in ecclesiastical court regarding what he referred to as the "personally opposed but..." hersey that Kerry advocates regarding abortion (For more information on that process and what's been filed, most of the info is over at De Fide). My original thought on this was that even though this guy was right, it was likely going to be a "show" thing, and little to no progress would be made on it. I thought the original "suit" made a really strong point, but my understanding is that under Canon Law, the Archbishop could just sit on it and not do anything with it.

(As an aside, please keep in mind I have no real expertise in Canon Law, I'm just filling in what info I know from reading things over the place. As always, I'll humbly accept correction in the event I'm misrepresenting some portion of the faith.)

Well, it appears that I may have jumped the gun with some of my assumptions.

“Consequently, if a Catholic publicly and obstinately supports the civil right to abortion, knowing that the Church teaches officially against that legislation, he or she commits that heresy envisioned by Can. 751 of the Code. Provided that the presumptions of knowledge of the law and penalty (Can. 15, § 2) and imputability (Can. 1321, § 3) are not rebutted in the external forum, one is automatically excommunicated according to Can. 1364, § 1.”

Now, I'm not going to sit here and claim to be able to determine the status of someone's soul...I'm certainly not qualified to make that judgement myself. I guess I'm somewhat surprised by the matter of this. I guess the idea of "automatic excommunication" is something that should have come to mind (it's not as if it's an unheard of thing...some mortal sins, such as having or aiding in an abortion carry the same weight).

I said it oringally and I'll say it again...it's going to be interesting to see how this entire thing plays out.