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“Democracy demands that the religiously motivated translate their concerns into universal, rather than religion-specific, values. It requires that their proposals be subject to argument, and amenable to reason. I may be opposed to abortion for religious reasons, but if I seek to pass a law banning the practice, I cannot simply point to the teachings of my church or evoke God’s will. I have to explain why abortion violates some principle that is accessible to people of all faiths, including those with no faith at all. Now this is going to be difficult for some who believe in the inerrancy of the Bible, as many evangelicals do. But in a pluralistic democracy, we have no choice. Politics depends on our ability to persuade each other of common aims based on a common reality.” – Barack Obama

Then-Senator Obama made this statement during his speech to Jim Wallis’ “Call to Renewal” conference in 2006.  Note two things:

(1)   He effectively denies the commonality of natural law and the conscience – the foundation of the “universal values” he commends – and links opposition to abortion only to the revelation of Scripture.

(2)   He also suggests that opposing abortion cannot be justified by our “common reality.”

As the first point, is the President prepared to argue that no “self evident truths” exist?  Is the assertion that “all men are created equal” and have rights endowed to them by a Creator too culture-specific for Mr. Obama?  And is the validity of these assertions determined simply by the number of people who agree with them?

As to the second point, is the “common reality” determined by the 50 percent plus one?  If so, did the “common reality” of the Japanese military state in the 1930s surely justify the rape of Nanking?

Mr. Obama calls for our being “amenable to reason.”  Yet he is unreasonable in refusing seriously to interact with the irrefutable scientific evidence that personhood begins at conception and, if so, that every person has value independent of his or her mother from that moment – and therefore possesses and should obtain a legally-recognized right to life.

Perhaps the German theologian Dietrich Bonhoeffer captured it all most clearly:

Destruction of the embryo in the mother’s womb is a violation of the right to live which God has bestowed upon this nascent life. To raise the question whether we are here concerned already with a human being or not is merely to confuse the issue. The simple fact is that God certainly intended to create a human being and that this nascent human being has been deliberately deprived of his life. And that is nothing but murder.

Ethics (New York; Macmillan, 1965), pp. 175-6.

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(Transcript after the jump)

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As the health care debate heats up it is hard to get straightforward, understandable information on the nuts and bolts of how Obamacare will operate.  Big picture, no trees, no weeds. That’s what we need.  Well, there was an extremely powerful eight minute interview on Mark Levin’s radio show last Friday (July 17, 2009) that you must listen to.  (We make it easy to do so below.)

Mark Levin interviewed Betsy McCaughey, adjunct fellow at the Hudson Institute and the chairman and founder of the Committee to Reduce Infection Deaths, about the Obama Administration’s health care plan.  She clearly and frighteningly describes provisions of the current House bill that will reduce care for the elderly and compel all programs to provide regimented, HMO-style care for the rest of us.  (FYI, McCaughey served also as the Lt. Governor of New York from Jan. 1995 to Dec. 1998.)

If you would like to listen we are going to provide two ways to do so. First, you can click here and listen or listen below to the eight minute interview using the Family Research Council website:

We want to heartily thank “The Mark Levin Show” for most graciously giving FRC permission to play the audio from our website.

You can listen or download the entire Friday, July 17, 2009 program from Mark Levin’s website – this is his “Audio” webpage.  Once on the Audio page, do the following: 1) click on “07/17 The Mark Levin Show;” and, 2) start the player at 8 minutes, 45 seconds.

I believe this audio will sharpen your focus on the key features of the health bill.

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The Washington Post last year admitted that it had “leaned” toward Barack Obama in the presidential race. That’s ridiculous. The Leaning Tower of Pisa leans, but it still stands. The Post and the rest of the liberal media fell over flat for him. Chris Matthews admitted to feeling a tingling going up and down his leg. The rest just wrote like that.

President Obama’s Mideast trip has been hailed as a “new beginning.” Indeed it is. Obama very pointedly did not visit Jerusalem on this his first trip to the region.

Liberal Democrat Harry Truman dared to recognize Israel in 1948 – minutes after the struggling Jewish state was born – and minutes before Egypt, Saudi Arabia, and the rest of the Arab world tried to strangle the infant in its crib. Republican Richard Nixon – despised by the liberal media – saved Israel’s life by re-supplying her with arms during the Yom Kippur War in 1973.

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On Monday in an interview with French journalist, Laura Haim, President Obama spoke about the purpose for his trip to the Middle East. During the interview, which you can read on the White House website, the President stated the following:

…I think that the United States and the West generally, we have to educate ourselves more effectively on Islam. And one of the points I want to make is, is that if you actually took the number of Muslims Americans, we’d be one of the largest Muslim countries in the world. And so there’s got to be a better dialogue and a better understanding between the two peoples.

What?

In April, on his trip to Turkey, President Obama said, “we do not consider ourselves a Christian nation…”

So, according to President Obama we are not a Christian nation, but we are one of the largest Muslim countries in the world?

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Here is Tony Perkins’ statement on President Obama’s nomination of Judge Sotomayer. Her record makes one wonder… is she a legislator or a jurist?

FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE: May 26, 2009 CONTACT: J.P. Duffy or Maria Donovan, (866) FRC-NEWS

Sotomayor: A Policy Maker or a Jurist?

Washington, D.C. – This morning President Obama announced his nominee to the nation’s highest court, Judge Sonia Sotomayor of the United States Court of Appeals for the Second Circuit. Family Research Council Action President Tony Perkins released the following statement:

“President Obama has chosen a nominee with a compelling personal story over a judicial pick with a solid constitutional judicial philosophy. A compelling personal story is no substitute for allegiance to the Constitution and its sound application to public life.

“Judge Sotomayor’s failure to premise her decisions on the text of the Constitution has resulted in an extremely high rate of reversal before the high court to which she has been nominated.

“With that fact in mind Judge Sotomayor appears to subscribe to a very liberal judicial philosophy that considers it appropriate for judges to impose their personal views from the bench. President Obama promised us a jurist committed to the ‘rule of law,’ but, instead, he appears to have nominated a legislator to the Supreme Court.

“For example, in 2001 when delivering the Judge Mario G. Olmos Law and Cultural Diversity Lecture at the University of California-Berkeley Law School, Sotomayor stated: ‘I would hope that a wise Latina woman with the richness of her experiences would more often than not reach a better conclusion [as a judge] than a white male who hasn’t lived that life.’

“Needless to say, that statement is troubling – if not offensive – on many levels. As the distinguished legal reporter Stuart Taylor of the National Journal observed about that speech and of Sotomayor, ‘her thinking is representative of the Democratic Party’s powerful identity-politics wing.’

“In a 2005 panel discussion at the Duke University Law School that can be seen on YouTube and cable news channels, the judge stated that the U.S. Court of Appeals is ‘where policy is made.’

“With all due respect to Judge Sotomayor, our constitution states otherwise and public surveys indicate that the American public understands this constitutional principle and want judges who interpret the law and do not act as life-tenured judicially empowered social workers.

“The Family Research Council expects the members of the Senate Judiciary Committee and the entire Senate to fully examine and publicly present an accurate picture of Judge Sotomayor’s judicial philosophy to the American public before they vote on her nomination.”

-30-

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On Friday government officials from the regime of Hugo Chavez in Venezuela raided the offices of Globovision, the only remaining television broadcaster in the country that openly criticizes Chavez.  The pretext for the raid has something to do with the station’s news reporting on an earthquake in Venezuela in early May, which asserted that the government had been slow to report on the incident.   According to press reports and comments from worried United Nations officials, Globovision stands to lose its license, which would mean the end of the last media outlet that dares to disagree with Chavez or his increasingly oligarchic powers.  Interestingly, Venezuelan government officials characterized the Globovision report as “hate speech” that risked alarming the country and “destabilizing” the populace. Government’s facile use of such expressions is reason for alarm.

As The Washington Post notes this morning, Latin American caudillos are no novelty, but the silence of the United States (i.e., the Obama administration) in the face of such repression is a first.  Not a first, but similarly worrisome, is the news that Nancy Pelosi, fresh from accusing the C.I.A. of lying to Congress in private briefings, is off to Beijing with nary a word prior to her trip of criticism of China’s abusive human rights practices.  Time was, U.S. Democrats like former Rep. Dick Gephardt (Mo.) were among the leaders of efforts to hold the Chinese accountable for their abuses of workers, and other Democrats spoke of Chinese denial of religious freedom and its record of forced abortion and sterilization.  Pelosi instead wants to engage the oligarchs in Beijing only on climate change.   But it is the climate for political freedom that is turning adverse.

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Sunday’s speech and the reaction of the Notre Dame community, and Catholics and others worldwide, will be the subject of much comment in the coming days.  Some quick thoughts and first impressions:

Without doubt, Obama was eloquent, charming, and seemingly at ease.  He had the advantage (a faculty and administration behind him, and the media framing it as the man of reason versus the rabble in the street, with, obligingly, Randall Terry performing that role as if on cue), and he seemed once again to know it.  The students, who prepare for this day with years of labor and the love (and labor and cash) of their families behind them, were respectful and, as students tend to be around our rock-star President, wowed by his skill with words, his symbolic meaning in transcending our historic racial divide, and his graceful humor.

As for his speech, it was un-Barackesque in one sense – he came down from Olympus, where pay grades are seldom referred to at all, and made it plain that on the issue of human life, he does in fact disagree with those who stand for its sanctity.   But he was Barackesque in striving to minimize those differences, in implying that there is “demonization” of opponents afoot (not from him, of course, just unnamed others), and suggesting that, to borrow an irritating catchphrase from a recent era in U.S. Catholic politics, he is all about “dialogue” with those who disagree with him.

There is the rub.  Obama is a man of many mellifluous words, but he is also a man of many unambiguous actions, and every action he has taken to date has been a forthright dismantling of the culture of life and the wall of separation that has existed between taxpayers and abortion.  A complete list would include all of his key personnel in White House domestic policy, HHS, State and the Justice Department.  His policy enactments include rescinding the Mexico City policy that kept the international abortion industry out of the federal Treasury, rescinding the Bush conscience regulations designed to protect medical and health research personnel from having to participate in or facilitate abortion, eliminating all but a smidgeon of abstinence funding for the pregnancy centers that deal directly with women in need, lifting the ban on the use of District of Columbia funds to pay for abortion in his proposed budget, providing federal funding for experiments that rely on killing embryonic humans in fertility clients, and sending Planned Parenthood an additional $10 million federal love note, matching what they spent to elect him last year.

The President’s efforts to spur “dialogue” involve a low-level White House meeting where groups — including, for the record, FRC — are asked to come in and help craft a plan to “reduce the need for abortion.”  To be credible, that plan would have to begin with reversing every decision Obama has made on abortion to date.  But note the phraseology, which suggests a fundamental disagreement.  Who speaks of a “need for child abuse”?  Or a need for white collar crime?  Or a need for bribery of public officials?  If there is a need for something, just how wrong is it?  Planned Parenthood and its allies secured this language in the Democratic Platform last year because they did not want any suggestion from their party that the act of abortion is a moral wrong.  But if it is not a moral wrong, then it is hardly something that needs to be reduced, particularly if, as Planned Parenthood insists, it is physically safe and negligible in its mental health implications.

President Obama and his administration have extraordinary message discipline when it comes to these matters.  That discipline will be on display again soon in the health care debate when the Democrats on the Hill insist that they are deferring that question to some other body (likely an HHS commission that will likewise pronounce itself for “dialogue”) for resolution.  Is there any chance that an Obama-endorsed, government-financed health plan will exclude abortion and taxpayer participation in it?  As a state legislator, Obama stood out as a man so concerned about protecting abortion in all circumstances that he led opposed laws to provide care for infants who survive the procedure.

Yesterday Notre Dame gave a high honor to such a man.  He spoke eloquently.  But the Jesuit fathers who taught me in high school and even a few of the Holy Cross priests who taught me at Notre Dame impressed on me to pay attention to what men do, not just what they say.  They cited the Good Book on knowing people by their fruits.  With Obama, that begins with what is being done to the fruit of the womb.

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President Obama is offering up a new version of the old fable of the stone soup. You’ll recall the Brothers Grimm fairy tale where the strangers come to town, offering nothing but a stone in the bottom of their kettle. They persuade the townspeople to add some potatoes, carrots, and soup bones, just for “garnish.” Soon they had a feast-for free.

In 1976, candidate Jimmy Carter came to Iowa. He said he “didn’t like abortion.” And he  pledged to reduce “the need for abortion.” This at least was something.

To most people, the Republican candidate wasn’t even offering a stone. President Ford never mentioned abortion, or the Supreme Court’s 1973 Roe v. Wade ruling that legalized abortion-on-demand. He let the First Lady, Betty Ford, speak out, offering her strongly pro-abortion views.

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One thing can be said for President Obama is that he doesn’t sneak up on his targets. And another thing that can be said for this liberal administration is that it is not in the least embarrassed about its inclinations. To buy into this left-of-center government is to have gotten what one bargained for. Yesterday Obama made it clear that he wants to see retiring Justice David Souter (he who ignored the erstwhile tradition of justices allowing a president of the party that appointed him to nominate his successor) replaced by October – and by an individual who has “empathy” and is “about how our laws affect the daily realities of people’s lives.” These are indeed fine characteristics, but they are finest in legislators and not in judges, and in judges they are finer in trial judges than in appellate and Supreme Court judges whose “empathy” may or may not be a reliable yardstick of, well – quaint concept – justice or due process.

President Obama also suggested that some (unspecified) Americans need Supreme Court judges who will use their empathy to assure that they feel “welcome in their own nation.” Is Obama referring to judges who will enforce duly enacted civil rights laws? To homosexual couples desiring to “marry” and have the U.S. Constitution traduced to their cause? To Mormons and Christians who are being assaulted in their churches or on the street for their participation in our democracy? To legal immigrants? Illegal immigrants?

In the realm of feeling, any answer is possible. But in the realm of leftwing jurisprudence, only one answer to each of these questions is likely. The empathy that matters is in the eye of the office-holder.

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