Obama gets their Irish Up
By this time, everyone is probably aware of the “Notre Dame Scandal” — the furor over President Obama being invited to give the commencement speech and receive an honorary law degree at Notre Dame. I haven’t had time to write about here (funny, I seem to have had time to write about it on other people’s blogs), but I do want to post here a link to a really superb article from the Wall Steet Journal, where William McGurn clearly lays out how we got here.
After noting President Obama’s extreme positions in favor of abortions, the destruction of human embryos for stem-cell research, and his opposition to “conscience clauses” for health care workers opposed to abortion, McGurn writes:
Within the Democratic Party these days, these are all orthodox positions. But it wasn’t always so. We forget it now, but back in the day, Jesse Jackson was calling abortion “genocide,” Al Gore had a pro-life record in the House, and even Ted Kennedy could write letters saying, “Wanted or unwanted, I believe that human life, even at its earliest stages, has certain rights which must be recognized.”
In this party, Catholic leaders such as the Rev. Theodore Hesburgh, then president of Notre Dame, still enjoyed tremendous influence. Had they used that influence to try to arrest the Democrats’ slide on life, things might have been very different today. Instead, they became classic enablers, treating abortion as an irritating issue that needed to be placed off to the side.
Thus, in 1984, Notre Dame famously handed its platform over to then Gov. Mario Cuomo, who bequeathed to delighted pro-choice Catholics the same personally-opposed-but rationale that Stephen Douglas had used in his debates with Lincoln. A few years later, the university followed up by awarding its Laetare Medal, one of the American Catholicism’s most prestigious, to Sen. Daniel Patrick Moynihan — another Catholic who had long since cut his conscience to accommodate the pro-choice direction of his party.
There were exceptions to this, including the very brave and coherent Catholic Governor Robert Casey of Pennsylvania, McGurn notes, but Catholic Democrats as a whole took a very different path:
In our public life, it has brought us to a day where the most prominent Catholics in America — from Vice President Joe Biden and House Speaker Nancy Pelosi to virtually every well-known Irish Catholic in the Senate — now defend the snuffing out of tens of millions of innocent human lives as the exercise of a fundamental right.
And on the Midwestern campus of the Golden Dome, it allows administrators and professors to tell themselves they are in “dialogue” with the spirit of John F. Kennedy when they are in fact surrendering to a Ted Kennedy reality they themselves have helped create.
You can read the rest of the excellent article here.
Many people are claiming that abortion isn’t the only issue, President Bush was invited and he was in favor of the death penalty, and stated an unjust war (though he didn’t start the war until after 2001 when he spoke at Notre Dame). All of that may be true, but doesn’t make the University’s actions any more right in the present case.
One overwhelming fact is true, however. Obama knows he could not have won without the Catholic vote this past election (53% of Catholics voted for him). He knows he can’t win a second term without us. As a politician, he is going to try to win us over (i.e. manipulate us) any way he can. Obama will be using this event to solidify his position with Catholics while outside of these photo-ops, he is going to be promoting an evil that goes directly against Church teachings, as well as all human decency. Is it our job to let him?
As the Notre Dame students noted today, it’s ironic that Obama is being given a law degree, since he is trashing the very principle behind our laws by denying human rights to a whole class of people, the unborn. I will add only this, but Obama, by once again pouring federal funds into paying for abortions, is violating the consciences of many taxpayers. He is also seeking to rid federal laws of their “conscience clauses,” thus forcing pro-life medical personal who object to abortion for religious reasons to participate in performing them. In other words, he is making himself not only an enemy of the Church and its teachings, but an enemy of First Amendment religious freedoms. One more reason he shouldn’t be given an honorary law degree. I’d say he’s pretty thoroughly besmirched the one he already has. Does a Catholic law school really need to give him another one to sully?
Bishop D’Arcy of South Bend has already said he won’t be attending Notre Dame’s commencement this year. I hope many students and parents follow suit.
