Here are two links to sites claiming you can be pro-life and for Obama. Raise gullibility shields now.
Can you be pro-life and support Senator Obama? The answer – upon even a moment’s reflection – is unequivocally yes.
Welcome to Pro-Life, Pro-Obama, an online resource, created by Pro-life supporters of Senator Barack Obama.
Barack Obama’s life has been one dedicated in service to the needs of others.
We are all called to build a culture of life – but there’s more to it than just hoping that the next Supreme Court justice somehow deals with Roe v. Wade. A bad economy is threatening to human life. Women facing the moral tragedy of abortion – are facing it, now, today – and they need a supportive community and tangible help, not condemnation.
As Ronald Reagan’s legal counsel and as a dean and professor at Catholic University and Notre Dame, I have worked to put the law on the side of life where it belongs.
But after 35 years, a new approach is needed. Too many unborn lives are being lost as we wait for judges to get it right. Barack Obama’s strengthening of support for prenatal care, health care, maternity leave, and adoption will make the difference. Studies confirm it.
Risibly claiming that “studies confirm it” is the last refuge of scoundrels. No one has demonstrated ANY cause/effect connection or even significant correlation between the items listed (prenatal care, health care, maternity leave, and adoption) and abortion rates, because the women who are getting abortions are overwhelmingly women who just don’t want to be pregnant, period. Let’s be clear. Abortion does not continue to be the huge national disgrace that it is because the government isn’t spending enough money on prenatal care, health care, maternity leave, and adoption. Abortion is performed most often not for “deep, soul searching reasons” but out of sheer selfishness.
Another entitlement program is not going to fix the problem, any more than the War on Poverty has ended poverty. The virtual reverse is the case. Those who are taken in by this are simply “useful idiots” in the cause of Leftist politics, people who don’t have the wit to know they are being used by Leftists who don’t care a bean about unborn children, but will happily accept any excuse to widen entitlement programs and buy more votes with benefits.
Here’s another attempt to convince us that somehow you can be pro-life and pro-Obama:
Overlook Press
On April 18, 2008, Douglas W. Kmiec was denied Communion at a Catholic Mass in Westlake, California. Ironically, Kmiec had been invited by a Catholic business group to give a dinner address on the Bishop’s teaching of “Faithful Citizenship.” Kmiec had served as head of the Office of Legal Counsel for both Ronald Reagan and George H. W. Bush. But now, he found himself rejected by his faith–simply for endorsing the presidential campaign of Senator Barack Obama.
In Can a Catholic Support Him?, Kmiec offers us a thoughtful explanation of his rationale. He addresses the difficult questions at the core of his decision: Can a Catholic support a Pro-Choice candidate? Can there be a reverence for life that embraces a larger set of values? How does a Catholic citizen balance his obligations to the Church and to community? In asking these questions, he challenges those whose partisan interests are provoking a false rift between the Catholic Church and the Democratic party.
This inquiry could hardly be more timely. Catholics have been on the side of the top vote-getter in the last nine presidential elections, and make up roughly one fourth of the electorate. This provocative book–at once a legal and religious treatise and a sincere and personal journey of faith will be an irreplaceable contribution to the conversation, in 2008 and beyond.
“Sincere and personal journeys of faith” will play will in the narrative-oriented post-modern Left, but they don’t change the fact of the historic Christian teaching on infanticide and respect for life (since Tertullian!), as not merely one of “a larger set of values”, but as the pre-eminent value in human ethics. The best response to this “catholic” challenge to the pro-life stance is not from the Catholic laity, however “sincere”, but from the core of Catholic teaching itself. Here are two sources, both of which state the “inconvenient truth” about the incompatibility of Catholicism with voting for pro-choice politicians.
I read this overnight and couldn’t put it down. Chaput has an easy, engaging writing style, but don’t let that fool you. He has a deep grasp of history and a forceful message about the role of Catholic faith in shaping and humanizing the public square. He deals with all the tough issues, but this is not primarily a book about abortion or Communion wars or which political party is good or bad. It’s much richer and more challenging than than that. This is simply the best book I’ve read about the American Catholic political vocation. If you want to know what the words “American and Catholic” really mean, read this book.
Chaput’s book is wide-ranging, well-sourced and cogently argued, and is about much more than abortion, yet makes clear the powerful message that Catholics (and I think any Christians) simply cannot accept politicians who consider deciding which human lives to protect to be “above their pay grade”.
Of course, some politicians will say nearly anything and pretend nearly anything to divert public attention from the real issue.
Denver archbishop slams Pelosi on Church teachings and abortion
The Archdiocese of Denver argues that since Speaker Pelosi claims to have studied the issue “for a long time,” “she must know very well one of the premier works on the subject, Jesuit John Connery’s Abortion: The Development of the Roman Catholic Perspective (Loyola, 1977).
The statement recall’s Connery’s conclusion: “The Christian tradition from the earliest days reveals a firm antiabortion attitude . . . The condemnation of abortion did not depend on and was not limited in any way by theories regarding the time of fetal animation. Even during the many centuries when Church penal and penitential practice was based on the theory of delayed animation, the condemnation of abortion was never affected by it. Whatever one would want to hold about the time of animation, or when the fetus became a human being in the strict sense of the term, abortion from the time of conception was considered wrong, and the time of animation was never looked on as a moral dividing line between permissible and impermissible abortion.”
The Archdiocese’s statement also quotes “the blunter words of the great Lutheran pastor Dietrich Bonhoeffer.”
Bonhoeffer, a strong critic and later victim of the Nazi regime in his native Germany wrote that “the destruction of the embryo in the mother’s womb is a violation of the right to live which God has bestowed on 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.”
Archbishop Chaput’s statement continues, explaining that, “ardent, practicing Catholics will quickly learn from the historical record that from apostolic times, the Christian tradition overwhelmingly held that abortion was grievously evil. In the absence of modern medical knowledge, some of the Early Fathers held that abortion was homicide; others that it was tantamount to homicide; and various scholars theorized about when and how the unborn child might be animated or ‘ensouled.’ But none diminished the unique evil of abortion as an attack on life itself, and the early Church closely associated abortion with infanticide. In short, from the beginning, the believing Christian community held that abortion was always, gravely wrong.”
You can run from what you know are your Christian responsibilities to the unborn, but you cannot hide from them forever. There is no chance that the pro-life position on any issue will gain any traction in an Obama administration with a Democratic, filibuster proof Senate and House. It just cannot happen. In fact, quite the opposite, as Obama intends to push for the “Freedom of Choice Act” which would immediately cancel ALL state laws restricting any aspect whatsoever of access to abortion, partial birith abortion, parental notification, and make the USA the most radically pro-abort nation in the world, legally speaking.
If you want to think of yourself as pro-life, and you’re even vaguely considering voting for Obama, you’ll have to look at yourself in mirror, in the light of the above, every day, knowing what you’ve done. Fair warning: after this election, especially if Obama wins, people who claim to be Christian and voted for him deserve to be asked by other Christians, “How do you square voting for the most pro-abortion president in history with being a Christian?” I plan to do exactly that. I hope others will. You’d better be prepared to answer.
Or better yet, vote for McCain.
January 24th, 2009 6:13 pm
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