Dear Senator Obama

He probably gets a lot of mail. This letter is of particularly keen importance.

Dear Senator Obama:

As an immigrant from Kenya, your father found new hope in America’s noble principles and vast opportunities. The same promise brought my parents here from Egypt when I was still too young to thank them. Now you have inspired my generation with your vision of a country united around the same ideals of liberty and justice, “filled with hope and possibility for all Americans.”

But do you mean it?

As a legislator, you have opposed every effort to protect unborn human life. Shockingly, you even opposed a bill to protect the lives of babies who, having survived an attempted abortion, are born alive. Despite your party’s broad support for legal abortion and its public funding, most Democrats (including Senator Clinton) did not oppose the Born-Alive Infants Protection Act. You, however, opposed it. Your vision of America seems to eliminate “hope and possibility” for a whole class of Americans: the youngest and most vulnerable. You would deny them the most basic protection of justice, the most elementary equality of opportunity: the right to be born.

As a prerequisite for any other right, the right to life is the great civil-rights issue of our time. It is what slavery and segregation were to generations past. Our response to this issue is the measure of our fidelity to a defining American principle: “that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights, that among these are Life.”

You have asked me to vote for you. In turn, may I ask you three simple questions? They are straightforward questions of fact about abortion. They are at the heart of the debate. In fairness, I believe that you owe the people you would lead a good-faith answer to each:

1. The heart whose beating is stilled in every abortion — is it a human heart?

2. The tiny limbs torn by the abortionist’s scalpel — are they human limbs?

3. The blood that flows from the fetus’s veins — is it human blood?

If the stopped heart is a human heart, if the torn limbs are human limbs, if the spilled blood is human blood, can there be any denying that what is killed in an abortion is a human being? In your vision for America, the license to kill that human being is a right. You have worked to protect that “right” at every turn. But can there be a right to deny some human beings life or the equal protection of the law?

Superbly reasoned.

Can we become a society that does not sacrifice some people to help others? Or is that hope too audacious?

Especially good questions for the senator who has based a book and a campaign slogan on those words. Hold him to it. Ask him if his own driving commitment to hope and civil rights holds up to reasoning and logic, when his positions are argued through to their logical conclusions.

Can we provide every member of the human family equal protection under the law? Your record as a legislator gives a resounding answer: No, we can’t. That is the answer the Confederacy gave the Union, the answer segregationists gave young children, the answer a complacent bus driver once gave a defiant Rosa Parks. But a different answer brought your father from Kenya so many years ago; a different answer brought my family from Egypt some years later. Now is your chance, Senator Obama, to make good on the spontaneous slogan of your campaign, to adopt the more American and more humane answer to the question of whether we can secure liberty and justice for all: Yes, we can.

Let’s join our voices and our letters, and take this conversation to the next level.

0 Comment

  • I heard you on Relevant Radio this morning. Good interview! Love your blog-
    Chris

  • I heard the man who wrote the letter being interviewed on the Laura Ingraham show today. Quite an impressive individual.

  • In the Constitution we are all guaranteed the basic rights of LIFE, LIBERTY, AND THE PURSUITE OF HAPPINIESS. I believe they ment the right to LIFE. Therefore we chose the right to LIFE for our unborn, over the right to “CHOSE” DEATH for our unborn.
    God Fearing, and living life to the fullest, and giving others the right to live LIFE to the fullest,
    Dennis
    Obama’s words lack wisdom and understanding, are in direct violation of our constitution. Further our constitution states –We believe these rights are self evident and that they are endowed by our creator.

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