No, you can’t
People like feel-good promises more than assertive guidelines. If you distort the truth or flat-out lie with enough convincing authority, people will believe you. Promise them anything…anything…and sound smart and confident, and they won’t care that facts don’t back up the words. Some people seem to believe that just saying something makes it so.
Like, Catholics who oppose abortion can support politicians who staunchly defend abortion. Especially when given a choice between candidates for an office. Doug Kmiec is one of the more baffling cases of such politics of Wonderland these days. And he’s out to make his case, in spite of Church teaching to the contrary.
Obama does not advocate the reversal of Roe vs. Wade, and orthodox Catholics do. We do for the very clear reason given by George in a Sept. 2 letter—namely, “one cannot favor the legal status quo on abortion and also be working for the common good.”
That’s exactly right, but what’s wrong is for Republican partisans to claim this to be Obama’s position. It’s not. Rather, Obama believes there are alternative ways to promote the “culture of life,” even given the law’s sanction of abortion.
The central hope of the Obama campaign is to find common ground—not by “favoring” that which can never be acceptable, the taking of innocent unborn life, but by dealing with the legal reality in a way that at least reduces the likelihood of abortion.
This is a play on words, and Prof. Kmiec is highly intelligent and should know that. Hence, the bafflement of many of his colleagues and friends. At least he should be honest about this instead of spinning the rhetoric. Because his candidate has promised to make the Freedom of Choice Act one of the first documents he signs into law as president.
Tell the people it’s all a matter of conscience…but neglect to empasize that conscience must be informed….and you can justify anything. Just by saying yes, you can.
The bishops of the Catholic Church are continually clarifying these political/cultural word traps by issuing declarations aimed at forming consciences for faithful citizenship. Kmiec mentioned Chicago’s Cardinal George. He was one of the latest to release a letter publicly.
And then there’s the entire body of US bishops, who saw the necessity to issue this news release about an ad campaign their Pro-Life office has launched, for further clarity.
Note this part…
A third ad underscores the extreme nature of current abortion policy under Roe v. Wade: “The human heart begins to beat at 22 days. Roe v. Wade says a doctor can stop it for the next 244….Have we gone too far?†The full-color ad directs readers to www.secondlookproject.org for more information on abortion law.
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The final ad, newly designed, calls on Congress to “Pledge now to oppose FOCA†— the “Freedom of Choice Act,†that is designed to mandate taxpayer funding of abortion and eliminate virtually all current laws regulating abortion. The ad features the eye-catching graphic of a red octagonal sign with the word “GO†instead of “STOP,†and reads: “You can’t reduce abortions by promoting abortions. If you agree, oppose the ‘Freedom of Choice Act’.â€
You can’t reduce abortions by promoting abortions. No matter how much you close your eyes and wish it were so.
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Prof. Kmiec has been peddling the notion that Obama is committed to an “abortion reduction agenda.” This is political pixie dust, sprinkled about to distract the gullible. The real Obama has long been firmly committed to an agenda of public policy measures that, if implemented, will predictably greatly increase the abortion rate.
Here’s an example: One policy that both sides agree actually HAS substantially reduced the number of abortions performed in the United States was the cutoff of Medicaid funding for abortion on demand. There are various empirical studies that demonstrate that many children have been born, who would otherwise have been aborted, because Medicaid funding of abortion has been denied by the federal Hyde Amendment, and by the comparable policies in effect in the majority of states. By the most conservative estimate, the federal Hyde Amendment alone has saved over one million lives since it was first enacted in 1976. Both sides agree that this has occurred — indeed, the pro-abortion groups like NARAL cite these studies in urging Congress and state legislatures to repeal these pro-life policies, while pro-life groups see this as a success story.
Well, then, here is a proven “abortion reduction” policy, so is Obama for it? No, he is not — he advocates repeal of the Hyde Amendment (and as a state senator, he voted against restricting state funding of elective abortions). Moreover, in 2007 Obama gave a speech to the Planned Parenthood Action Fund in which he promised abortion would be covered in his national health care plan, which means that everybody would be required to pay for elective abortion through taxes, mandatory premiums, or both.
There is more: Obama is a cosponsor of the “Freedom of Choice Act,” which would make invalidate virtually all state and federal limits on abortion, including parental notification laws. In addition, the “Freedom of Choice Act” provides that “A government may not . . . discriminate against” abortion “in the regulation or provision of benefits, facilities, services, or information,” which hardly sounds like a law that will foster “abortion reduction.” Nor will is allow any meaningful limits on
even third-trimester abortions. One of the stated purposes of the bill is to make partial-birth abortion legal again (i.e., to nullify the Partial-Birth Abortion Ban Act, which the U.S. Supreme Court upheld in 2007).
In 2007, Obama told the Planned Parenthood Action Fund, “The first thing I’d do as president is sign the Freedom of Choice Act. That’s the first thing I’d do.”
Obama has defended a vision of “abortion rights” that is more expansive than that adopted by the Supreme Court or of most defenders of Roe v. Wade. This is illustrated, for example, by Obama’s actions in the Illinois state Senate in 2001-2003, when he successfully led the opposition to a bill to merely provide protection for babies who are born alive during abortions. (The bill that Obama opposed was virtually identical to a federal bill that passed Congress without a single dissenting vote in 2002.) Obama said, in 2001, that it would violate Roe v. Wade to recognize what he called a “previable fetus” as a person — even when that human is entirely born, and alive. Recognizing that most Americans would recoil at his notion even a fully born aborted infant is still covered by Roe v. Wade, Obama has been making demonstrably false claims about the bill ever since, as National Right to Life shows in a thoroughly documented White Paper that we released on August 28, 2008, which can be read or downloaded here: http://www.nrlc.org/ObamaBAIPA/WhitePaperAugust282008.html
Douglas Johnson
Legislative Director
National Right to Life Committee
Washington, D.C.
http://www.nrlc.org
Legfederal // at // aol – dot – com
Could you vote for a pro-choice candidate if 1) he really could not significantly have an impact on abortion from the office he was seeking (mayor of a small town, for example) AND 2) his other policies were ethical.