Because it’s not over yet

Prominent voices of clarity are taking to the public square to inform people about what’s at stake in this election, after the dust clears and the balloons burst.

Charles Chaput is in a number of places.

So is Princeton Professor Robert George.

The other day, Richard John Neuhaus came out with this penetrating commentary in his magazine. It’s about time, says RJN, that abortion entered the debate.

As abortion extremists put it, the woman has a right to a dead baby. Obama apparently agrees, even saying that it is a constitutional right. In this he goes farther than almost any reputable constitutional scholar, claiming that the abortion license is covered by a right to “privacy” that is found not only in the “penumbra and emanations” of the Constitution but in the Constitution itself.

This, together with his adamant support for the government funding of abortion and for the Freedom of Choice Act, which would eliminate all state regulation of abortion–including waiting periods, parental notification, and other very modest measures–leaves no doubt that Senator Obama is on the farthest edge of abortion extremism. And it highlights what is arguably the most important single issue in this election: Who, as president, will get to nominate the next one, or two, or three, justices to the Supreme Court.

Yes. I say that every chance I get.

It is time to focus again, and this time relentlessly, on the question of the protection of innocent human life and the related and inseparable question of the role of the courts in our political order…

What in the last several decades came to be called the “culture wars” runs very deep, and there is no end in sight. Nobody who cares about this constitutional order can be happy with our present circumstance. Politics is supposed to be about persuasion, deliberation, and decision-making through the process of representative democracy. It is not supposed to be warfare conducted by other means. And yet it is hard to suppress the impression that we are two nations in conflict.

We are indeed. The deed is abortion, and it is dividing the nation.

The abortion debate is about more than abortion. It is about the nature of human life and community. It is about whether rights are the product of human assertion or the gift of “Nature and Nature’s God.” It is about euthanasia, eugenic engineering, and the protection of the radically handicapped.

And so much more. The definition of marriage and understanding of sexuality. The radical curriculum change in public schools and shift from classical education to outcome-based education. Social engineering. And the place of religiously – or even morally – informed voices in the public square, in decision making, even in the discussion.

The construal of the self, of community, and of ultimate meaning that is espoused by the Court is incompatible with Christian and Jewish teaching and, we expect, with the common experience of most Americans. It is, in effect although not in name, another religion.

The divide is not between ‘values voters’ and all the others. We’re all values voters, and somebody’s values will prevail. Neuhaus pinpoints here the fact that secular liberalism is another orthodoxy, its own religion.

And many people are still happily unaware. Of this, and other matters central to American life and its direction.

Here are two of the best, and briefest, lines in an NRO piece about making use of the time left.

Civility is good. But the abdication of moral leadership is bad.

Politics and the pop culture have morphed, the lines are blurred, and for some it’s just varying degrees of entertainment.

With so much Letterman groveling, Saturday Night Live appearing, glad-handing dinners, and lame sermons, one would get the impression from both our political and religious leaders that we are not two weeks away from a critical election.

If we elect Barack Obama two weeks from now, I believe the laughter will have been a contributing factor. Too many — from the candidates to religious leaders to commentators to, I’m sure, some Joe Plumbers — are being seduced by rhetoric during this election cycle. They’re glossing over substantive differences and duties.

So, some questions to focus the attention.

It’s a good thing that Americans want to embrace the first black president — they want to make a statement that Barack Obama can be president — that race and an exotic name should not keep one from the presidency. That’s a great instinct. But what of human dignity? And isn’t it patronizing to hold Barack Obama up as a great civil-rights leader just because he is black? What about the children who will never be born because of legal abortion? What about the black children who are killed at even higher rates by this “medical procedure”? And we haven’t even talked about school choice yet, the civil-rights movement of our day, on which issue Barack Obama sides with the old guard opposing the freedom to choose.

Yeah, no kidding.