Letter to Barack Obama

Dear Senator Obama,

I was going to write this as a post about you, and the coverage you’ve been receiving, about your political aspirations and beliefs, and some of the deeper questions they raise. But I decided to make it a letter to you. A letter is more personal, and I take personal resonsibility for my words and actions, as I believe you do.

So here’s what I was wondering. You were featured yesterday on the front page of the Chicago Tribune in that very large and respectful story titled “Inside Obama’s Inner Circle.” It represented you as a man who thinks deeply and consults with your trusted circle of friends and professional colleagues in engaging dialogue that shows commitment to great causes and faithfulness to each other.

Under the section subtitled “Exploring issues,” the Trib piece states that you rely on your advisers “as conversationalists who explore issues in depth.” And it quotes your friend and colleague Valerie Jarrett as saying this:

He rarely accepts anyone’s initial position without any push back. He consistenly probes deeper and deeper to make sure that you and he both have really thoroughly analyzed any given issue.

I believe that. So I have a question about it. Assuming that you have probed deeply to make sure you’ve thoroughly analyzed the issue of human rights at all stages of life, for each and every person, did you have any push back on the issue of abortion? Did you go past the rhetoric and emotions and look at facts and reason? Did you go past the academic arguments about ‘personhood,’ about a ‘fetus’ having no ‘intrinsic value’ until the age of conscience and reason? Did you consider that from the moment of conception (or fertilization), the life created is of the ‘species Homo sapiens’, which means ‘human life’?

I propose that you at least look at Professor Robert P. George’s book The Clash of Orthodoxies, which provides brilliant discourse from the argument of reason, leaving aside religious beliefs, to establish the clear inherent dignity of every human life. It notes that we are each “embodied persons and not persons who merely inhabit our bodies and and direct them as extrinsic instruments under our control, like automobiles.”

George says:

A comotose human being is a comotose person. The early embryo is a human being and, precisely as such, a person–the same person who will be an infant, a toddler, an adolescent, an adult. The genetically complete, distinct, dynamically unified, self-integrating human organism that we currently identify as, say, the sixty-three-year-old Father Richard John Neuhaus is the same organism, the same human being–the same person–who was once a twenty-eight-year-old civil rights and anti-war activist, a precocious sixteen-year-old high school student, a mischievous adolescent, a toddler, an infant, a fetus, an embryo.

The consistency of this reasoning is stark, isn’t it? Consistency is neccesary to arrive at the fullness of truth.

Although he has grown and changed in many ways, no change of nature (or “substance”) occurred as he matured–with his completeness, distinctness, unity, and identity fully intact–from the embryonic through the fetal, infant, child, and adolescent stages of his development, and finally into adulthood. He was a human being–a whole, living member of the species Homo sapiens–from the start. He did not become a human being sometime after he came to be; nor will he cease being a human being prior to his ceasing to be (i.e., his dying).

This, Senator, is following the intellectual argument through to its logical conclusion. This is the finest display of critical thinking skills in academia, and I would hope and expect, in politics as well. But it’s not out there much in either, which is why its so startling and clear when it is tried.

Dr. Martin Luther King was startling and clear in his appeals to reason when he so courageously fought for human rights for all persons. And Dr. King did include religious beliefs, invoking the name of the Lord in his exhortations. And when the above mentioned Richard John Neuhaus was a twenty-eight-year-old civil rights activist, he marched alongside Dr. King, who himself had been a high school student, an adolescent, a toddler, an infant, a fetus and an embryo. Where in there did he gain value, if it was not intrinsic?

Senator, though I believe you are familiar with the famous “I Have a Dream” speech, here’s the text in its entirety. Look at some of the ideas King addressed.

In a sense we have come to our nation’s capital to cash a check. When the architects of our republic wrote the magnificent words of the Constitution and the Declaration of Independence, they were signing a promissory note to which every American was to fall heir. This note was a promise that all men, yes, black men as well as white men, would be guaranteed the unalienable rights of life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness.

He said “all.” Do you think he meant only the born, and not the human as yet unborn? His struggle was not just about race, but ultimately human dignity.

Now is the time to rise from the dark and desolate valley of segregation to the sunlit path of racial justice. Now is the time to lift our nation from the quick sands of racial injustice to the solid rock of brotherhood. Now is the time to make justice a reality for all of God’s children.

Where, Senator, do you draw the line on “all of God’s children”?

I noticed that you were a hit today “at a Rainbow/Operation PUSH Coalition Breakfast honoring Martin Luther King Jr.”, according to today’s Tribune online. If you didn’t catch it, here’s what it said:

Obama received a standing ovation at the annual King scholarship breakfast when the Rev. Jesse Jackson introduced him with an approving reference to the Illinois Democrat’s presidential aspirations.

“It’s a long, nonstop line between the march in Selma in 1965 and the inauguration in Washington in 2009,” said Jackson, the coalition’s founder and a one-time presidential candidate himself.

Obama said thinking of the slain civil rights leader’s life was humbling, and added: “I’ve gotten a little attention lately, but the fact of the matter is all I do is stand on the shoulders of others.”

Those are big, broad shoulders Dr. King had, Senator, and they carried the burden of fighting for the rights of all human persons. Did you think about that? Because it’s clear you were thinking about his legacy.

“Whatever challenges we face are nothing like the challenges our parents and grandparents faced,” Obama said. “The torch has been passed to this generation, but we haven’t always taken it up. We haven’t pushed the boundaries of what is possible. We have much more work to do.”

We sure do.

Which means I’d better wrap up this long letter, and let both of us get back to it. But there’s one more thing I wondered. That Sunday Tribune article I mentioned earlier ended with some words of wisdom from your wife. It said “Michelle Obama doesn’t play a day-to-day role in her husband’s work,” but that she’s considered to be the “true north” on your compass.

“She always asks Barack, ‘What do you think is the right thing to do?'” said Jarrett. “‘Forget about what polls say. Do your homework. After you’ve done all the due diligence, what’s the right thing to do?'”

That’s the perfect question. So, Senator, after doing your homework on the most fundamental human right of all, the right to life, and the due diligence on its intrinsic value, what do you believe is the right thing to do?

Because without getting first things right, without protecting all human life, I believe it’s audacious to talk about hope.

 

Sincerely,

Sheila Liaugminas