With Good Reason What We've Learned

May 6, 2009

 As only Mark Steyn could put it, "we're still in the first 100 days of the joyous observances of Barack Obama's first 100 days, and many weeks of celebration lie ahead."  And how.

The inane swells of euphoria notwithstanding, one has to admit that those first 100 days have been very revealing:   we have a President who knows that crisis -- especially an economic one -- is too good a thing to waste; we have a president who, as a person, is vastly more popular than his policies; we have a president who, as Steyn puts it, "has the knack of appearing moderate while acting radical, which is a lethal skill."

It is in light of these features of the Obama psyche that pro-lifers must continue to gauge the president's continued assault on human life, and especially his attitude toward the Freedom of Choice Act (FOCA). 

First introduced in 1989, FOCA is likely the most radical legislative proposal on abortion that has been proposed at the federal level.  It is a piece of legislation designed "to prohibit, consistent with Roe v. Wade, the interference by the government with a woman's right to choose to bear a child or terminate a pregnancy, and for other purposes." In fact, FOCA, if it became law, would go well beyond Roe, sweeping away all limits on abortion, state and federal, including restrictions on government funding of abortion and conscience protections for healthcare providers.

In its most recent form, the bill declares that women have a "fundamental right" to abortion, and prohibits the government -- at any level -- from regulating abortion (such prohibition applies retroactively). The most recent version of the Freedom of Choice Act was introduced in the last Congress by Barbara Boxer in the Senate (S. 1173) and Jerrold Nadler in the House (H.R.1964), and like predecessor bills, it never made it to either floor for a vote.  Although candidate Obama promised Planned Parenthood (as shown in this video) that "the first thing I'd do, as president, is sign the Freedom of Choice Act," the bill has not been introduced in this Congress.   But as recently reported, Obama has pushed back on the urgency of passing FOCA. "The Freedom of Choice Act is not my highest legislative priority," stated the President at the end of April. "The most important thing we can do is to tamp down some of the anger surrounding the issue to focus on those areas we can agree on."

Dialogue. Accommodation. Common ground. Reasonableness. Obama believes he is about all that and wants us to believe it too.

But none of us should.

Obama has mastered the art of concealing a strident pursuit of his aggressive anti-life agenda under the guise of debonair disdain for conflict and feigned confusion over all the fuss emerging from Catholic quarters.

What most strikes me about the first 100 days of the Obama phenomenon is how he has come to incarnate in the popular American psyche the fulfillment of the longed-for secular messiah. It's the Age of Aquarius redux. Obama stands in that liberal American psyche as the great emancipator of foregone conservative foibles and moral scruples, poised to institutionalize all the dogmas of the new secular orthodoxy.  Consequently, he has unceremoniously imparted what he and his adorers believe will be a final coup de grace for many a conservative folly: reversal of the Mexico City Policy, his executive order suspending the Bush administration policy on the federal funding of embryonic stem cell research, his move to rescind the "conscience clause" regulations put in place by President Bush, and the list goes on.

And given the apparent shallowness of his own religious experience, he is the icon of all religious indifferentists, of those "spiritual but not religious" souls, of the devotees of nice McNihilism.  

All of which -- to end on a positive note -- brings to mind the delightful evening I shared last Monday night at a bar in midtown Manhattan with a wall-to-wall crowd of Catholics attending a 'Theology on Tap' session with Archbishop Charles Chaput of Denver.

The advent of Obama and the preeminence of the new secular orthodoxy exert a pervasive pressure on committed Christians and Catholics especially to succumb to what Archbishop Chaput called "the double life rule." By that the Archbishop meant the unabashed inconsistency between "personal values" and what one lives and condones in public moral behavior.  And it's the polar opposite of the kind of double-life inconsistency found in the Phariseeism condemned by Jesus in the Gospels.  The Pharisees of Jesus' time flaunted their external religious observance while concealing their inner vices -- "white washed tombs" was Christ's metaphor of preference.  Today, we witness a phenomenon that the late Msgr. Bill Smith was wont to call "Pharisees in reverse," that is, living (or at least not publicly condemning or opposing) a life of politically correct and culturally attuned vice while keeping religious creed and social mores intensely "private."

And "a privatized, part-time Christianity is absurd," his Excellency insisted.

Yes, absurd.  And in the age of Obama, fatal for America and for our two-century old experiment in ordered liberty.

***

 

While I'm at it...

*  Kudos to Mary Ann Glendon
Professor Glendon published an open letter to Notre Dame President Fr. Jenkins in which she explains why - in light of the fact that Notre Dame invited Barack Obama to give this year's commencement speech, and plans on granting him an honorary degree - she must decline Notre Dame's prestigious Laetare Medal and the honor of speaking at the commencement ceremony.  Professor Glendon's decision (the right one) received predictably minimal media coverage.  President Jenkins has now announced that, for the first time in 120 years, Notre Dame will not be awarding the Laetare Medal to anyone this year... See also this piece, which raises a very important question for Fr. Jenkins.

* Obama's first Supreme Court pick
The following are among the names being floated as possible Supreme Court nominees to fill Souter's seat: Elena Kagan, 49, the former dean of Harvard Law School who was confirmed as the nation's first female solicitor general on March 19; Diane Wood, 58, a federal appeals court judge; and Sonia Sotomayor, 54, also a federal appeals court judge. Wendy Long of the conservative Judicial Confirmation Network, writing in National Review Online last Friday, observed that these three most-mentioned potential nominees - Kagan, Wood, and Sotomayor - are all far-left "radicals."

"If Obama holds to his campaign promise to appoint a justice who rules based on her own 'deepest values' and what's in her own 'heart' - instead of what is in the Constitution and laws - he will be the first American President who has made lawlessness an explicit standard for Supreme Court justices," she says.

Obama offered only some brief considerations about the type of person he would nominate to serve on the country's highest court. While trying to give the semblance of opposing judicial activism, it's Obama's statement that he considers "empathy and understanding" as an "essential ingredient" for judicial decisions that is the tip-off that judicial activists are, indeed, most welcome.


* Morning After Pill for 17 year-olds
A federal judge recently mandated that the FDA must make Plan B available to anyone 17-years old and older without a prescription.  Last week, the agency announced that it would not appeal the judge's decision, and would allow the manufacturer to market the contraceptive drug to children as young as 17-years old, who can now obtain it over the counter.  Plan B is a serious drug, with serious side effects, designed to prevent pregnancy if taken within 72 hours of so-called "unprotected" sex.  There are a multitude of problems and issues involved with this drug, but this surprising CNN commentary touches on a few of the important social problems surrounding the decision to give 17-year old children unfettered access to Plan B (and that is any 17-year old, girl or boy).

 

 

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