Obama at Notre Dame

....."As I considered the controversy surrounding my visit here, I was reminded of an encounter I had during my Senate campaign, one that I describe in a book I wrote called The Audacity of Hope. A few days after I won the Democratic nomination, I received an email from a doctor who told me that while he voted for me in the primary, he had a serious concern that might prevent him from voting for me in the general election. He described himself as a Christian who was strongly pro-life, but that's not what was preventing him from voting for me.


What bothered the doctor was an entry that my campaign staff had posted on my website - an entry that said I would fight "right-wing ideologues who want to take away a woman's right to choose." The doctor said that he had assumed I was a reasonable person, but that if I truly believed that every pro-life individual was simply an ideologue who wanted to inflict suffering on women, then I was not very reasonable. He wrote, "I do not ask at this point that you oppose abortion, only that you speak about this issue in fair-minded words."


Fair-minded words.


After I read the doctor's letter, I wrote back to him and thanked him. I didn't change my position, but I did tell my staff to change the words on my website. And I said a prayer that night that I might extend the same presumption of good faith to others that the doctor had extended to me. Because when we do that - when we open our hearts and our minds to those who may not think like we do or believe what we do - that's when we discover at least the possibility of common ground.


That's when we begin to say, "Maybe we won't agree on abortion, but we can still agree that this is a heart-wrenching decision for any woman to make, with both moral and spiritual dimensions.

So let's work together to reduce the number of women seeking abortions by reducing unintended pregnancies, and making adoption more available, and providing care and support for women who do carry their child to term. Let's honor the conscience of those who disagree with abortion, and draft a sensible conscience clause, and make sure that all of our health care policies are grounded in clear ethics and sound science, as well as respect for the equality of women."


Understand - I do not suggest that the debate surrounding abortion can or should go away. No matter how much we may want to fudge it - indeed, while we know that the views of most Americans on the subject are complex and even contradictory - the fact is that at some level, the views of the two camps are irreconcilable. Each side will continue to make its case to the public with passion and conviction. But surely we can do so without reducing those with differing views to caricature.


Open hearts. Open minds. Fair-minded words.".....

-President Barack Obama at Notre Dame University


The above is an excerpt from President Obama's speech at Notre Dame, in which he addressed the issue that caused so much controversy over his visit to the Catholic campus-abortion. I had not paid a lot of attention to the issue since I am not Catholic. Whether the university invited the President to speak and exercise his free speech rights in an institution that is firmly anti-abortion seemed to be a Catholic issue to me.

But I am also against abortion unless the life of the mother is at stake or in case of rape (and even in rape, it seems to me that immediate adoption is the preferable choice.) For years, I had opined that the argument seemed to belong to the two extremes, with no middle ground having a voice. I thought that perhaps, abortion might be ok if we were just talking about a clump of cells or something that could be circumvented by a morning-after drug. However, the more thought I have given it, the more I have come to the conclusion that there is no middle ground between life and death.

I have written on the abortion issue before, so I won't repeat the same arguments here. I want to address President Obama's words at Notre Dame.

In essence, he said nothing.

"Open hearts, open minds, fair-minded words"

Nothing.

The bottom line is that Obama is pro-choice. That includes partial-birth abortion. It also includes the deliberate infanticide of a baby that survives the abortion process and is living outside the womb. That allows the doctor to put the baby in a closet somewhere and allow it to die-if that is the mother's wish. Obama has actually voted to allow such a procedure. So what he is saying is that we can all agree to disagree-but abortion will continue. Adios.

This leaves Notre Dame and the Catholic Church asking itself; what is it that they believe? How far are they willing to go to stand up for that belief? To be frank, they got themselves into this pickle when they made the invitation-which they never had to do. After that, they had to deal with the furor, in which there was no way to win. Cancel the invitation and face charges of censorship of opinion and expression. As it was, they offended those in their church who take the abortion issue seriously.

With all due respect, Notre Dame did not handle this wisely.