Obamas Pay Grade - Road to the Middle Class

OUR LIBERAL friends do a pretty good job obfuscating the line between law and morality when they oppose “legislating morality.” And they talk a good line about the separation of church and state. As if. As if faith and law and morality can be safely separated into neat little boxes.

So when Pastor Rick Warren questioned Sen. Barack Obama (D-IL) on abortion at his Saddleback Civil Forum he carefully played the liberal game, asking Sen. Obama:

I know this is a very complex issue. 40 million abortions. At what point does a baby get human rights in your view?

Warren is asking where the secular law steps in and says, OK, at this point the right to choose is trumped by the right to life and now the state will protect this person’s life and will sanction anyone who interferes with its right to life.

This is a difficult question for a liberal to answer. I’ve asked it of liberal women in the past, and they really can’t deal with it. That’s because the liberal line on abortion carefully avoids confronting the issue. There aren’t any liberal sound bites available to help them out.

Sen. Obama is a presidential candidate, so he knows how to duck.

Well, I think that whether you are looking at it from a theological perspective or a scientific perspective, answering that question with specificity, you know, is above my pay grade. But let me just speak more generally about the issue of abortion because this is something obviously the country wrestles with.

Pretty neat, eh? He’s not prepared to deal with the issue in the way that Warren frames it, and the only way that a pastor can frame it without falling into the traps that liberals have set up regarding the separation of church and state.

Notice the Ali Shuffle. He is not being asked for a theological perspective or a scientific perspective. He is being asked a political question. Where would you as president come down on this? Where would you draw the line?

Obama’s evasion illustrates why the recent pro-life activism recently has been about drawing the line in law. Born Alive Act? Partial Birth Abortion Act? Is it ok to kill the baby just before it’s born? Just after? We keep asking: where would you draw the line, liberals? And they don’t like it.

In my view there are two issues here. There is the legal line: cross that and you break the law. But the more important one is the moral line. We are going to have abortion, and there will be abortions on the legal side of the line. But such abortion should be safe, legal, and shameful. To coin a phrase.

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Christopher Chantrill blogs at www.roadtothemiddleclass.com. His Road to the Middle Class is forthcoming.

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Chappies

“But I saw a man yesterday who knows a fellow who had it from a chappie that said that Urquhart had been dipping himself a bit recklessly off the deep end.” —Freddy Arbuthnot
Dorothy L. Sayers, Strong Poison

Civil Society

“Civil Society”—a complex welter of intermediate institutions, including businesses, voluntary associations, educational institutions, clubs, unions, media, charities, and churches—builds, in turn, on the family, the primary instrument by which people are socialized into their culture and given the skills that allow them to live in broader society and through which the values and knowledge of that society are transmitted across the generations.
Francis Fukuyama, Trust

Hugo on Genius

“Tear down theory, poetic systems� No more rules, no more models� Genius conjures up rather than learns� ” —Victor Hugo
C�sar Gra�a, Bohemian versus Bourgeois

Education

“We have met with families in which for weeks together, not an article of sustenance but potatoes had been used; yet for every child the hard-earned sum was provided to send them to school.”
E. G. West, Education and the State

Faith & Purpose

“When we began first to preach these things, the people appeared as awakened from the sleep of ages—they seemed to see for the first time that they were responsible beings...”
Finke, Stark, The Churching of America, 1776-1990

Conversion

“When we received Christ,” Phil added, “all of a sudden we now had a rule book to go by, and when we had problems the preacher was right there to give us the answers.”
James M. Ault, Jr., Spirit and Flesh

Postmodernism

A writer who says that there are no truths, or that all truth is ’merely relative’, is asking you not to believe him. So don’t.
Roger Scruton, Modern Philosophy

Faith and Politics

As far as the Catholic Church is concerned, the principal focus of her interventions in the public arena is the protection and promotion of the dignity of the person, and she is thereby consciously drawing particular attention to principles which are not negotiable... [1.] protection of life in all its stages, from the first moment of conception until natural death; [2.] recognition and promotion of the natural structure of the family... [3.] the protection of the right of parents to educate their children.
Pope Benedict XVI, Speech to European Peoples Party, 2006

China and Christianity

At first, we thought [the power of the West] was because you had more powerful guns than we had. Then we thought it was because you had the best political system. Next we focused on your economic system. But in the past twenty years, we have realized that the heart of your culture is your religion: Christianity.
David Aikman, Jesus in Beijing

Religion, Property, and Family

But the only religions that have survived are those which support property and the family. Thus the outlook for communism, which is both anti-property and anti-family, (and also anti-religion), is not promising.
F.A. Hayek, The Fatal Conceit

Conservatism

Conservatism is the philosophy of society. Its ethic is fraternity and its characteristic is authority — the non-coercive social persuasion which operates in a family or a community. It says ‘we should...’.
Danny Kruger, On Fraternity

US Life in 1842

Families helped each other putting up homes and barns. Together, they built churches, schools, and common civic buildings. They collaborated to build roads and bridges. They took pride in being free persons, independent, and self-reliant; but the texture of their lives was cooperative and fraternal.
Michael Novak, The Spirit of Democratic Capitalism

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