Catholics, Obama and Abortion

Some good posts today from around the 'net ...

• Roman Catholics for Obama '08: Some ignore his pro-abortion voting record, others rationalize it, by Paul Kengor. Catholic World Report June 2008:

  Obama was not a member of the US Senate at the time that the Born Alive Infants Protection Act passed unanimously through both chambers of Congress. But he was a member of the Illinois state legislature, where similar legislation was introduced at the state level. There, Obama twice voted against the legislation, in 2002 and 2003, and as chair of the Health and Human Services Committee blocked another attempt to bring the legislation to the floor of the Illinois Senate.
  

  The pro-life community in the state of Illinois was aghast, and pro-life Catholics were horrified. Yet today Catholics around the country are lining up to endorse Barack Obama’s candidacy for president of the United States. They are stumping hard for Obama, who, if elected, has promised to do whatever he can to appoint justices and support legislation guaranteeing decades of protection for Roe v. Wade.
  

  [...]
  

  There is a psychological-emotional attraction to Obama that goes beyond the traditional reasons explaining why people, Catholics included, support certain candidates. What’s more, the Roman Catholics in Obama’s camp are largely typical of the religious left generally and left-leaning Catholics specifically who identify with and support a liberal Democrat for president. The abortion issue simply loses out to a wider swath of “social justice” issues that for them take precedence.
  

  The Church continues to exhort Catholics to reject this moral equivalency in their voting, but Obama’s Catholic supporters don’t care, and from this atmosphere of dissent Obama hopes to ride a wave of millions of Catholic votes all the way to the White House.

  
  
• Rationalizing Evil, by Paul Zummo (Cranky Conservative. June 2, 2008):

  Catholics who support Obama have simply made a choice that other issues are of more importance than abortion. A handful have plainly said so, but others pretend - like Kmiec - that somehow Obama is really not so bad. In fact, Obama will do more to ameliorate the situation than his would-be Fall opponent. Whatever.
  

  Of course people are free to decide as they choose, but I just wish more people would simply say that “the war is more important to me” or something of that nature than to simply pretend that Obama’s position on abortion is anything but morally repugnant. ...
  

  In the final analysis, I have come to believe that a vote for Obama comes as close to the line of being completely unacceptable from a Catholic point-of-view as is possible without going over it. In fact, it may be completely over that line. That is not to say that one is therefore obliged to vote for McCain, but I just do not see how a Catholic in good conscience can vote for a man so completely devoted to upholding the greatest evil of our day.

  
  
• Choosing Among Evils, by Scott Carson (Examine Life June 2, 2008):

  Herein, I think, lies the difference between the Kmiecs of the world, and those Catholics for whom life issues are more coherently understood. If there was a man running for president who knew full well that there were whole populations of "real people" being intentionally killed--let's say, for example, that there is some backwards county in northwestern Idaho where they are rounding up blacks and shooting them--if there were such a man running for president who said that he thought such activities ought to have the support of the law, then I imagine that even Doug Kmiec would say that he couldn't find it in his heart to vote for him. And yet that is exactly what Barack Obama, and others who support abortion rights, do say, though they do not say it knowingly. Of course Barack Obama does not believe that abortion is the moral equivalent of racial genocide, because of course he would fully oppose it if he did view it that way. So Barack Obama at least has the excuse of ignorance; what is Doug Kmiec's excuse, if he really believes what he says he believes about abortion? Can it be any more obvious that he does not believe what he says he believes about abortion? He does not think what the Catholic Church thinks, at any rate, that is, he does not think that human lives equal in value to his own are being intentionally taken every day, or he would be far more outraged than he is at the moral sloppiness of the Barack Obamas of the world who fail to understand what it is they are defending, just as any rational person would be outraged at a racist who defended himself by saying that he just doesn't think other races are equal to his own. I'm sure that Barack Obama is a nice man who is very sincere and who really wants to do good things, but even if I found his other ideas politically acceptable, I could no more vote for a person who favors abortion rights than I could vote for a person who is openly and viciously racist. Such a person is morally crippled and does not have a healthy understanding of the foundations of morality. Such a person, no matter how "nice" they may appear, no matter how well intentioned, cannot be trusted to make sound policy decisions.