Episcopalian friends of mine pointed out George Will's column last Sunday addressing the growing crisis in the U.S. Episcopal Church and the worldwide Anglican communion. The crisis runs much deeper, they assure me, than the ordination of Gene Robinson as as bishop in 2003. Paraphrasing Pittsburgh's bishop, Will states that "[t]he Episcopal Church's leadership is latitudinarian - tolerant to the point of incoherence --- about clergy who deviate from traditional church teachings concerning such core doctrines as the divinity of Christ, the authority of scripture and the path to salvation." This is also the perspective of my Episcopalian friends. One friend told me that the type of views espoused by former bishop Shelby Spong are now the norm among the church leadership.
From what I can see, this crisis has generated a real crisis of faith among some ordinary Episcopalians attempting to live out their lives as followers of Christ. As I sit in my office with a portrait of Thomas More watching over me as I type these words, it is hard for me - I confess - to feel too bad about the implosion of the Anglican/Episcopalian Church. And, that is why it is so important for me to see and remember the true suffering that occurs in these times.
As I pray with Jesus (John 17: 20-21) for the unity of all believers, I pray especially this day for all who suffer a crisis of faith because of their church leaders' own crisis of faith.
Memphis Bishop calls upon Catholics to avoid 'one issue' votes By THOMAS C. FOX
TENNESSEE BISHOP RECEIVES AWARD AT NCEA CONVENTION IN ATLANTA: Bishop
J. Terry Steib of Memphis, Tenn., receives award at the National
Catholic Educational Association convention. The award is presented to
someone who has supported Catholic education on a national level. Memphis
Bishop J. Terry Steib this week called upon Catholics to avoid being
one issue voters. He asked them to follow their consciences and weigh
all the moral issues they face before casting their ballots.
“We must recognize,” he wrote, “that God through the Church, is
calling us to be prophetic in our own day. If our conscience is well
formed, then we will make the right choices about candidates who may
not support the Church's position in every case.”
Citing words from a statement, “Forming Consciences for Faithful
Citizenship,” a voting guide issued last November by the Bishops of the
United States, Steib wrote that "there may be times when a Catholic who
rejects a candidate's unacceptable position may decide to vote for that
candidate for other morally grave reasons. Voting in this way would be
permissible only for truly grave moral reasons, not to advance narrow
interests or partisan preferences or to ignore a fundamental moral
evil."
“A person might choose not to vote, but voting is a necessary part
of our witness to Jesus Christ and a witness to our Baptism. So,
sometimes hard choices will have to be made.”
Steib wrote that within the past few weeks some denominations have
taken on the task of challenging the policy of the IRS concerning the
Church and politics and that they were deliberately endorsing
candidates and urging people in their congregations to vote for those
persons in order to force the IRS to determine if the current policy of
forbidding such endorsements is proper.
He said he disagreed with the approach because of his “deep respect”
to the non-establishment clause in the First Amendment to the
Constitution.
He wrote that some Catholics have been asking their bishops to endorse candidates.
Continuing he wrote that he has been among those bishops who have
received letters from “well-meaning people” telling me for whom I
should vote and how I should inform parishioners regarding the
candidates for whom they should or should not cast their ballot.”
He wrote “it is not my duty nor is it my role to tell the members of
the community of faith in the Diocese of Memphis how to vote.”
Rather he felt the need, he wrote, to proclaim the truth of Jesus
Christ as announced in Scripture and articulated by the Church.”
“Politics,” Steib wrote, “is not just a game; it is instead a part
of the commonwealth of our lives. Just as we cannot avoid drinking
water in order to live, so also, as faithful Christians we cannot avoid
being involved in the political process and remain good Christians. But
if we are to be involved in the political process by voting, then we
must have formed our consciences well.”
He called upon Catholics to be prudent when they form their
consciences. “Prudence is not easy to define, but according to the
Catechism of the Catholic Church, prudence helps us to ‘discern our
true good in every circumstance and to choose the right means of
achieving it.’"
He posed the question facing many Catholics, asking what is a voter
to do when presented with candidates whose views do not reflect the
full teachings of the Church.
To help answer the question he quoted the spiritual writer, Father Ronald Rolheiser who wrote the following in his book Secularity and the Gospel:
“In an age of increasing violence, fundamentalism, and the myth that
God wishes to cleanse the planet of its sin and immorality by force,
perhaps the first witness we must give to our world is a witness to
God's non-violence, a witness to the God revealed by Jesus Christ who
opposes violence of all kinds, from war, to revenge, to capital
punishment, to abortion, to euthanasia, to the attempt to use force to
bring about justice and God's will in any way."
Steib wrote that he understood Rolheiser to be saying Catholics cannot be one issue people.
In a similar light, in an interview this week, Gabino Zavala, an
auxiliary bishop in the Los Angeles Archdiocese, said his fellow
bishops have long insisted that "we're not a one-issue church," a view
reflected in their 2007 document "Forming Consciences for Faithful
Citizenship."
"But that's not always what comes out," said Zavala in the Los Angeles Times,
who is also bishop-president of the Catholic peace group Pax Christi
USA. "What I believe, and what the church teaches, is that one abortion
is too many. That's why I believe abortion is so important. But in
light of this, there are many other issues we need to bring up, other
issues we should consider, other issues that touch the reality of our
lives."
Steib and Zavala’s remarks come in the wake of a number of U.S.
Catholic bishops who in one manner or another have called upon
Catholics to vote to oppose any candidate that does not support an
effort to overturn Roe v. Wade, the U.S. Supreme Court ruling legalizing abortion in the United States.
The most recent in a string of such bishops are Denver Archbishop Charles Chaput and Kansas City-St. Joseph Bishop Robert Finn.
Chaput recently labeled Barack Obama as “the most committed”
abortion-rights candidate from a major party in 35 years. Emphasizing
he was speaking as a private citizen and not as a representative of the
Denver archdiocese, Chaput made the case it is immoral to vote for
Obama.
Chaput had already said that Obama running mate Joe Biden, a
Catholic, should not present himself for Communion because of his
abortion rights position.
Similarly, Finn wrote last week in his diocesan paper that
'pro-choice' candidates are "inviting Catholics to put aside their
conscience on this life and death issue." He added: “They want us to
deny our conscience and ignore their callous disregard for the most
vulnerable human life."
And earlier this month, Bishop Joseph Martino of the Scranton (Pa.)
Diocese issued a letter warning that "being 'right' on taxes,
education, health care, immigration, and the economy fails to make up
for the error of disregarding the value of a human life." He added: "It
is a tragic irony that 'pro-choice' candidates have come to support
homicide — the gravest injustice a society can tolerate — in the name
of 'social justice.' "
In her Americaarticle, Professor Cathleen Kaveny argues that characterization of a particular matter as representing an intrinsic evil offers little assistance to faithful Catholic voters in evaluating the positions of political candidates on such issues as abortion. Once the concept of intrinsic evil is properly understood as a technical theological term focused upon the objectively disordered nature of the act, Professor Kaveny explains that classifying an act as intrinsically evil tells us little about the magnitude of that evil. (Our Mirror of Justice colleague, Michael Perry, has posted excerpts of her article here. Peter Nixon had previously made similar remarks on the Commonwealsite.) At the end of her America article, Professor Kaveny concludes: “For many pro-life Catholics, the issue of voting and abortion comes down to this: what does one do if one thinks that the candidate more likely to reduce the actual incidence of abortion is also the one more committed to keeping it legal? The language of intrinsic evil does not help us here.”
Professor Kaveny’s article is interesting and thought-provoking as a dissertation on the theological origins of the concept of intrinsic evil and how to think critically about the comparative wrongness of immoral acts. I appreciate her contribution to our better understanding of Catholic moral teaching. I take to heart her encouragement of more careful use of terms in debate about matters of public moment from the perspective of Catholic teaching. Nonetheless, I did not find Professor Kaveny’s article to be directly responsive to the arguments of Church leaders and other prominent Catholics about the public policy implications of the Church’s consistent and emphatic teaching about the human rights of the unborn. Moreover, even taking the article on its own terms and adhering to a technical understanding, I suggest the full import of the concept of intrinsic evil in public discourse may warrant further development when we encounter political platforms and candidates who re-define acts of evil as a matter of free choice and a constitutional right.
At the recommendation of a priest friend, my wife and I went to see the movie "Fireproof" today. Although it doesn't have all of the technical excellence of the typical Hollywood fare, it was exceptionally well made for a low budget film (according to Box Office Mojo, it was made for $500,000 and has earned $20 million). More importantly, the story will be familiar to anyone who has experienced or witnessed the emptiness of a marriage grown cold, the stranglehold of addiction, or the temptation of wandering eyes. The movie shows the growth of a firefighter as the lessons of the firehouse - "never leave your partner behind" - are applied to his broken marriage.
In their Newsweek response to George Weigel's recent article (which has been discussed here at MOJ), Nicholas Cafardi et al. make what they take to be the "Catholic case" for Obama. [Insert here my standard skepticism about this "case".] They conclude with this:
Weigel may also wish to engage in a theoretical debate about hypothetical public support for the funding of abortion, and whether that results in improper moral complicity with an evil act. That is a worthy seminar topic, but we recommend he start by asking the same question of himself in terms of coerced taxpayer support for an unjust and unjustifiable war in Iraq costing over $10 billion a month and thousands of Iraqi and American lives, which Weigel aided and abetted with his vocal support, contrary to the express prayers of the Holy Father he called "a witness to hope."
Now, to be fair, Weigel opened to door to this conclusion with his own conclusion (though not with the content of his main arguments). He wrote:
And should an Obama administration reintroduce large-scale federal funding of abortion, the bishops will have to confront a grave moral question they have managed to avoid for decades, thanks to the Hyde amendment: does the payment of federal taxes that go to support abortion constitute a form of moral complicity in an "intrinsic evil"? And if so, what should the conscientious Catholic citizen do?
I'm not sure what the conscientious Catholic should do. And, I'm happy to leave, for now, the "complicity" question to the "seminar" mentioned by Cafardi. But, as has now been true -- frustratingly so -- of Doug Kmiec and others who share his (current) view for months, the Cafardi response fails utterly to engage the not-at-all seminar-ish argument that Weigel actually emphasized, namely, that it is hard to take seriously the "pro-lifers should vote for Obama because he supports social-welfare policies that -- we hope! -- will result in fewer abortions" argument when those making the argument refuse, again and again, to acknowledge the fact that -- taxpayers' consciences aside -- Sen. Obama supports (and will certainly be able to enact) policies that are *at least* as likely to dramatically increase the number of abortions as his social-welfare proposals (which, let's be clear, the present economic situation will make it difficult to enact) are to reduce them. Indeed, even if the later proposals *are* successful, there is no reason for someone who actually takes the time to consider the consequences of FOCA, the repeal of the Hyde Amendment, the repeal of the Mexico City policy, etc. to think that they will dis-incentivize more abortions than these latter measures will encourage.
If Sen. Obama is elected, it will be a dramatic (and, I fear, permanent) setback for the anti-abortion cause, and not only in the Supreme Court (though it will, of course, be a set-back there, too.) In saying this, I am not denying that there are plenty of ways to reduce the number of abortions. (The problem is, there are ways to increase the number, too . . . and public funding of abortions in developing nations would seem to be one of them.) I wish "Democrats for Life" all the best, and hope that -- someday -- Sen. Obama actually signs onto their agenda. Perhaps it will bring about some progress in other areas of interest to faithful Catholics. I hope so. But, let's be clear-eyed and candid about the thing.
I've always said here at MOJ that I understand full well that many faithful Catholics will conclude that, all things considered, it's better to vote for the pro-abortion-rights Democrat. But, I think these faithful Catholics should not dodge the implications of Sen. Obama's election (the same is true, of course, of faithful Catholics who vote for pro-life Republicans whose views on some other serious matters might be flawed.) If one is clear-eyed and candid, one will not rest one's arguments on statements like "focusing on courts and Justices has brought us nothing" (it has), "there's no hope for overturning Roe" (there is, some, though there would be more if faithful Catholics would stop voting for pro-abortion-rights Senators), "overturning Roe would not, in the end, actually reduce abortion" (it would reduce, even if it would not end, abortions), and "respect for religious freedom requires us to accept a pro-abortion-rights legal regime" (it doesn't).
Amy Sullivan is the author of "The Party Faithful," in which she contends that the Democrats are shrinking the "God gap." We'll see. In any event, in thisTime magazine piece -- yet another exploration of the "divisions" among Catholics on abortion -- she writes, "[i]n a hierarchical tradition like Catholicism, debates don't happen very often." Good Lord. What a silly thing to say.
Doug Kmiec, Cathy Kaveny, and Nick Cafardi make some good arguments for voting for a Democrat who actually helps women choose life as opposed to a Republican who pays only lip-service to the pro-life cause (even though lip-service from a bully pulpit counts for a lot). As a life-long Democrat, a passive member of Democrats for Life, and an active member of Consistent Life [formerly “Seamless Garment Network”], I would be quite open to such an argument.
But that argument would be valid only if we had candidates like Jimmy Carter running against pitiless Republicans.
By contrast, Obama has refused to endorse our modest Democrats for Life proposal to help women choose life. Far worse, he has said that his first act in office will be to sign the Freedom of Choice Act. FOCA will hurt women as well as children, especially because it will eliminate state laws that discourage overly hasty abortion decisions.
Why don’t Doug and his friends ever respond fully to the FOCA question raised by Weigel and George? (I call Doug “Doug” because he was my colleague here in Valparaiso for two years or so, during which, by the way, I don’t recall him ever hinting that he agreed with my pro-life stance. I was pleasantly surprised to hear of his views later on.)
More generally, they don’t seem to take seriously Cardinal George’s statement that “children continue to be killed [by abortion], and we live therefore, in a country drenched in blood. This can't be something you start playing pragmatically against other issues.”
My suspicion is that all three of them –and indeed John McCain as well—have failed to grasp the fundamental pro-life argument for human equality. That is, they must somehow imagine incorrectly that the unborn child is being constructed in the womb, and therefore acquires a human nature only gradually. My critique of this common “constructionist” conception of gestation, and explicitly of John McCain, and my presentation of the more correct “developmental” view can be found in my list of articles on the Mirror of Justice website, or just by clicking here: http://mirrorofjustice.blogs.com/mirrorofjustice/stith/constructiondevelopmentandrevelopment.pdf
Why the faithful can in good conscience back the Democrat
By Nicholas P. Cafardi, M. Cathleen Kaveny and Douglas W. Kmiec
This article is a rebuttal to a previously published essay by George Weigel arguing that Barack Obama's views on abortion are fundamentally at odds with Catholic doctrine. To read the original article, click here.
George
Weigel and his fellow McCain advisers are growing frustrated at the
state of the campaign, and they should be. This election rightly
continues to focus on the millions of Americans at risk of losing their
jobs and their homes. The issue of abortion, of course, is tied to the
nation's economic fortunes. In part, we endorsed Senator Obama because
his tax-reduction plan focuses on the betterment of average families
and those living at the margins. Center for Disease Control statistics
reveal that prosperity directly affects the abortion rate far more
significantly than Republican rhetoric pledging to outlaw abortion—a
feat John McCain has failed to accomplish with nearly three decades in
Congress.
Mr. Weigel predicts that the emergence of
serious pro-life Catholics supporting Obama in this election portends
"a new hardening of the battle lines. Not on our part. To us, endorsing
Barack Obama was not only about who would make the best president, but
also about erasing many of these old battle lines, which, frankly, have
been drawn on the wrong battlefield and have served no one
well—especially women and the unborn, to say nothing of our political
discourse.
In the closing weeks of this election,
abortion is among the crucial issues for Catholic voters, but promoting
a culture of life is necessarily interconnected with a family wage,
universal health care and, yes, better parenting and education of our
youth. This greater appreciation for the totality of Catholic teaching
is at the very heart of the Obama campaign; it is scarcely a McCain
footnote.
In a perfect world, the pro-life
argumentation of George Weigel is unassailable. He counsels having
constitutional law align absolutely with the defense of innocent human
life; to which we say, "Amen." The problem for Weigel is that even our
collective "Amen" will not make it so. In the meantime, millions of
children are being aborted.
Mr. Weigel is an
intellectual and for him it's a simple matter of accessing the
objective truth of the human person as explicated in Catholic natural
law and saying, "Follow me." For 35 years, however, pro-lifers have
followed that intellectual siren call, asking the Supreme Court on
multiple occasions to reverse Roe v. Wade. We have no
objection to pursuing this legal avenue, which does not depend on who
occupies the White House—though we have no illusions about it, either.
The legal path has not worked to date, and it may never work.
The
church asks its faithful to find meaningful—not hypothetical—ways to
promote human life. While getting the law and philosophy right might
eventually do that, it does bring up the question: What are you doing
for the cause of life now? The McCain answer: not much.
Besides
being prepared to nominate justices like Samuel Alito and John Roberts,
who in keeping with their judicial oath are certainly not on record as
having a predetermined view on the reversal of Roe, McCain's
planning has all the narrow, in-built affluent bias of the
near-identical Bush ideas. In terms of health care, McCain makes no
provision for the uninsured and proposes that the insured pay more, in
all likelihood dumping people into a private insurance market that is
more expensive and less responsive to those with pre-existing
conditions.
By contrast, Obama does make provision for
universal health care and recognizes abortion for what it is: a tragic
moral choice often confronted by a woman in adverse economic and social
circumstances (without spouse, without steady income, without
employment prospects, and a particularly stigmatic and cumbersome
adoption procedure). Obama proposes to reduce the incidence of abortion
by helping pregnant women overcome the ill effects of poverty that
block a choice of life. A range of new studies–using U.S. rather than
Swedish data–affirm this approach.
We're happy to
continue to debate abortion, but the well-worn battlefield Mr. Weigel
occupies should not distract voters from tangible policies that would
actually reduce abortions. Before unwarranted Republican indenture,
Catholic thinking gave proportionate consideration to how well a
candidate addressed such important matters as a just economy, a living
or family wage, access to health care, stewardship of the environment,
fair treatment of immigrants and, not to be overlooked, the just or
unjust conduct of a war. This is basic Catholic social teaching. It
also just happens to be Barack Obama's policy agenda.
Is
Obama the perfect pro-life candidate? No. Is he preferable to the
self-proclaimed "pro-lifer" McCain? Yes, because promoting life in
actuality beats McCain's label and all of Weigel's elegant theorizing
and hand-wringing. The Republican alternative familiar to Weigel is
simultaneously self-righteous, easy and ineffective. The Democratic
path is practical, anything but easy—as no act of bona fide love of
neighbor ever is—but inviting of a life-affirming outcome.
Weigel
may also wish to stay tied up in knots over the fitness of Catholic
politicians to receive holy communion, rather than practically asking
how to be of help to a woman facing an unwanted pregnancy. But as we
read the American bishops, they have invited Catholic officeholders to
promote life as much as is politically possible (never conceding any
life as expendable). The notion of using the sacrament as a political
tool we find divisive, deeply offensive and contrary to the Gospel.
Weigel
may also wish to engage in a theoretical debate about hypothetical
public support for the funding of abortion, and whether that results in
improper moral complicity with an evil act. That is a worthy seminar
topic, but we recommend he start by asking the same question of himself
in terms of coerced taxpayer support for an unjust and unjustifiable
war in Iraq costing over $10 billion a month and thousands of Iraqi and
American lives, which Weigel aided and abetted with his vocal support,
contrary to the express prayers of the Holy Father he called "a witness
to hope."
There is no more audacious embrace of hope than faith-based action that honors all of life.
Here's Archbishop Chaput, at the Public Discourse not-quite-a-blog. There's a lot in the piece, and there's no point in just cut-and-pasting it here. This jumped out at me, though:
None of the Catholic arguments advanced in favor of Senator Obama are new. They've been around, in one form or another, for more than 25 years. All of them seek to ''get beyond'' abortion, or economically reduce the number of abortions, or create a better society where abortion won't be necessary. All of them involve a misuse of the seamless garment imagery in Catholic social teaching. And all of them, in practice, seek to contextualize, demote and then counterbalance the evil of abortion with other important but less foundational social issues.
This is a great sadness. As Chicago's Cardinal Francis George said recently, too many Americans have ''no recognition of the fact that children continue to be killed [by abortion], and we live therefore, in a country drenched in blood. This can't be something you start playing off pragmatically against other issues.''
Speaking of "being around for years", Doug Kmiec's latest, in the L.A. Times, seems, at the end of the day, to endorse the old "personally opposed but . . . " argument from Gov. Cuomo's Notre Dame speech. He writes:
Sometimes the law must simply leave space for the exercise of individual judgment, because our religious or scientific differences of opinion are for the moment too profound to be bridged collectively. When these differences are great and persistent, as they unfortunately have been on abortion, the common political ideal may consist only of that space. This does not, of course, leave the right to life undecided or unprotected. Nor for that matter does the reservation of space for individual determination usurp for Caesar the things that are God’s, or vice versa. Rather, it allows this sensitive moral decision to depend on religious freedom and the voice of God as articulated in each individual’s voluntary embrace of one of many faiths.
This is not the pro-life view. Nor, until a few months ago, would Doug Kmiec have regarded this as the pro-life view. It is emphatically not the case - at least, it is not the case for those who hold the views that Prof. Kmiec always professed to hold — that the regulation of abortion involves a burden on the religious freedom of those who do not believe that unborn children are entitled, as a matter of human rights, the protection of the law. To protect unborn children is to vindicate human-rights commitments. It is not to impose sectarian morality on non-adherents. (Remember, Doug Kmiec professes to believe that the Constitution requires governments to ban abortion. It doesn't, but that's not the issue. Can it be that the Constitution requires a ban *and* that "the law must simply leave space for the exercise of individual judgment"?)
In a previous post, I discussed at some length the question of eduational policy and reform, which I described as the most neglected issue in the current presidential campaign. And yet access to quality education is vital as a powerful engine for economic progress, especially among the poor, and probably ranks as the government benefit of greatest importance to most American families.
In the last presidential debate, we heard more than previously on education from the candidates in their most prominent appearances before the American public. As the Chronicle of Higher Education says, “[i]n the last question in the last of three presidential debates, John McCain and Barack Obama fielded their first, and only, question in these forums that focused squarely on education policy.” (A full transcript of the third and last debate may be found here; you can scroll to the end for the education discussion.) In general, the candidates’ remarks fit comfortably into the categories that I had outlined in my earlier post.
Despite portraying himself as the candidate of change, Senator Obama largely adhered to longstanding liberal preferences and to the platform of the teachers’ unions by offering to spend more federal money on education. Although he said in passing that both more money and reform were needed, he proceeded to ignore reform and speak only about spending programs, such as for expanded pre-kindergarten programs and increased pay to teachers. Obama seemed not to appreciate the irony of his litany of spending proposals in light of the question that had been posed by moderator Bob Schieffer. Schieffer had highlighted that the United States already spends more money per capita on education than any other nation, but with much less in educational achievement to show for it.
Senator Obama concluded his initial remarks on education by urging parents to take greater responsibility by turning off the television and taking away video games and working to “instill[] that thirst for knowledge that our students need.” Obama did not, however, offer any hope or choice for those kids “thirsting for knowledge” who arrive at failing public schools in places like the District of Columbia or Cleveland, where record-setting public funding rates has led to little improvement in the quality of public education.
Senator McCain then characterized education as the “civil rights issue of the 21st century.” Lauding the achievements of the civil rights struggle for “equal access to schools in America,” McCain then asked the pertinent question for today: “But what is the advantage in a low income area of sending a child to a failed school and that being your only choice?” More pointedly and personally, McCain argued that “we have to be able to give parents the same choice, frankly, that Sen. Obama and Mrs. Obama had and Cindy and I had to send our kids to the school—their kids to the school of their choice.”
In response, Senator Obama pointed to charter schools and said that he agrees it is “important to foster competition inside the public schools” (emphasis added). However, returning to his strong opposition to vouchers for poor families who wish to choose private educational opportunities, Obama said that he disagreed with McCain “on the idea that we can somehow give out vouchers—give vouchers as a way of securing the problems in our education system.”
The two candidates sparred over their contrasting positions on the current voucher program for the District of Columbia school system, which is the only public school system that falls directly under federal control. Senator McCain touted his support for that program, noting that 9,000 families had applied for only 1,000 vouchers and arguing that choice opportunities should be increased. Senator Obama insisted that the data doesn’t support vouchers as the answer and noted that a program for vouchers in the District of Columbia doesn’t address educational policy in the remaining 50 states. As the moderator sought to cut off the discussion, McCain tried to insert a rebuttal that the D.C. voucher program was working as well as could be expected but that the number of vouchers allowed remained too small to offer meaningful alternatives to failing schools in the district.
Earlier, Senator Obama had also addressed the question of the federal role in education. While saying that “we have a tradition of local control of the schools and that's a tradition that has served us well,” he nonetheless insisted “that it is important for the federal government to step up and help local school districts do some of the things they need to do.” He criticized the “No Child Left Behind” program for imposing burdens on local schools without providing greater federal funding to assist in meeting those higher standards. Interestingly, when referring critically to the problem of “unfunded mandates,” Senator Obama’s solution was not to reduce federal mandates but rather to increase federal spending to support such mandates. As an example he spoke about what “happened with special education where we did the right thing by saying every school should provide education to kids with special needs, but we never followed through on the promise of funding, and that left local school districts very cash-strapped.” Thus, Obama is favorably disposed to federal regulation of education, within limits, provided that increased federal spending accompanies that regulation.
As had been much anticipated, the controversial subject of Senator Obama’s past associations with radical and former domestic terrorist Bill Ayers was raised during the debate. But overlooked was the specific educational character of some of the foundation work on which Obama and Ayers participated together and what those educational initiatives might reveal about Obama’s attitude toward and competence of his approach to education.
As discussed in my earlier post, Obama’s only prior executive experience—and one of the few matters of substance on which he has an actual record in public service—consists of his prominent role as the leader of the Chicago Annenberg Challenge in the 1990s. This was a well-funded effort, supported by the political and social establishment in Chicago, to bring about reform and improvement in public education. The picture that emerges from the Chicago Annenberg Challenge is not a pretty one. Even acknowledging that many mainstream projects were included within this well-funded program, Obama nonetheless also agreed to subordinate some substantive math and science educational proposals in favor of diverting funding to Ayers’s questionable initiatives to politicize public education and radicalize public school children. More importantly, the overall effort was a depressing failure. As reported by a comprehensize evaluation of the program (here), after spending $100 million on public school enhancement, the Obama-chaired Chicago Annenberg Challenge failed to bring about any significant progress on student educational achievement, student academic engagement, or student social competence.
Despite this disastrous and textbook example of the futility of simply throwing money at public education, while tracking the nostrums of the liberal education establishment, Obama’s present educational proposals as a candidate suggest that he learned nothing of substance from this sobering experience. Under an Obama Administration, the future of educational quality and equal access does not look bright.
