Elizabeth Lev on Obama’s Speech at Notre Dame

For a final post-script on the President’s speech at Notre Dame, I would encourage everyone to read Elizabeth Lev’s article, Obama Is No Uncle Tom, available here.  She contrasts the simple but profound moral convictions of the main character from Harriet Beecher Stowe’s famous novel with the President’s very different moral and political commitments.  She also comments on the de facto racial-genocidal effect of Planned Parenthood choosing to “serve” predominantly African-American neighborhoods, and on Obama’s misuse of Cardinal Bernadin’s “consistent ethic of life.”

 

For those of you unfamiliar with the author, Lev is a writer and art historian who lives and teaches in Rome.  She is also the daughter of Notre Dame’s original choice for the Laetare Medal this year.  Here is a sample from her powerful essay:

 

 

Obama, more than most, benefitted from the uncompromising and unbending principles of civil rights activists (considered by many to be "fanatics") determined to change the status quo and to end an age where blacks were considered second-class citizens. Yet he now turns a blind eye to the new class of the voiceless oppressed, the unborn. In all the gruesome tales Stowe recounts of masters' cruelty to slaves, nothing exceeds the horror of piercing an innocent child's head with scissors as it exits the womb. And yet this real-life horror story is not only tolerated, but promoted by Obama and his principal collaborators, in particular Kathleen Sebelius, his bizarre choice to head the Department of Health and Human Services.

 

 

Where is the Martin Luther King of the unborn? Where is the Rosa Parks? The Frederick Douglas? Unborn children have even less of a voice than the downtrodden, barely literate slaves of Stowe's novel. It has fallen to the heirs of the abolitionists and of the civil rights activists to speak for the voiceless unborn. Yet in his unctuous Notre Dame address, Obama chose to uphold the iniquitous status quo, rather than join those prophetic voices.

 

 

Recall his words, "I do not suggest the debate surrounding abortion can or should go away...the fact is that at some level, the views of the two camps are irreconcilable." Substitute the word "abortion" with "slavery" and think what would have happened had Abraham Lincoln taken this line.

 

 

As an African-American woman -- from Chicago no less -- I wanted to be delighted by the election of Barack Obama.  But his disregard for both unborn human lives as well as of those who would try to protect them renders him more similar to enablers of slavery than to the noble men and women in Stowe's story.  This paradoxical behavior darkens what should have been one of the greatest moments in history. 

 

 

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As a single parent who had her first child in economic hardship, ignoring constant unsolicited advice from everyone but my family to abort my child, I found resources in myself I never knew were there. I find no comfort in Obama's words about support for single mothers, since his practical actions have only been to unabashedly aid and abet abortion and its promoters, both on U.S. soil and now abroad.

 

 

I strongly encourage everyone to read the whole thing.