[UPDATE: As I hope those who read Doug Kmiec's piece can readily see, I didn't mean "responds to Robby George" literally. Indeed, Doug wrote his piece before he could possibly have seen the comments Robby sent me for posting. It would be very interesting to read a (literal) response by Doug to Robby, on the precise issues Robby addresses in his post. With Robby's help, I will encourage Doug to provide such a response.]
Robby George criticized Barack Obama in the message I posted here this morning. For a rather different view of Obama, by Doug Kmiec, famously Catholic law professor at Pepperdine, former dean of the Catholic University School of Law, and, not least, a Republican who served under Presidents Reagan and George H. W. Bush, keep reading. (Thanks to MOJ reader Ronald Volkmer, at Creighton, for sending me this.)
A Prayer From Barack
Obama
Douglas W. Kmiec
03-03-2008
In the Feb. 26 Democratic debate, Tim
Russert asked Sen. Barack Obama what he thought of minister Louis Farrakhan’s
endorsement of him. Obama said he denounced it, which was good enough for
everybody but Sen. Hillary Clinton, who demanded that Obama also reject it.
Obama, with bemused annoyance, complied, but I thought, uh-oh, here we go, will
Republicans dissatisfied with their default nominee be the next potential votes
denounced and rejected? Russert didn’t ask, and Obama said he welcomed support
from a wide range of people including Republicans and independents. What a
relief!
In an essay for Slate magazine (“Reaganites for Obama?” Feb.
13), I suggested that two groups I know well — Reaganites and Catholics — might
be happier with Barack Obama than Sen. John McCain. The essay stirred up a
ruckus among my former Reagan administration colleagues (who thought I was
abusing some substance, like a few other Malibuites who succumbed to their “last
temptations” in recent years) and in church communities across the country
(which just said they would pray for me).
My reasons for writing so
provocatively were a combination of skepticism toward McCain (full disclosure: I
was a legal adviser to Mitt Romney, so skepticism came naturally) and a
fascination with Obama. Unless you gave up TV for the duration of the writers’
strike or something shorter, such as Lent, the Ronald Reagan comparison is
obvious. Obama’s eloquence and inspiration is inescapable.
The Catholic
doubts about McCain are more subtle, but my point — which actually has
implications for many faiths — is that signing on to the McCain campaign by
default slights a large body of religious teaching in opposition to Iraq and
strongly in favor of immigrants, the environment, and the family wage. So with
the innocence of someone who teaches Sunday school in a laid-back beach
community, I suggested that believers had a moral obligation to inquire further.
SOMETHING DEEPER
The suggestion gathered some support, but also abundant
amounts of personal vilification insinuating that I had sold my soul for a
prospective Supreme Court appointment in an Obama administration (which has the
entire People for the American Way in stitches) or damning me for eternity.
Ordinarily this would not prompt me to write more, but now that the epithets
have temporarily subsided (Muqtada al-Sadr’s cease-fire or perhaps the surge is
working), herewith a few additional thoughts in mitigation (or aggravation as
the case may be).
Well before Obama entered the national consciousness
by means of presidential primary, he addressed what he called “the mutual
suspicion that sometimes exists between religious America and secular America.”
In a speech entitled “Call to Renewal,” given in Washington in the summer of
2006 (at a poverty conference of the same name), Obama noted that during his
Senate campaign, he was challenged on his abortion views. Obama gave the
standard liberal response: It is impermissible to impose his religious views
upon another. He was running for “U.S. senator of Illinois and not the minister
of Illinois,” he quipped. Had Obama left it at that, he could easily be written
off by conservatives as just another secular, anti-religious, and, likely,
big-government liberal.
But the insufficiency of that answer nagged at
him. He realized — and this epiphany explains his successful campaign, I believe
— that the greatest division in America today is “not between men and women, or
those who reside in so-called red states and those who reside in blue, but
between those who attend church regularly and those who don’t.” He also
recognized that some conservative leaders “exploit this gap” by reminding
evangelical Christians how much Democrats disrespect their values and dislike
their church.
Truth hurts, but, of course, pointing fingers at Pat
Robertson or Karl Rove would still not have merited positive conservative or
Catholic notice — if Obama hadn’t kept talking. He didn’t just criticize those
on the right who used religion as a wedge issue; he directed a healthy amount of
criticism at his own party. Democrats, he said, avoid engaging the substance of
religious values by falsely claiming the Constitution bars the subject. Even
worse, some far-left liberals paint religious Americans as “fanatical,” rather
than as people of faith. Now that got my attention.
Here was a Democrat
who got it. Indeed, why say “Democrat”? Here was a public figure who actually
understood that, for millions of Americans, faith “speaks to a hunger that’s
deeper than... any particular issue or cause” — his words, lest Hillary and the
copyright police get on my case.
Obama reflected on how neither of his
parents were actively religious, and yet he found himself drawn to the church.
He could engage in community organizing for the poor, but without faith he would
always remain “apart and alone.” Faith did not mean no doubt, said Obama, but it
did mean hearing God’s spirit beckoning. After joining an African-American
church, he found himself employing the language of faith—well, OK, maybe he did
hear it first from Deval Patrick—and ever since his work has been electrified.
Xeroxed or not, those references to Abraham Lincoln’s Second Inaugural Address
and “the judgments of the Lord” or Dr. Martin Luther King Jr.’s embrace of “all
of God’s children” inspire and call upon our better selves.
SINGING TO THE CHOIR
Obama is frequently chastised these days by Mrs. C for
being all words and no substance (or something about hats and cattle that is
funny only in Texas), but that criticism is falling flat. Much earlier, Obama
himself noted that there is nothing more transparent than “inauthentic
expressions of faith.” Showing that occasional dry wit, he likened it to
politicians who “come and clap — off rhythm — to the choir.” So while the number
of recent primaries won by Clinton can be counted on one hand clapping, Obama
receives thunderous applause whenever he challenges secularism and those who
would urge that religion be banished from the public square. Calling as his
faith witnesses Lincoln, King, Frederick Douglass, and Dorothy Day, Obama tells
his audiences that it is an “absurdity” to insist that morality be kept separate
from public policy.
Having urged liberals to see how much of American
life is grounded in the Judeo-Christian tradition, Obama does have a request for
conservatives — namely, try to fully understand the liberal perspective on the
separation of church and state. Not the infamous “wall of separation” that
bizarrely mandates affirmative secularity disguised as neutrality, but the
perspective, according to Obama, that separation more readily protects church
from state than the opposite.
This sentiment, unlike the exclusionary
view invented by the late Justice Hugo Black in the late 1940s, is as old and
wise as Alexis de Tocqueville, who cautioned churches against aligning too
closely with the state for fear of sacrificing “the future for the present.” “By
gaining a power to which it has no claim,” Tocqueville observed, “[the church]
risks its legitimate authority.”
There is nothing in that assessment of
church-state separation objectionable to conservatives. Indeed, Obama’s thoughts
could have been seamlessly added to Romney’s “Faith in America” speech without
changing its meaning.
LIFE AND
DIGNITY
Nevertheless, part of Obama’s
message remains difficult for conservatives, especially Catholics. Committed to
the protection of human life in the womb, Catholics are urged (some of my
critics say “mandated,” but with respect, they are mistaken) to vote only for
candidates who oppose abortion. In truth — and here let me quote the bishops
directly so they can share in the mail — “a Catholic cannot vote for a candidate
who takes a position in favor of an intrinsic evil, such as abortion or racism,
if the voter’s intent is to support that position.” But voters should not use a
candidate’s opposition to abortion “to justify indifference or inattentiveness
to other important moral issues involving human life and dignity” — such as,
say, the invasion of a foreign nation leading to the sacrifice of the lives of
our own troops and of thousands of others.
A digression? I don’t think
so, but here’s the question: Does Obama’s thoughtful appreciation of faith mean
that he would work toward the protection of life in all contexts even if that
protection cannot be achieved in a single step?
I’m inclined to think
so, though it’s at this juncture that large numbers of my Republican friends
will say, “Kmiec, get real, just think who Obama will appoint to the Supreme
Court?” That suggests at least two things: First, they really weren’t at all
serious about my prospects for the top bench, and second, isn’t it time for both
sides to stop treating the Court like a political sinecure?
Chief
Justice John Roberts Jr. has done an able job of lowering the Court’s profile.
Even when the Roberts Court takes on big issues—such as “partial-birth” abortion
and racial tie-breakers—it has knack of writing small, preferring the “as
applied” to the “facial” challenge. With that condo in Florida and his active
tennis game, there’s no reason to think Justice John Paul Stevens won’t reach a
Biblical age, and hey, if he hangs on long enough, maybe both sides will have
decided so many jurisdictional, tax, and sentencing guideline cases that they
won’t remember the Court’s previous, more activist history.
NOT EASY FOR ANYBODY
OK, that was a digression. Returning to religious
conservatives, like me, who have faith-related, ethical concerns, Obama argues
that there must be, in this life, a distinction between the uncompromising
commitments that religion calls us to make and the public policy that we can
realistically expect. This is a dose of political pragmatism, and reasonable on
virtually any issue not involving a grave moral evil. It’s not an easy answer.
But frankly, that’s a problem not just for Obama, but for all of us. As he
writes, “I may be opposed to abortion for religious reasons, but if I seek to
pass a law banning the practice, I cannot simply point to the teachings of my
church or evoke God’s will. I have to explain why abortion violates some
principle that is accessible to people of all faiths, including those with no
faith at all.”
To his credit, Obama neither offers up a glib,
unsatisfying solution nor reverts to the standard liberal line that objective
moral values have no place in the public discussion. Our problems are not mere
technical dilemmas “in search of the perfect 10-point plan. They are rooted in
both societal indifference and individual callousness — in the imperfections of
man.”
If liberals and conservatives would stop shouting at each other
(and most especially at me), more people might see abortion as a product of
societal indifference and individual callousness: the former exemplified by
economic conditions ranging from inadequate wages to evictions traceable to the
subprime fraud; the latter typified by a self-centeredness that sees children as
competitors or enemies to personal fulfillment. A person who understands the
significance of faith as well as Obama does is likely to have a better chance of
understanding and addressing both causes. Why? Because when the seemingly
insoluble intrudes upon life as it inevitably does, the religious person has the
humility to pray. Obama concluded his own religious reflections a few years back
with what he described as “a prayer I still say for America today.” The prayer?
That despite our profound disagreements, “we can live with one another in a way
that reconciles the beliefs of each with the good of all.”
This is as
much a Catholic prayer as a Jewish or Protestant or Mormon or Muslim one, which
is why barring the completely unexpected, Barack Obama will be the next
president of the United States — with or without my vote.
