When Senator Barack Obama addressed the question of human life and abortion back during the presidential primaries at the Compassion Forum in April, he said that there is “a moral dimension to abortion, which I think that all too often those of us who are pro-choice have not talked about or tried to tamp down.” Those Catholics who wanted to support the Obama candidacy viewed this language in hopeful terms as signaling a new openness to the message of life, in contrast with the rigidly pro-abortion substance and style of past Democratic presidential campaigns. Please be assured, we were told, despite his unwavering pro-choice record as a state legislator and United States Senator, Obama was not your typical abortion rights extremist. He is someone who will not ignore or despise our witness for life.
During the past week, however, three episodes have unfolded that have begun to clear the air on the sanctity of human life question, as well as cast a more penetrating light on Senator Obama’s commitment to unfettered abortion rights and his genuine attitude toward the pro-life movement. When Obama is pulled away from the glittering generalities of his campaign for “change” and his studied rhetoric in large public forums, he inadvertently may have shown a disdain for the pro-life movement and a lack of candor about his own public record on abortion. Most importantly, we have learned that when Obama was in a position of power and making official decisions, well before he had moved into campaign mode, he had gravitated toward the most extreme position on abortion.
First, over this past weekend, the presumptive presidential nominees appeared right after one another on the same stage at the Saddleback Church Forum. In that exchange, we saw the clearest of differences between the candidates on the question of human rights for infants and abortion.
Senator McCain was direct, did not waffle, and made no attempt to play both sides of the fence. When asked “at what point is a baby entitled to human rights,” McCain said forthrightly “at the moment of conception.” McCain pointed to his pro-life voting record and concluded: “And as President of the United States, I will be a pro life president and this presidency will have pro life policies. That’s my commitment. That’s my commitment to you.” As moderator Rick Warren aptly responded, “Okay, we don’t have to go longer on that one.”
By contrast, Obama responded to the same question by saying that “one thing that I’m absolutely convinced of is there is a moral and ethical content to this issue. So I think that anybody who tries to deny the moral difficulties and gravity of the abortion issue I think is not paying attention.” Obama had said almost exactly the same thing back in April at the Compassion Forum. In the ensuing months has there really been anyone who has publicly tried “to deny the moral difficulties and gravity of the abortion issue?” (Even NARAL and Planned Parenthood have been pulled back publicly on this point.) To whom is Obama supposed to be responding? What is this statement supposed to mean? What difference would it make in the policy-making councils of an Obama administration? Any hint by this language that Obama is genuinely open to the witness for unborn human life was negated only seconds later when Obama proclaimed “I am pro-choice” and “I believe in Roe v. Wade.”
Most troubling was the manner in which Obama began his answer at the Saddleback Forum. The question encompassed not only abortion but was framed as when “does a baby get human rights?” On this pretty simple question about when the newest members of our society are to be treated as human beings and entitled to human rights, Obama could only offer that “answering that question with specificity, you know, is above my pay grade.” What! The man who asks us to trust him with the highest political job in the world cannot give us a straightforward answer to the question of when “a baby gets human rights”! And if he truly is unable to answer the question, shouldn't he logically be doing everything he can to extend full protection to those babies both born and unborn so that we do not commit the atrocity of deliberately taking an innocent human life?
When Obama made a nearly identical nod to the “moral dimension to abortion” at the Compassion Forum back in April, I offered the following comment here at Mirror of Justice: “Given Obama’s unwillingness to affirm that human life is literally at stake, the nature of this ‘moral dimension’ was less than clear. Beyond words, what exactly does this recognition of a moral element mean to someone like Obama who is asking to lead our nation? Is there any evidence that this ‘moral dimension’ to abortion or this ‘moral weight’ to ‘potential life’ has any consequence for Obama’s approach to public policy on the question?”
The next episode followed soon after the first, when Senator Obama was interviewed right after the Saddleback Forum by the Christian Broadcasting Network (the full interview on video is available on the CBN web site). During the interview, Senator Obama let slip the mask of congenial respect for his opponents on the abortion issue and blasted pro-life groups for supposedly “lying” about his abortion record: “They have not been telling the truth. And I hate to say that people are lying, but here’s a situation where folks are lying.” Obama was addressing nagging questions about his startling opposition as an Illinois state senator to the Born Alive Infant Protection Act, which was designed to ensure medical treatment to babies who survived an abortion procedure. As he repeated again in this interview, Obama now claims he would have fully supported the federal version of this law and that he only opposed the state version because “what that bill also was doing was trying to undermine Roe vs. Wade.” For anyone to say otherwise, Obama insisted this week, “it defies common sense and it defies imagination, and for people to keep on pushing this is offensive.”
Yes, it does indeed defy common sense and defy the imagination that Senator Obama would take such an extreme position. But, once the public record of his legislative actions was unearthed, it turns out this is just what he did. As the New York Sun put it by way of considerable under-statement (here), rather than the pro-life movement having “lied” about Obama’s legislative record, Obama was the one who, well, “appeared to misstate his position” in the interview. Facts are stubborn things, as John Adams said.
Which brings us to the third episode, which in turn takes us back in time several years to an incident that became the subject of focused attention this week. This episode is the most revealing and consequential of all. Rather than having to parse his words, we see how Obama makes an actual decision about human rights for the most vulnerable. We have an opportunity to look at his attitude about the sanctity of human life from a time before he was appealing to a wider audience while campaigning for the presidency. In 2003, then-state senator Obama took a more extreme position on abortion than any member of the United States Congress and surpassed even the National Abortion Rights Action League in his promotion of abortion rights. The United States Congress unanimously approved the federal Born Alive Infant Protection Act. Even such pro-choice Senators as Kerry, Clinton, and Boxer cast “yes” votes on this legislation. But when the same legislation came before the Illinois legislature, Obama used his position as chair of a committee to kill it.
Confronted with that outrageous conduct, Obama has repeatedly insisted that he would happily have supported the federal version. He swears that he only opposed the state version because it did not contain a clause stating that it would not overturn existing abortion access laws. And for that reason, Obama says, the pro-life movement is “lying” about his record.
Unfortunately for Obama, the 2003 legislative records have been unearthed and tell a very different story. Multiple versions of the Born Alive Infant Protection legislation came up for consideration before the state legislative subcommittee that Obama chaired. One of those versions was identical to the federal version, containing the very clause that Obama now says would have secured his satisfied approval. And Obama still voted against it as a state senator. (The state bill that was identical to the federal version and which Obama still opposed is available here.)
On the campaign trail, Obama likes to say that “words matter.” But deeds matter even more. For an eyewitness account of Senator Obama’s repeated efforts to defeat the state legislation to protect babies born alive during an abortion, juxtaposed with Obama’s unsettling endorsement of the abortion rights industry at a live appearance before Planned Parenthood, I refer you to a video viewed hundreds of thousands of times at YouTube.
Greg Sisk
Tuesday, August 5, 2008
In reporting the plan of several law professor organizations to boycott the Association of American Law Schools annual meeting if held in the San Diego hotel owned by a contributor to the California campaign against same-sex marriage, Tom Berg says that we ought to regard the protest/boycott as "legitimate."
If by "legitimate," Tom means legally protected, then by all means, definitely yes. The government should not interfere with the choice by consumers singly or organized (and I would argue many service providers as well) not to patronize (or serve) those whose actions or positions they find offensive. But if by "legitimate," Tom means that this is a laudatory development or one arguably in keeping with the nature of all of the entities that are behind the boycott plan, then I think we should say, definitely no.
Most of the law professor organizations that are involved in this boycott campaign—the Legal Writing Institute, the AALS Section on Legal Writing Research and Reasoning, and the AALS Section on Teaching—are scholarly and academic organizations, not political lobbies. These entities should have no political platform by which to guide their actions. Since when has the Legal Writing Institute or the AALS or any of its subunits been permitted to adopt political resolutions? Does this now mean that a member of the Legal Writing Institute or these AALS sections who is opposed to same-sex marriage is no longer a member in good standing? Does this mean that a member of these entities who dissents from the new official position in favor of same-sex marriage would be well-advised to remain silent or even resign? Should a scholarly organization committed to legal writing or teaching excellence be identified as a political lobbying entity and one that takes a particular stand on a disputed issue? Again, the answer should be definitely no.
When the American Political Science Association (APSA) was recently considering whether to move a future annual meeting from New Orleans, the advocates of relocation were careful to frame their argument in terms of the alleged concrete harms that gay and lesbian political scientists might experience when visiting a state that not only rejected same-sex marriage but also prohibited any legal recognition of same-sex couples comparable to marriage. The debate focused on whether there was a real risk that the legal regime in Louisiana would prevent a gay person's partner from participating in health decisions should that gay person be hospitalized during the annual meeting. Ultimately, the executive board of the APSA concluded that the risk was not substantial enough to justify moving the meeting, to which gay rights groups and others within the APSA have responded with a boycott.
However, during the APSA debate, it was always common ground that political viewpoints alone were not a "legitimate" basis for the APSA as a scholarly organization to make decisions about siting a meeting. No one contended that the APSA should take a stand for or against same-sex marriage. To contend otherwise would have been to corrupt the nature of a scholarly organization, which should be committed to the open exchange of ideas, into that of a political pressure group with a distinct political viewpoint. Not only would such a step have contradicted the very nature of a general scholarly organization and compromised academic freedom, it also would have created inappropriate political conflict among the members.
The boycott of AALS meeting events now proposed by these law professor entities has taken the very step that the APSA wisely understood was never a "legitimate" option for any entity that calls itself a scholarly association and claims to represent an entire field of scholarly study. As I understand it, no one is suggesting that gay and lesbian law professors will be endangered, denied service, or mistreated in any way at this San Diego hotel. The boycott is crudely political, nothing less. It is based solely on the illegitimate and non-scholarly endorsement of one side of an election referendum, which then is advanced by an attempt to preclude any association with those who take the other side of that election contest. Such an openly political gambit, on an election matter no less, is unworthy of a scholarly association. By so corrupting a scholarly association, academic freedom for all law professors is diminished. This is a sad day indeed for the AALS.
(By contrast, the Society of American Law Teachers (SALT) is an openly political organization, not a general scholarly association, and thus its threat of a boycott poses less of a contradiction to its nature. Nonetheless, by taking the unwise step of urging the AALS to become politicized and act in conformity with a particular political stance on a controverted election, SALT improperly seeks to enmesh a scholarly association in a political controversy. As Susan Stabile inquires in her post, SALT's action arguably also undermines freedom of expression for controversial viewpoints, which from time to time SALT has suggested is part of its mission. We apparently may expect SALT in the future to adopt political litmus tests for hotel owners, vendors, etc., which it then will demand be honored by the AALS at the risk of a political boycott.)
Greg Sisk
Susan Stabile kindly responds to my post documenting the massive size of current government programs and the enormous expenditures on social programs already in place. She challenges the significance or meaning of some of the data that I provided and concludes that they fail to demonstrate a "serious commitment to the human flourishing of the poorest."
While the Hodge chart that I included in my prior post does include government pensions in the description of skyrocketing social spending (as compared with defense spending) over the past 60 years, I carefully separated out government pensions when noting that the categories of welfare, health care, and education spending by government constitute 40 percent of overall government spending and some 15 percent of our entire national economy. Now even if we were to assume that only half of health care spending by government and only one quarter of education spending by the government provides benefits to the poor, with all spending on welfare obviously being directed to poverty programs, government spending on programs for the poor in 2007 exceeded $1 trillion. If a trillion dollars of government spending on poverty programs, not even accounting for the many more tens of billions contributed by Americans each year to charities that serve the disadvantaged, does not demonstrate a "serious commitment to the human flourishing of the poorest," then apparently the sky really is the only limit.
I also offer this further defense of the reliability of the data that I provided: As evidence that the figures supposedly are hard to pin down, Susan says that Census Bureau statistics indicate that defense spending in 2007 was 20 percent of government outlays rather than the 13 percent figure that I used. In fact, the figures on government spending are readily available in some detail in Census Bureau statistics. The 20 percent figure that Susan identified is the share of defense spending as a part of the federal government budget viewed in isolation. As I'd noted in my post, and as the heading in the pertinent chart confirms, I was presenting the figures for government spending at all levels: federal, state, and local. The federal government is not the centerpoint for all governmental activity and programs in this country. State and local spending on poverty programs and education is considerable and should not be neglected. Defense spending indeed is only 13.4 percent of overall government spending and less than 5 percent of GDP, a level of defense spending that is lower today than before the Clinton Administration and much lower than it has been at many periods during the past half-century. And while defense spending as a share of GDP has been stable or declining, social spending as a share of GDP has nearly doubled in the past 40 years.
I stand by my earlier observation that those who advocate more government spending, new government poverty programs, and higher taxes to pay for it all have a great burden in proving that government consumption of more than a third of economic production in this country and government exaction of the product of nearly a third of our work lives to pay the taxes is negligible and insufficient.
Greg Sisk
Monday, August 4, 2008
From the way our friends on the leftward side of our Catholic academic community here on the Mirror of Justice sometimes talk about government social programs and spending on the poor in this society, a person understandably might be left with the impression that we live in a libertarian regime in which the capitalist market distributes all income, government is small and starved for resources, taxes are low, and the disadvantaged are utterly neglected. Thus, Eduardo Penalver laments in a recent post that “a serious governmental commitment to human development among the poorest Americans” has never been manifested in the United States, “at least not during [his] lifetime.”
I want to suggest that the dollar-and-cents reality is something quite different. We can debate whether an even larger government presence and more government spending, accompanied by higher taxes, higher compliance costs, and more draws against economic productivity, is a good thing or not. But we should not be unaware of the enormous level of government expenditures already in place, among which social spending is by far the largest segment. We should also debate whether a state-centric approach to social justice is a good thing, either in material or spiritual terms. But only by appreciating the real-world economic realities can we fairly evaluate the remaining differences among us.
During fiscal year 2007, the total amount of government spending at all levels was $4.9 trillion. To place this in perspective, based on a Gross Domestic Product of $13.67 trillion, government spending consumed 35.9 percent of our economic production as a nation. The following table was helpfully compiled from Census Bureau statistics by usgovernmentspending.com:
To see the same figures stated as percentages by category of overall government spending and in the form of a pie-chart:
Of that government spending, social spending constituted some 55.8 percent of total spending, totaling more than $2.88 trillion. Defining social welfare spending more narrowly to include only welfare, health care, and education, these spending categories add up to more than 40 percent of overall government spending and some 15 percent of our entire economic output. (And this social spending figure dwarfs the expenditures on national defense, which now stands at 13.4 percent of government outlays and less than 5 percent of GDP.)
Far from there being an absence of a serious government commitment to the poor during our lifetime, the trend in government spending during my lifetime at least has been nothing less than dramatic. Looking only at the federal budget, which significantly understates the total government spending on social programs, Michael Hodges on his web page documents how the percentage of the federal budget devoted to defense has plummeted while social spending has skyrocketed:
Nor should we look only to the government spending side and ignore the source of those revenues―the burden on the taxpayer. As calculated by the Tax Foundation from Bureau of Economic Analysis data, the average American spends nearly a third of each year working simply to earn enough to pay various local, state, and federal taxes:
Now I understand that some of our friends on the Mirror of Justice would like to see these numbers go higher, both in spending and taxes (and the two of course move together). They envision a still larger role for government in moving our society toward social justice. (And if Barack Obama does become President, as he at least appears to presume, we undoubtedly will see just such a major expansion of government.) But we should never pretend that government is not already a monumental presence in our lives, that government does not already expend gigantic sums of money, that the government does not already consume a huge segment of our national economy, and that we are not already paying a hefty part of our incomes in taxes.
Greg Sisk
