Bill McGurn

June 2009

This article is an excerpt from a recent speech given by Bill McGurn to Notre Dame’s Center for Ethics and Culture

Good evening…

The precipitate cause of our gathering tonight is the honor and platform our university has extended to a President whose policies reflect clear convictions about unborn life, and about the value the law ought to place on protecting that life.  These convictions are not in doubt. In July 2007, the candidate spelled them out in a forceful address to a Planned Parenthood convention in our nation’s capital.

Before that audience, he declared that a woman’s “fundamental right” to an abortion was at stake in the coming election. He spoke about how he had “put Roe at the center” of his “lesson plan on reproductive freedom” when he was a professor—and how he would put it at the center of his agenda as president. He invoked his record in the Illinois state senate, where he fought restrictions on abortion, famously including one on partial-birth abortion. He said that the “first thing” he wanted to do as President was to “sign a Freedom of Choice Act.” And he ended by assuring his audience that “on this fundamental issue,” he, like they, would never yield.

So tonight our hearts carry a great sadness. But we do not come here this evening to rally against a speaker. We come to affirm the sacredness of life. And we come with a great hope: That a university founded under the patronage of Our Lady might be as consistent in the defense of her principles as the President of the United States has been for advancing his. In a nation wounded by Roe…in a society that sets mothers against the children they carry in their wombs…we come here tonight because however much our hearts ache, they tell us this: Our church, our country, and our culture long for the life witness of Notre Dame.

What does it mean to be a witness? To be a witness, an institution must order itself so that all who look upon it see a consonance between its most profound truths and its most public actions. For a Catholic university in the 21st century, this requires that those placed in her most critical leadership positions—on the faculty, in the administration, on the board of trustees—share that mission. We must concede there is no guarantee that the young men and women who come here to learn will assent to her witness—but we must never forget that the university will have failed them if they leave here without at least understanding it. That is what it means to be a witness….

For most of her life, Notre Dame has served as a symbol of a Catholic community struggling to find acceptance in America—and yearning to make our own contributions to this great experiment in ordered liberty.

If we are honest, however, we must admit that in many ways we—and the university that nurtured us—are now the rich and powerful and privileged ourselves. This is a form of success, and we need not be embarrassed by it. But we must be mindful of the greater responsibilities that come with this success.

For years this university has trumpeted her lay governance. So what does it say about the Notre Dame brand of leadership, that in the midst of a national debate over a decision that speaks to our Catholic identity, a debate in which thousands of people across the country are standing up to declare themselves “yea” or “nay,” our trustees and fellows—the men and women who bear ultimate responsibility for this decision—remain as silent as Trappist monks? At a time when we are told to “engage” and hold “dialogue,” their timidity thunders across this campus. And what will history say of our billions in endowment if the richest Catholic university America has ever known cannot find it within herself to mount a public and spirited defense of the most defenseless among us?

In the past few weeks, we have read more than once the suggestion that to oppose this year’s speaker and honorary degree is to elevate politics over the proper work of a university. In many ways, we might say that such reasoning lies at the core of the confusion. As has become clear with America’s debates over the destruction of embryos for scientific research, over human cloning, over assisted suicide, and over other end-of-life issues, abortion as a legal right is less a single issue than an entire ethic that serves as the foundation stone for the culture of death.

Twenty-five years ago, on a similar stage on this campus, the then-governor of New York used his Notre Dame platform to advance the “personally-opposed-but” defense that countless numbers of Catholic politicians have used to paper over their surrender to legalized abortion. Eight years after that, the school bestowed the Laetare Medal on a United States Senator who had likewise long since cut his conscience to fit the abortion fashion.

Today we have evolved. Let us note that the present controversy comes at a moment where the incoherence of the Catholic witness in American public life is on view at the highest levels of our government. Today we have a Catholic vice president, a Catholic Speaker of the House, a Catholic nominee for Secretary of Health and Human Services, and so on. These are America’s most prominent Catholics. And they have one thing in common: The assertion that the legal right to terminate a pregnancy—in the chilling euphemism of the day—must remain inviolable.

For those who think this a partisan point, let us stipulate for the record one of the curiosities of the Republican Party. Notwithstanding the party’s prolife credentials, at the level of possible Presidential contenders, the most prominent pro-choice voices in the GOP arguably belong to Catholics: from the former Republican mayor and governor of New York, to the Republican Governor of California, the Republican former governor of Pennsylvania, and so on. Notre Dame must recognize these realities—and the role she has played in bringing us to this day by treating abortion as a political difference rather than the intrinsic evil it is.

In his writings, Pope John Paul II noted the awful contradiction of our times, when more and more legal codes speak of human rights while making the freedom to deprive the innocent of their lives one of those rights. Several times he uses the word “sinister” to characterize the enshrinement of abortion as a legal right. And he states that all pleas for other important human rights are “false and illusory” if we do not defend with “maximum determination” the fundamental right to life upon which all other rights rest.

Maximum determination. Ladies and gentlemen, the unborn child’s right to life represents the defining civil rights issue of our day—and it ought to be a defining civil rights issue on this campus.

Those who say that as Notre Dame engages the world, she cannot expect her guests to share all her beliefs are right. But that is not the issue. The issue is that we engage them. Think of how we would have treated an elected Senator or President or Governor whose principles and actions were given over to seeing that segregation enjoyed the full and unqualified protection of American law.  We would have been cordial…we would have been gracious…we would have been more than willing to debate…but we would have betrayed our witness if ever we brought them here on the idea that all that divided us was one political issue….

…[I]magine the larger witness for life that would come from putting first things first. So often we find support for abortion rights measured against decisions involving war, capital punishment, and so on. All these issues deserve more serious treatment. But the debate over these prudential judgments loses coherence if on the intrinsic evil of abortion we do not stand on the same ground. What a challenge Notre Dame would pose to our culture if she stood united on this proposition: The unborn belong to no political party…no human right is safe when their right to life is denied…and we will accept no calculus of justice that seeks to trade that right to life for any other.

Let me end with a story about one of our family. His name is John Raphael; he belongs to the Class of ‘89; and he’s an African-American who runs a high school in New Orleans. He’s also a Josephite priest.

In his ministry, Father Raphael knows what it is like to answer the knock on his office door and find a woman consumed by the understandable fears that attend an unplanned pregnancy. He says that one of the greatest lessons he learned about how to respond to these women came from a friend of his, who had come to him in the same circumstances. The woman was an unmarried college student, and she told him what had surprised and hurt her most was how many friends greeted her news by saying, “Oh, that’s terrible.”

“That young lady taught me something,” says Father Raphael. “She taught me that what these women need first and foremost is to have their motherhood affirmed. For too many women, this affirmation never comes. We need to let these mothers know what their hearts are already telling them: you may have made a mistake, but the life growing within you is no mistake. That life is your baby, waiting to love and be loved.”

My young friends, this night I ask you: Make yours the voice that affirms life and motherhood. Be to those in need as the words of our alma mater: tender…strong…and true. And in your every word and deed, let the world see a reflection of the hope that led a French-born priest in the north woods of Indiana to raise Our Lady atop a dome of gold.

I thank you for your invitation.  I applaud your courage. And as we go forth this evening, let us pray that our beloved university becomes the Notre Dame our world so desperately needs: a witness for life that will truly shake down the thunder.

God bless you all.

William McGurn is a columnist for the Wall Street Journal, a former chief speechwriter for President George W. Bush, and a member of Notre Dame’s Class of 1980.

Bill Donohue

June 2009

When I first learned that President Barack Obama was invited to give the commencement address and receive an honorary law degree at the University of Notre Dame, I walked into McGeever’s pub and told the boys that they would not believe which Catholic university was going to honor the president. “Don’t tell me Notre Dame,” Billy O’Connor said from behind the tap. When I confirmed his worst suspicion, all the guys at the bar were in a state of utter disbelief. Then came the anger.

Notre Dame is not just another Catholic school—it’s named after Our Blessed Mother. Moreover, there is not a Catholic Irishman who doesn’t root for Notre Dame every fall (save for those who are an alumnus of a Notre Dame opponent on game day). To top it off, Notre Dame is not Georgetown: it doesn’t have a reputation of taking down crucifixes from the classroom or putting a drape over the Greek name for Jesus when the president speaks on campus.

It is more than practicing Catholics who are up in arms—it’s the nation’s bishops. In the nearly 16 years I have been president of the Catholic League, I have never seen the bishops more exercised than they are over the decision of Notre Dame president Father John Jenkins to honor President Obama. This will have repercussions way beyond May 17: the bishops have set anchor in the culture war. Once a collectivity becomes energized, it is difficult to repair to the status quo ante—it’s not like a faucet that can be turned on and off.

What broke? In 2004, the bishops issued a document, Catholics in Political Life, that plainly said, “The Catholic community and Catholic institutions should not honor those who act in defiance of our fundamental moral principles. They should not be given awards, honors or platforms which would suggest support for their actions.” Thus, for Notre Dame to honor a pro-abortion radical like President Obama is a slap in the face to the bishops.

It would be impossible to find a politician who is more pro-abortion than Obama. When in the Illinois state senate he led the fight to deny health care to a baby born alive as a result of a botched abortion. He opposed the U.S. Supreme Court decision outlawing partial-birth abortion. He has overturned by executive order abortion restrictions put in place by President George W. Bush. He is a proponent of embryonic stem cell research. He opposes the conscience rights of healthcare workers not to assist in or perform acts they find morally repugnant. He has appointed one pro-abortion activist after another to his administration. He has a 100 percent approval rating from NARAL, the most extreme pro-abortion group in the nation. And he told Planned Parenthood he would gladly sign the Freedom of Choice Act, the most sweeping abortion-rights legislation ever written.

Given Obama’s credentials, and given what the bishops have clearly asked of Catholic institutions—to say nothing of Notre Dame’s special status—it would have been remarkable if the bishops, as well as practicing Catholics everywhere, didn’t explode. Moreover, Harvard Law professor Mary Ann Glendon, president of the Pontifical Academy of Social Sciences and former U.S. Ambassador to the Vatican, decided to turn down a prestigious medal on commencement day, so disappointed is she with Notre Dame’s decision to honor her former student.

Abortion is not just another issue. Unlike the death penalty, which the Catholic Church presumptively opposes, abortion is “intrinsically evil.”

Archbishop Raymond Burke, who formerly led the Archdiocese of St. Louis and who now sits on Rome’s Supreme Court, recently summed up the issue. “There is no element of the common good,” he said, “no morally good practice, which a candidate may promote and to which a voter may be dedicated, which could possibly justify voting for a candidate who also endorses and supports the deliberate killing of the unborn, euthanasia or the recognition of a same-sex marriage as a legal marriage. The respect for the inviolable dignity of innocent human life and the integrity of marriage and the family are so fundamental to the common good that they cannot be subordinated to any other cause, no matter how good it may be.”

People of other faiths who are opposed to abortion, as well as non-believers, fully understand why the bishops have laid down a marker: the time has come to hold up a big STOP sign to those whose concept of social justice doesn’t extend to the unborn. What’s at stake is the Judeo-Christian notion of protecting the least among us.

President Obama has every right to speak on any college campus, including Notre Dame. He should be invited to speak at Notre Dame law school. He should be welcomed to participate in a symposium. He should be greeted as a panelist or a discussant on some contemporary issue. But he should not be honored. No one has a right to be honored, not even the president of the United States.

(This is a slightly longer version of an article that appeared on May 15 in the Washington Times.)

William Donohue

March 2009

On January 23, President Barack Obama rescinded the Mexico City Policy that barred federal funds from being used to promote or perform abortions overseas. He was immediately congratulated by every pro-abortion organization in the nation.

The next day he won their plaudits again when he said that “It is time that we end the politicization of this issue. In the coming weeks, my Administration will initiate a fresh conversation on family planning, working to find areas of common ground to best meet the needs of women and families at home and around the world.” He ended by saying that “I look forward to working with Congress to restore U.S. financial support for the U.N. Population Fund.”

In other words, Obama intends to accomplish his goal of ending the politicization of abortion by spending federal dollars to support a pro-abortion agency of the U.N., namely the United Nations Population Fund (UNFPA). This begs the question: If President George W. Bush was guilty of politicizing abortion by cutting off federal aid to UNFPA—this is exactly what the pro-abortion industry accused Bush of doing—then why is Obama not similarly guilty for reinstating the funds? Apparently, only those opposed to abortion are guilty of politicizing the issue; those in favor of it bring people together.

UNFPA claims that it is not pro-abortion. It says that it merely supports “reproductive rights,” by which it means “the right to decide the number, timing and spacing of children,” etc. It does not rule out any means to accomplish this end. Which means it has absolutely no problem with abortion. More than that, it works tirelessly to work with pro-abortion groups to limit births, and nowhere is it more active than in poor, non-white nations around the world.

No one knows what a fraud UNFPA is better than Steve Mosher, president of the Population Research Institute. A good Catholic, Mosher says that despite this U.N. agency’s alleged concern for “safe” abortions, it is “just a euphemism for legal abortion.” Indeed, he argues that “The United Nations Population Fund would like to see abortion legalized worldwide, including in the 114 countries where there are significant restrictions on abortion, and it works to that end.” He emphasizes that “this is an organization that is devoted to aborting and sterilizing and contracepting as many women as possible.”

One way UNFPA accomplishes its goals is to manipulate public opinion by selling the idea that it works well with some segments of the Catholic community. More accurately, it works well with a few stray dissidents, and it works very well with anti-Catholic front groups.

Thoraya Obaid, the executive director of UNFPA, has admitted that “The Catholic Church can only discuss abstinence, but we have some relationships with a few priests who will refer women for other family planning options. This is what I have done in Latin America.” In Brazil, for example, the pro-abortion group works with “certain progressive branches” of the Catholic Church.

The so-called progressive Catholics that UNFPA teams up with are none other than the Catholic bashers at Catholics for Choice (previously Catholics for a Free Choice). Frances Kissling, who was president of the letterhead group for decades, was the darling of UNFPA during Dr. Nafis Sadik’s reign as its executive director. Sadik said it all when she explained that “I was very happy to find in Frances Kissling an ally who not only shared my passion for sexual and reproductive health and rights but had a passion of her own, for her church and its mission.” Kissling once admitted that it was her mission to “overthrow the Catholic Church.”

No wonder the pro-abortion enthusiasts at UNFPA loved Kissling—she bailed them out when they were in hot water with the U.S. State Department for cooperating with the Communist Chinese government’s “one child” policy.

Following a 2002 State Department investigation of UNFPA’s ties to China’s pro-abortion policies, Secretary of State Colin Powell wrote, “I determined that UNFPA’s support of, and involvement in, China’s population-planning activities allowed the Chinese government to implement more effectively its program of coercive abortion.” It was for reasons like these that the Bush administration denied U.S. funding of UNFPA, monies that Obama wants to reinstate.

Kissling’s role in whitewashing China’s monstrous anti-human rights policies was to give it a clean bill of health when she and other “religious leaders” visited China in 2003. “We believe that UNFPA has been unequivocally committed to providing informed and voluntary family planning,” she offered.

Predictably, Kissling was dutifully congratulated by Sadik’s successor, Ms. Obaid: “I am extremely grateful that the religious leaders who visited China have affirmed that UNFPA is promoting voluntary choice in the Chinese family planning program and is not involved in any way with coercive practices.” Perhaps she doesn’t think that having the government track the menstrual cycle of women isn’t coercive, or the practice of ordering them to have an abortion.

One scholar who wasn’t fooled by this was the late Julian Simon, a professor of population economics at the University of Maryland. Here is how he described what was going on in China: “Its ‘family planning’ one-child policy is pure coercion. It includes forcing IUDs into the wombs of 100 million women against their will; mandatory X-rays every three months to insure that the IUDs have not been removed, causing who knows what genetic damage; coercion to abort if women get pregnant anyway, and economic punishment if couples evade the abortionist.”

Beijing’s one-child policy began in 1979, with support from UNFPA: it gave China $50 million over the first five years of the program. According to Mosher, the policy led to widespread female infanticide, something which was once practiced in poor areas of China. “But when the one-child policy came into effect we began to see in the wealthy areas of China,” he says, “what had never been done before in history—the killing of little girls.”

This imbalance, in turn, led to a massive wave of human trafficking: in 2005, an estimated 800,000 people—80 percent of whom were women—were being trafficked from across China’s borders. Somewhere in the neighborhood of 350 million girls are now said to be missing from the Chinese population. And yet UNFPA—which is heavily staffed by former Planned Parenthood workers—has never objected to any of this.

UNFPA concentrates heavily in places like Vietnam, Nigeria and Peru, promoting policies similar to those in China. When the genocidal maniac from Serbia, Slobodan Milosevic, wanted to tame his people, he invited UNFPA to help reduce the population of Kosovo; Milosevic said Kosovar women were “baby machines” that needed to be stopped. UNFPA did not disappoint him—it responded with a huge contraception and abortion campaign.

It is one thing for UNFPA to act irresponsibly, quite another to tap American taxpayers for money to support its agenda. Moreover, UNFPA gets a boat-load of cash from the establishment. For instance, John D. Rockefeller III, the nation’s foremost population control guru, was responsible for getting UNFPA off the ground in 1969. And today it is lavishly funded by the likes of Microsoft billionaire Bill Gates and Wall Street tycoon Warren Buffett (he is also a generous contributor to Catholics for Choice). Yet Obama says this isn’t enough, even in a recession.

The Obama supporters are trying to cast this issue as a matter of human rights. They’re right about that, but only in a perverse way. Women’s rights are at stake, but it is not their right to family planning that is being jeopardized, it’s their right to be free from government agents seeking to police their private behavior. It’s also their right to be free from punitive policies that victimize them for wanting to expand their family. And it’s the right of children to be born—a right UNFPA never addresses.

No one can improve on what Pope Benedict XVI said on December 8, 2008: “Poverty is often considered a consequence of demographic change. For this reason, there are international campaigns afoot to reduce birthrates, sometimes using methods that respect neither the dignity of the woman, nor the right of parents to choose responsibly how many children to have; graver still, these methods often fail to respect even the right to life. The extermination of millions of unborn children, in the name of the fight against poverty, actually constitutes the destruction of the poorest of human beings.”

The pope’s indictment applies perfectly to UNFPA. In the name of women’s rights, it undercuts women. In the name of eradicating poverty, it eradicates the poor. If this wasn’t bad enough, those who support UNFPA often seek to malign Catholicism.

In the mid-1990s, speaking of the Catholic Church, Professor Julian Simon wrote that it is “up against a deep-rooted anti-Catholicism that is triggered by the population issue and distorts the thinking of even the clearest-minded people.” This was quite a statement, especially coming from a Jew. By the way, not long before he passed away, Simon called me to say how much he appreciated the work of the Catholic League. He said that while he did not want to become a member, he wanted to make a $100 donation. We could certainly use his insights, and his courage, today.

Since Simon wrote those words, nothing has changed. What fires the population crowd is hatred of Catholicism. They hate the Church’s teachings on sexual ethics, preferring a full-blown liberationist agenda where everything goes. They also want to limit the number and type of persons who make their way to the U.S., having grave reservations about the influx of Catholic Latinos.

The pro-abortion forces have been galvanized the likes of which we haven’t seen since the Clinton administration. This does not bode well: If the Freedom of Choice Act that threatens Catholic doctors and hospitals ever makes its way through the Congress, Obama has pledged to sign it. Meanwhile, we can expect to see more executive orders that restrict abortion overturned, and more abortion-happy judges appointed to the federal bench.

It is all so sick. At the same time that the world’s most dangerous terrorists are being bestowed with new rights, innocent children are losing the few they once had. Thus has human rights been stood on its head.

William Donohue

January-February 2009

The pro-life movement knows that 2009 will test its reserve more than ever before. It is an appropriate time, then, to consider what we’re up against.

Most of those in favor of “choice” don’t have the courage to complete the sentence. The “choice” they support does not entail choosing between chocolate or strawberry, but between life and death. Deep in their hearts they know this is true, and their gutlessness is at least testimony to their guilt: they are tacitly acknowledging that the choice they advocate is nothing to celebrate.

So in fairness, it would not be accurate to say that most of those who are “pro-choice” are actually “pro-abortion.” But it is a monumental mistake to assume that the abortion rights movement is not dotted with those who truly are “pro-abortion.” Indeed, some actually love it so much that they call it a “positive good,” or a “blessing.” Some even call it a “sacrament.” Here’s the proof.

Feminist lawyer Gloria Allred knows that abortion is murder, yet she contests the idea that our society would be better off without abortion. For example, in 2003, she told Sean Hannity that she took the side of Laci Peterson, the pregnant woman who was killed by her husband (she had named her unborn son Connor). When the D.A. considered the evidence, Allred said, “the fact that there are two individuals who are dead here, Laci and Connor, that has to be the most important consideration of everything.”

This is quite an admission given that three years earlier she had the following exchange with Bill O’Reilly. O’Reilly: “Wouldn’t it be better if there were never an abortion?” Allred: “I think that’s a world we’re never going to see, so I wouldn’t speculate.” O’Reilly: “All right, but wouldn’t it be better if a….” Allred: “Not necessarily.”

So it would not necessarily be a better society if there were no abortions, notwithstanding the fact that abortion kills. It therefore seems plausible, according to Allred’s way of thinking, that society might be better off with abortions. This isn’t the voice of someone who is reluctantly “pro-choice.”

In the late 1980s, the Fund for a Feminist Majority released a video, “Abortion for Survival,” that included advocates hailing abortion as a “positive good.” A few years later, a retired women’s studies professor from the University of Washington, Patricia Lunneborg, wrote a book called Abortion: A Positive Decision. According to a rave review in Publishers Weekly, Lunneborg found abortion clinics “to be places where women are highly valued and patients’ self esteem is carefully tended.” Sounds like a resort.

A few years ago, in a book entitled Beyond Choice, Alexander Sanger lashed out at those who say “abortion is the lesser of two evils.” According to him (he is the grandson of Planned Parenthood founder, Margaret Sanger), such reasoning was faulty. The time had come, he argued, to recast abortion as a “positive good.” Beverly Harrison, a professor of Christian ethics at the Union Theological Seminary, had previously come to the same conclusion. She contended that abortion was not only a “positive good”—it was a “loving choice.”

In 2007, a writer from England, Caitlin Moran, said that she regards abortion as “one of the ultimate acts of good mothering.” Ex-priest Daniel Maguire upped the ante in 2001 in a book, Sacred Choices, wherein he maintained that abortion for the right reasons is “a holy choice, a sacred choice.” He is still teaching theology at Marquette University.

In 2008, radical feminist Erica Jong wrote a piece dubbed, “If Men Could Get Pregnant, Abortion Would be a Sacrament.” She credited the late feminist, and anti-Catholic, Florynce Kennedy, with first coining this line.  Another anti-Catholic, Freedom From Religion Foundation founder  Anne Nicol Gaylor, wrote a book in 1975 called Abortion is a Blessing; it was hailed by feminists Betty Friedan and Gloria Steinem for seeing abortion as a blessing.

Patricia Baird-Windle, one time owner of three abortion clinics, has also held that “abortion is a major blessing, and a sacrament in the hands of women.” Catholic dissident theologian Mary Hunt, who runs the Women’s Alliance for Theology, Ethics and Ritual, admits that she “dares” to call abortion “sacramental.” Episcopal “priestess” Carter Hayward has similarly said that “Abortion should be a sacrament even today.”

No one beats French author Ginette Paris. After having an abortion, she explained her “radiance” as such: “What’s going on is that I’ve just had an abortion and lived an impossible love and accomplished a great reconciliation with myself. But it was my secret and my gift.” She broke her secret in her 1992 book, The Sacrament of Abortion.

So it is not true that all those in the “pro-choice” movement are struggling with a difficult choice. Some really love abortion. Remember this the next time some apologist for abortion rights tells you how everyone on his side finds abortion problematic. And then tell him to purge his side of these very sick people.

William Donohue

December 2008

We have been in the throes of a culture war for the past half-century, but never has it been more imperative to buckle your seat belts until now. Quite frankly, the culture war is about to explode.

The culture war pits traditionalists against modernists. To be more specific, it pits those who ascribe to the timeless values that inhere in faith, family and country against those who reject faith and family—traditionally understood—and who equate patriotism with jingoism.

Who are these people who comprise the ranks of the modernists? They are people so thoroughly secularist that they literally loathe religion. They are people who think that anyone who supports marriage as an institution exclusively designed for one man and one woman is a bigot. And they are people who think that the U.S. government is the cause of American bashing around the world.

Where do we find such persons? Many work in Hollywood, the media, the universities, the arts and in the non-profit sectors of the economy. They are fundamentally unhappy with themselves, God, nature, the U.S. and Western civilization. And that is why many hate the Catholic Church: It is a traditionalist institution that not only embraces God and nature, it is responsible for making Western civilization the greatest civilization in the history of the world.

We’re in for it. Why? Because the modernists feel emboldened after the November election. Please don’t misunderstand me—I am not blaming Barack Obama for all of what is about to happen. I am blaming many of those in the occupations I cited who see in his victory a golden opportunity to wage war on traditionalists. They are already revving it up; just wait until they kick it into high gear.

The modernists will be paying close attention to what Obama does in his very first days in office. If he does what he has pledged to do—push for the Freedom of Choice Act (FOCA)—then that will prove to be pivotal in the culture war. We won’t have to wait long on whether his promise to Planned Parenthood will be realized, and that is because two days after he is sworn in, it will be the 36th anniversary of the infamousRoe v. Wade decision that legalized abortion.

In 1993, two days after he was sworn in as president, Bill Clinton rapped pro-lifers in the face when he overturned every Executive Order limiting abortion. Will Obama choose the day pro-lifers assemble in Washington for the Right to Life March to stick it to them? If he affirms his support for FOCA, that will prove to be incendiary.

FOCA is not just another pro-abortion piece of legislation. It is the most radical, comprehensive pro-abortion bill in the history of the United States. No nation in Europe has anything like it. If passed by the Congress, and signed by Obama, it would effectively nullify every state restriction on abortion. That means that all parental consent laws would go by the wayside. It means that partial-birth abortion would be legal again. It even means that Catholic hospitals and Catholic doctors may lose their right not to perform abortions.

The Office of the General Counsel of the United States Conference of Catholic Bishops has prepared an analysis of FOCA that is as accurate as it is scary. Among the many provisions it is likely to invalidate are “laws protecting the conscience rights of doctors, nurses and hospitals, if those laws create even minimal delay or inconvenience in obtaining an abortion or treat abortion differently than other medical procedures.”

In other words, if FOCA were ever to become law, not only will the rights of the unborn be stripped for all time, the rights of the born who defend them will be stripped as well. Sadly, because the abortion rate among black girls is so high, it means that America’s first African American president will preside over an increase in the death of black babies.

If Obama touts FOCA on January 22, it will spark not simply the pro-abortion industry, it will ignite all the modernists who have a real problem with faith, family and country, traditionally understood. With no one left to demonize in Washington, radical secularists will take after the Catholic Church and every other traditionalist institution. Look for them to target any religion that doesn’t ascribe to its modernist interpretation of discrimination, all with an eye towards gutting its tax exempt status.

Much of the action will take place outside the beltway, in local communities across the nation. There will be culture war battles on a myriad of fronts. Fortunately, it will bring traditional Catholics, evangelical Protestants, Muslims, Mormons and Orthodox Jews closer together. We should not be reluctant to form coalitions across faith lines.

So buckle your seat belts. The polarization that has marked the culture war thus far is about to worsen. At stake is the very moral foundation this country was built on, and the values and social institutions it reflects. As you might expect, we will not walk away from this fight. We will not sit on the sidelines—we will be gladiators, not spectators.

2008

“When he was in the state senate, Barack Obama worked hard against a bill that would provide health care for a baby who survived an abortion…. This is called ‘selective infanticide’…. There’s been a media cover-up on this…”

-Bill Donohue, “Fox and Friends,” May 15, 2008

The Catholic League has been getting many phone calls and e-mails regarding Sen. Obama’s support for infanticide. To read more about how, while in the Illinois state senate, Obama led the fight to deny medical care to infants born alive as a result of botched abortions and let them die unaided in hospital rooms, check out the links below:

Terence P. Jeffrey, Human Events.com, 10-8-08: “The Obama Debate Every American Should See”

Robert George, Townhall.com, 10-15-08: “Obama’s Abortion Extremism”

George Weigel, Newsweek, 10-14-08: “Pro-Life Catholics For Obama”

Mona Charen, National Review Online, 9-19-08: “Deniers for Obama”

Nat Hentoff, WorldNetDaily.com, 9-17-08: “Abortion wars crescendo”

Catholic League news release, 9-17-08: “Abortion Survivor to Obama: Stop Supporting Selective Infanticide”

Jim Meyers, Newsmax.com, 8-26-08: “Obama OK’d ‘Live Born’ Abortion”

Terence Jeffrey, Townhall.com, 8-20-08: “Obama and Pro-Life ‘Liars'”

Rich Lowry, RealClearPolitics.com, 8-19-08: “Obama Lying About His Abortion Record”

Amanda Carpenter, Townhall.com, 8-12-08: “Obama Lied ABout Abortion Record”

Patrick J. Buchanan, Buchanan.org, 8-12-08: “A Catholic Case Against Barack”

National Right to Life Committee, NRLC.org, 8-11-08: “Obama Cover-up Revealed on Born-Alive Abortion Survivors Bill”

Linda Chavez, LindaChavez.org, 8-8-08: “Obama’s Catholic Problem”

Deal W. Hudson, InsideCatholic.com, 8-7-08: “Is It Fair to Say Barack Obama Supports Infanticide?”

Deal W. Hudson, Catholic.org, 7-8-08: “Deal Hudson on Senator Obama’s Interview”

Catholic League news release, 7-7-08: “Obama Responds to Infanticide Charge”

Deal W. Hudson, InsideCatholic.com, 7-7-08: “Obama Responds to the Infanticide Charge”

Jill Stanek, WorldNetDaily.com, 7-2-08: “Obama’s biggest lie about supporting infanticide”

Deal W. Hudson, InsideCatholic.com, 7-1-08: “Infanticide?”

Catholic League news release, 6-27-08: “Democrats Reach Out to Catholics”

Deal W. Hudson, InsideCatholic.com, 6-26-08: “The Case Against Barack Obama”

William McGurn, The Wall Street Journal, 6-24-08: “NARAL Catholics Line Up for Obama”

William Donohue

October 2008

After George W. Bush won reelection in 2004, it was disclosed that “values voters” played a major role in defeating the Democrats. More than any other issue, it was abortion that proved decisive: the “values voters” preferred the pro-life position of the Republican Party.

It didn’t take long before some Democrats, especially Catholics and Protestants, decided that it was imperative not to allow the Republicans to take ownership of this issue. But they were faced with a big problem: the Democrats were unequivocally committed to abortion rights—for any reason and at any time during pregnancy.

Enter James Carville and Paul Begala. They argued that the Democrats would continue to lose election after election until they finally pared back in their support for abortion rights. Accordingly, they recommended that Democrats oppose partial-birth abortion and support parental notification laws. Their pragmatism, however, fell on deaf ears: the leadership of the Democratic Party would not budge in its pro-abortion position.

So the only thing left for Christian Democrats who were worried about ceding this entire issue to the Republicans was to create the fiction that it was possible to support abortion-on-demand by posturing a pro-life position. To accomplish this trick, they decided to defend abortion as a constitutional right—including partial-birth abortion—while promoting social policies that might reduce the need for abortions. They labeled this a “common ground” approach, one that serviced the “common good.” As they soon discovered, however, the central problem remained.

To begin with, they never found a plausible way to answer the most basic question of them all: When does life begin? Recall that when Sen. Barack Obama was asked this question by the evangelical heavyweight Rick Warren, he fumbled. Obama actually said that answering this question was “above my pay grade.” By contrast, when Sen. John McCain was asked the same question, he quickly said, “At conception.”

McCain’s pro-life voting record squares completely with his answer, but Obama’s pro-abortion record is not explained by his evasion. If abortion doesn’t kill innocent human life, then it must be assumed that Obama believes life begins some time after birth. But when? Recall that when he was in the Illinois state senate, he led the fight against mandating health care for children born alive as a result of a botched abortion. In other words, he supports selective infanticide.

Now those who are pushing the “common ground” approach must know that they, too, are a walking contradiction. They don’t want to make any abortions illegal, and indeed they refuse to criticize Obama for his off-the-charts advocacy of abortion rights. So when they say they want to reduce abortions, they are right back to where they started from. Why would it be necessary to reduce a medical procedure that doesn’t harm anyone? After all, no one says we need to reduce the need for root canals.

There are other problems for these folks, as well. The Platform of the Democratic Party does not seek a “common ground” approach to human trafficking—it supports laws that criminalize labor and sex trafficking. Yet when it comes to abortion, it balks at any legal remedy. Is this because the Democrats are more bent out of shape over human trafficking than abortion? To put it differently, making human trafficking illegal hasn’t stopped it from occurring, so why not legalize it and then support “common ground” strategies that reduce its occurrence?

These “values” Democrats will tell you that it would be wrong to criminalize abortion because that would bring us back to the days when women were imprisoned for having an abortion. MSNBC’s Chris Matthews, for example, says this all the time. But the fact of the matter is that women were not imprisoned for having an abortion in the pre-Roe v. Wade days—it was the abortionist who faced prosecution.

In Leslie J. Reagan’s pro-abortion book, When Abortion Was a Crime: Women, Medicine, and Law in the United States, 1867-1973, she makes it clear that women were not routinely prosecuted and imprisoned for having abortions during this period. Indeed, she lists only one such incident of this kind, and that was an unusual case in 1971 when a Florida woman was arrested for manslaughter. So the Matthews argument is nothing more than a scare tactic.

It must also be said that these “values” Democrats went mute when Nancy Pelosi totally misrepresented the Catholic Church’s teaching on abortion; none issued even the mildest rebuke. This certainly included Sen. Bob Casey, Jr., the so-called pro-life Catholic Democrat from Pennsylvania whose voting record on abortion lines up with NARAL—the most radical pro-abortion group in the nation—65 percent of the time.

Finally, the presidents of NARAL and Planned Parenthood spoke at the Democratic National Convention, and the most radical pro-abortion Political Action Committee of them all, EMILY’s List, hosted a big party. If this doesn’t signal what a fraud the “common ground” ploy is, nothing does.

ad published in Washington Times

September 22, 2008

On page 10 of Catalyst, we reproduced the ad that ran in the Washington Times weekend edition; the ad called attention to Sen. Obama’s NARAL record and his support of selective infanticide.

By Kate O’Beirne

(Catalyst January/February 2006)

For over thirty years, the plain words of Roe and Doe have been distorted by the media. On the 30th anniversary of the decisions, media polls reflected the ongoing disinformation campaign. CNN asked, “Do you favor the Supreme Court ruling that women have the right to an abortion during the first three months of their pregnancy?”The Washington Post’s poll misrepresented the 1973 decisions in the same way. Feminists translate public support for Roe v. Wade, which is based on the public’s misunderstanding of the case, to support for their abortion-on-demand agenda.

Faye Wattleton was president of Planned Parenthood for 14 years. A beautiful black woman whose fawning media coverage included a fashion spread in Vogue magazine, she put an extremely attractive face on Margaret Sanger’s legacy. It was Wattleton who decided that Planned Parenthood should be in the lead in promoting abortion rights. When an equally attractive and articulate pro-life black woman was willing to take her on—Kay James of the National Right to Life Committee—Faye Wattleton refused to make joint appearances with her. Wattleton’s reluctance to face a well-armed opponent is understandable. Kay James would have had the better of the argument, because the facts are on her side.

In 2003, even a poll commissioned by Wattleton’s new outfit, the Center for the Advancement of Women, found that 51 percent of women thought abortion either should not be allowed or should only be available in cases of rape or incest or to save the life of the mother. Another 17 percent thought abortion ought to be available but with stricter limits. Only 30 percent agreed with Faye Wattleton and her abortion absolutist allies, which was down 4 points from two years earlier. Of the top 12 priorities for women, keeping abortion legal was second to last.

A 1999 poll by another feminist outfit, the Center for Gender Equity, found a similar 53 percent of American women favor outlawing abortion or permitting it only for cases of rape, incest, or to save the life of the mother. In fact, men typically favor abortion more than women do.

In a rare departure from its typically feminist-friendly coverage, in 2003 The New York Times reported on the growing number of young people with pro-life views. Their own polling found that among people from 18 to 29, only 39 percent thought abortion should be generally available, down from 48 percent ten years earlier. One young pro-lifer explained, “Myself and my classmates have never known a world in which abortion wasn’t legalized. We’ve realized that any one of us could have been aborted.”

A 2004 Wirthlin Worldwide poll found that 61 percent of those polled said abortion is “almost always bad” for women. Polls consistently show that about half of the public would ban abortion with exceptions for rape, incest, or life of the mother, which would ban about 95 percent of abortions. Another quarter of the public would ban all but first-trimester abortions.

Because less than a quarter of the public agrees with Kate Michelman, Gloria Steinem, Gloria Feldt, and their allies that abortion should be available at any time for any reason, pro-abortion activists fight to keep the issue in the courts, beyond the reach of the public’s pro-life sentiments. When she left her top post at NARAL, Kate Michelman headed to the Democratic National Committee to run a program called Campaign to Save the Court. But here too, pro-abortion feminists are at odds with public opinion.

A 2005 poll by Ayres, McHenry and Associates found that 79 percent of voters disagreed that a pro-life judicial nominee should be disqualified from serving on the Supreme Court.

Elected officials haven’t been kind to the abortion-rights agenda in recent years. Kate Michelman notes, “Since 1995, states have enacted nearly 400 restrictions on a woman’s right to choose.” Gloria Feldt laments that the White House and both chambers of Congress are controlled by “anti-choice politicians.” So too are the majority of governorships, and “the state legislatures are overwhelmingly anti-choice.” These abortion absolutists seem to believe that some strange alchemy has handed such a political advantage to pro-life politicians given their constant claims that their abortion-on-demand agenda enjoys the broad support of voters.

When the question has been asked of voters, polls show the pro-life advantage is unequivocal in the voting booth. A 1996 Wirthlin exit poll found that among voters who listed abortion as one of their top two issues 45 percent voted for Bob Dole and 35 percent for Bill Clinton. A Los Angeles Times poll found even a bigger advantage for Dole among women who voted on the abortion issue. In 1994, among single-issue abortion voters, the pro-life advantage was 2 to 1.

Following the election in November 2004, Kristin Day, the executive director of Democrats for Life of America, explained how her party had been damaged by abortion-rights forces. She stated, “For the past 25 years, pro-life Democrats have been leaving the party over the issue of abortion.” Day pointed out that 25 years ago, when Democrats held a 292-seat majority in the House, 125 of those seats were held by pro-life Democrats.

Feminists’ unyielding support for this “women’s issue” that doesn’t have the support of women puts them at odds with the large majority of Americans who support recent protections for unborn children, like the ban on partial-birth abortions.

Feminists vehemently defend the hideous procedure its opponents descriptively call “partial-birth abortion.” A federal judge considering the constitutionality of a ban on the procedure described it as a “gruesome, brutal, barbaric, and uncivilized medical procedure—the fetus’s arms and legs have been delivered outside the uterus while the fetus is still alive. With the fetus’s head lodged in the cervix, the physician punctures the skull with scissors or crushes the head with forceps.”

President Clinton vetoed bans on partial-birth abortion that passed Congress with bipartisan majorities. In 1996, I had the pleasure of appearing as a guest on CNN’s “Crossfire” with Eleanor Smeal, who was there to defend the indefensible.

The co-hosts asked us about the political fallout from the president’s opposition to the ban. Smeal warned that the gender gap threatened anyone who doesn’t allow this gruesome procedure, and I pointed out that 64 percent of women supported the ban. Bob Novak noted that people don’t like abortion, and Eleanor Smeal responded, “For some women it saves their lives.”

What is telling about my experience in that debate with Eleanor Smeal is that these abortion absolutists don’t openly defend their radical agenda. On the show, I freely admitted that I opposed both the partial-birth abortion procedure and other methods of abortion.

Just as Smeal was only willing to defend a procedure as allegedly life-saving for the mother, in an editorial urging the election of John Kerry, Kate Michelman also deceptively avoided making the case for abortion on demand. “If you are raped, if you are a victim of incest or if carrying a pregnancy to term will endanger your health, it’s a decision for you—not the government—to make.” In the interest of accuracy, she might have added, “If you decide on the eve of your full-term delivery that you want to choose an abortion instead, it’s your decision and not the government’s.”

In fact, these feminists defend every single one of the over 40 million “choices” that have been made since Roe v. Wade, which itself was the product of a series of lies. Feminists at the time argued that they wanted to see “therapeutic” abortions legalized. The plaintiff in Roe falsely claimed she had been raped. Justice Blackmun falsely claimed that abortion had never been a common-law crime.

Feminists still lie about the incidence of back-alley abortions that served as a justification for legalization. In a celebratory column welcoming the euphemistically titled March for Women’s Lives, in the spring of 2004, Ellen Goodman wrote, “After all, those of us who remember when birth control was illegal and when ten thousand American women a year died from illegal abortions don’t have to imagine a world without choices.” As she later had to allow, her memory was faulty. When her column prompted charges that she was repeating “propaganda” or an “urban legend,” she did a little research and admitted in a later column that the claim that there were thousands of deaths in the years prior to abortion’s legalization (which she hadn’t bothered to check in the 30 years since Roe v. Wade) is false.

In 1972, the year before Roe v. Wade, according to the federal Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, 39 women died of illegal or self-induced abortions. Overall improvements in prenatal and obstetrical care beginning in the 1940s saw the rate of pregnancy-related deaths from causes other than abortion drop at roughly the same rate as abortion-related deaths.

Elizabeth Fox-Genovese is the Eleonore Raoul Professor of the Humanities and professor of history at Emory University. This founding director of the university’s Institute for Women’s Studies believes that the abortion rights agenda betrays women. She writes, “Doubtless we would benefit from more complete studies, but we now have enough evidence to say with confidence that for the vast majority of women, abortion represents a worst-case scenario-and, too often, a confirmation of their abandonment by the father of the child and by the larger community. More often than not, girls and women have abortions because they lack the support to have their child.”

Kate Michelman, Faye Wattleton, Gloria Steinem, Gloria Feldt, Eleanor Smeal, and their abortion allies have been promoting an antiwomen agenda in the name of women’s liberation by waging a campaign for “choice” on behalf of women who often feel they have no choice at all.

Kate O’Beirne is the Washington editor of National Review and is a member of the Catholic League’s Board of Advisors. She served for 10 years as a panelist on CNN’s “The Capital Gang.”