I wanted to quickly look at something that Barack Obama said at Rick Warren’s forum to discuss issues with the two presidential candidates of the major parties. Obama was asked when human life was due some protection under the law. He responded that “whether you’re looking at it from a theological perspective or a scientific perspective, answering that question with specificity … is above my pay grade.”
If we presume that he is deferring that question to God, as I cannot imagine who Obama would be deferring to otherwise, then this raises interesting questions on how he processes things morally. If candidate Obama honestly appeals to agnosticism on when life begins, he is obviously allowing for the possibility that the unborn may in fact be human beings and people in every true sense of the word. But he does not know that for certain, and so he supports the most radical agenda imaginable in the name of reproductive freedom. Even if a child survives an abortion, there can be no legislation enacted to protect that child from the medical staff following the mother’s decision to its grisly conclusion. He defended his position by saying that there was already legal protection for children, as if he were unaware that these particular children in question were not seen as newborns but the product of failed abortions. A terrible reminder of what happens when human value is determined subjectively.
This puerile defense fails to recognize one obvious fact. There are already laws on all of the books that protect human beings from being unjustly killed and that has not slowed down the abortion machine for a moment. That is why the unborn, or in this case the newly born, need explicitly stated protection. It is too easy to redefine them for the sake of legalizing their extermination by any means necessary.
But candidate Obama is not as daft as that. He says that he fought that Act not for what it did, but for what it might do. It might threaten Roe v. Wade in some future chain of legislation built upon the most modest and humane first steps, and so candidate Obama shows clearly that he is radically pro-abortion in that he will brook no legal protection of any child that might begin to build a legal case that abortion is morally wrong and ought to be stopped.
Then he has the audacity to defer to the “higher” pay-grade on the question of the humanity of the unborn. “Only God knows,” he says with a political wink while he promises to immediately rescind all Executive Orders that protect the unborn. “Who among us can answer that question?” he soothingly asks us as he defends fighting legislation that’s only function was to require hospitals not to neglect to death newborn children that had survived the doctor’s attempt to destroy them.
Taken at his word, we learn a chilling lesson about candidate Obama through this conversation. In the face of ignorance, stick to your political allies. If you do not know what it is because such questions ought to be left to God alone, kill as many as you need to. After all, Obama is convinced that women take abortion very seriously, so I guess the identity of the unborn doesn’t matter at all.
