Truth & Power

Daniel Philpott, a political science professor at Notre Dame, writes movingly of the events of last Sunday, when the University of Notre Dame hosted President Barack Obama as it's commencement speaker.  I have included a portion of the text below, but please follow the link and see what our good friends at ilsussidiario.net are doing these days:

    When I got home, I went upstairs and read Obama’s speech, which had just been posted on the internet. For eloquence and tailoring to local circumstances and culture: give him an A! The point that he made best was one about charitable argumentation and debate, not demonizing the other. I certainly agree with that, and this part brings up his grade somewhat. But on the quality of its reasoning, I am afraid I cannot give the speech a passing grade. Already that evening, a blog entry on the site of the magazine America, which does not at all have a reputation for being a foe of Obama, called it a paean to relativism. Since we cannot settle our differences, let’s learn to talk about them. That is very important, to be sure, but Mr. President, you forgot about one small thing: justice. The leaders of the great justice movements, Martin Luther King, Gandhi, Lincoln, the 19th century suffragettes, were good at being charitable and well-reasoned but they didn’t stop with simply talking about differences. They demanded change -- an end to unjust exclusion.

    Obama spoke of the civil rights movement. Of course, he has every right to, and I was as moved as any American on the night that he was elected when I thought about how far we have come in race relations. But there is great irony here, for he is radically committed to upholding laws that exclude an entire class of persons from their right to life. Can anyone imagine Martin Luther King saying we disagree deeply about our differences but that the important thing is that we learn to talk about them charitably -- and leaving it at that? No, he said: I have a dream. And he demanded justice for those excluded. Obama’s reasoning is remarkably similar to the reasoning that Douglas offered to Lincoln in the famous debates of 1858: this is a moral and religious issue which cannot be resolved, no one is asking you to approve of slavery, only to let the states decide for themselves, etc. Obama’s speech included what I thought were rather small and uncertain measures to get the numbers of abortions down. If they do, then great. We'll see. But he failed to confront any of the real questions. If the unborn are persons, then is it not a fundamental injustice to have laws that allow us to kill them? And if they are not persons, then what are they? For that matter, if they are not persons, then why are you so concerned about getting the number of abortions down? Why be committed to protecting a mere blob of cells or flesh?

Comments

[Christina]

This is excellent. Thanks for sharing, Stephen!