Tuesday, March 24, 2009
The professors, academics, and all-around brains over at moralaccountability.com released an excellent open letter today to all supporters of Barack Obama who are also genuinelly pro-life (as opposed to those who just gave it lip service during the election cycle). For those who haven't been following this issue closely, Obama has marked the first two months of his presidency with one anti-life decision after another, the latest being the promotion of embryonic cloning for the SOLE purpose of destroying them to be harvested for their stem cells.
We share with you a commitment to the profound, inherent, and equal dignity of every member of the human family. It is for this reason that we oppose abortion, embryo-destructive research, euthanasia, and every other form of direct killing of innocent human beings. We believe that these practices are grave injustices that no society should promote, facilitate, or even permit.
Despite Barack Obama’s record of support for legal abortion and its public funding, and his pledge to lift President Bush’s limitations on the federal funding of embryo-destructive research, you felt that Obama would, all things considered, make a better president than John McCain, and you encouraged your fellow pro-life citizens to join you in voting for him. Some of you argued that Senator Obama, despite his vocal support for legal abortion and equally vocal opposition to pro-life legislative initiatives, was actually the superior candidate from the pro-life point of view. His economic and social policies, many of you said, would strike at the causes of abortion and reduce its incidence. You predicted that lives would be saved.
When it came to embryo-destructive research, many Obama supporters argued that there was no difference between their candidate’s position and the position of Senator McCain. Both, unfortunately, proposed to lift President Bush’s restrictions on federal funding of this lethal research. So that issue was a “wash.”
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On March 9, however, the verdict came in on the issue of embryo-destructive research, and the news is very bad. It would have been bad enough had Obama done what McCain likely would have done, that is, incentivize embryo destruction by authorizing the federal funding of research that involves destroying so-called “spare” embryos left in assisted reproduction clinics. But Obama’s executive order goes farther. It instructs the Director of the National Institutes of Health to promote and fund all forms of embryonic stem cell research that are not banned by law. In other words, Obama has removed all impediments to the funding of research in which human beings are created (whether by cloning or other procedures) specifically for the purpose of being destroyed to produce stem cells. True, under the Dickey-Wicker amendment, the actual embryo killing must be done with private funds. But once the embryos are destroyed, federal taxpayer money will now freely flow to pay for research using cell lines derived from those embryos. President Obama has incentivized the creation of embryos in unlimited numbers for research in which they are killed. Moreover, he has revoked the 2007 executive order instructing the Director of the National Institutes of Health to promote and fund research aimed at developing non-embryo-destructive sources of pluripotent stem cells. This was a baldly ideological move that can have no point other than to appease the embryo-research lobby at the expense of lives and possibly scientific advancement.
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Even if one supposes that Barack Obama’s policies will result in fewer abortions despite relaxed legal restrictions, the number of human lives saved-even on the most optimistic reading-will be offset by the lives taken as a result of what President Obama did. This misguided and profoundly unjust policy alone wipes out any case for regarding Barack Obama’s election as a boon to the cause of defending nascent human life. And if Senator Obama’s campaign promises to the abortion lobby are to be believed, this may be only the beginning.
We know how deeply disappointed truly pro-life Obama supporters must be by the radicalism of the President’s decision. Democrats for Life (DFL), to its credit, has forcefully condemned the decision, making no secret of feeling betrayed by a president that it had gone the extra mile to work with in an effort to find “common ground.” A few days after the decision was announced, prominent Obama supporter Dr. David Gushee, a distinguished Evangelical theologian, publicly rebuked the President for “a series of disappointingly typical Democratic abortion-related moves.” We hope that you, too, will speak out against what can only be described as a moral atrocity against the weakest and most vulnerable of our brothers and sisters. On this, pro-lifers like you who supported Obama can find common ground with pro-lifers like us who found his denial of the full and equal dignity of unborn members of the human family to be disqualifying. Let us speak out with one voice against this grave and shocking injustice.
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4 comments:
The cult of personality behind this man is incredible, much more powerful than I initially thought. I thought President Clinton was charismatic, and he is, but the power behind our current president is nothing short of a cultural phenomenon. Its like these people are in a hypnotic trance, and on some level I think they are. You can tell him the things he does and they simply cannot or will not believe it, because they see you as an enemy for questioning their messiah. You can say, "Hey, did you know that Obama is enforcing the negative eugenics policy by not only promoting infanticide in our country but in Africa as well?" They're programming won't allow them to process that. He is their "hope" and their "change".
And even most of the pro-life folks cannot even understand that at the root of it, the abortion issue is part of the broader implementation of negative eugenics for population control. It demonstrates a value system that does not prize individual human life, only the lives of some. Its really no different than the driving ideology behind wars of choice and the inevitable collateral damage.
I heard a Christian friend of mine joke the other day about Arabs in the Middle East by saying, "Nuke 'em all!" And although he is a believer, he had absolutely no clue as to the depravity of such humor.
"It's really no different than the driving ideology behind wars of choice and the inevitable collateral damage."
Well, it depends on the reason for the "choice." One could make an argument for, say, the Iraq War, that it was driven by an interest in saving the lives of innocents being massacred there. That's obviously not the entire picture (if it were, we'd be in Sudan right now), but it was definitely one reason. If Saddam was a tyrant and threat ONLY to those outside of his country but a benevolent leader to his own people, it's improbable that we would have invaded.
But yes, if one chooses a war with no regard for the loss of innocent life involved, then that ideology is definitely similar to the abortion/eugenics/population control movement.
"The cult of personality behind this man is incredible, much more powerful than I initially thought."
Very true. While it is definitely wearing off with plenty of people, there are still tons (especially the media) who will still not ask any hard questions because they worship him. If Bush had been this incompetent, he would have been tarred and feathered by the elite.
"One could make an argument for, say, the Iraq War, that it was driven by an interest in saving the lives of innocents being massacred there. That's obviously not the entire picture (if it were, we'd be in Sudan right now), but it was definitely one reason."
Surely you don't still believe this. Well, maybe you do.
"Very true. While it is definitely wearing off with plenty of people, there are still tons (especially the media) who will still not ask any hard questions because they worship him. If Bush had been this incompetent, he would have been tarred and feathered by the elite."
Uh oh, we're using that "elite" word again. I'm interpreting your use of the word to mean that the media are the elite. Am I right?
You want to know who the real elites are? The central banks and the European and American oligarchs that effectively own the global banking and governmental systems and influence world politics through their power structures - the IMF, the World Bank, the Federal Reserve and the banks that own it, the Club of Rome, the CFR, the United Nations, etc. They have their representatives in the media, but the media are only useful to the extent that they echo their prescribed propaganda.
But yeah, the new is wearing off and people are some people are seeing him for who he is. They're not all willing to vouch for him anymore - the anti-war people, for instance. I could have told them they were being duped, but they wouldn't have listened.
Whether Bush or Obama, you have basically the same foreign policy with different rhetoric. The approach is a bit more cautionary and less heavy-handed, but its essentially the same. And for the life of me, I really don't know why conservatives aren't decrying the fact that war costs money and we really can't afford to chase Goldstein right now.
I think Bush was every bit as bad, but he got to the point where he couldn't sell himself anymore; he lost a lot of dignity and became quite pitiable. He relied almost solely on fear; he had that down home folksiness that some people fell for, but I didn't - at least not for long. He just ended up looking dumb all the time.
But just as you had the die-hard Bush supporters to whom the president could do no harm, you're going to see a much more severe case of this with Obama. His base will never give up on him - never.
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