Posted by
Always To The Right on Sunday, August 17, 2008 4:50:56 PM
I’ll credit Rick Warren with asking both John McCain and Barack Obama about abortion. I skipped the Saddleback Church non-debate, but Jim at Gateway Pundit
captured what has to be the quote of the election. When asked the
point when a human embryo achieves personhood, Obama said that the
question is “above my pay grade”
First, the entire issue of abortion involves determining when a baby
becomes a person. If Obama thinks this is above his pay grade, then he
probably shouldn’t be running for political office. If a baby is a
person at conception, then abortion is murder. If Obama doesn’t believe
that abortion is murder, then he can’t believe in the personhood, the
humanity, of an embryo or fetus — not unless he’s some kind of monster.
As President — even as Senator — Obama is expected to have an answer for this. Quite literally, there is
no higher pay grade in the US government, and abortion is one of the
issues he has to face. If he can’t face it, then he should go back to
community organization and leave politics for people who can. John
McCain had no trouble answering the same question. Obama dodged it —
and for good reason: his answer would have exposed his radical views.
Even in his equivocations, though, Obama can’t be honest. His reference to the Democratic platform on abortion
is laughable. He insists that it represents an effort to reduce
abortions, but Obamas’ language pledges to oppose all efforts to limit
abortion on demand while providing public financing for abortions.
That language actually strengthens the pro-abortion position
over the 2004 position, while paying lip service to reducing abortions
through nore government-funded programs.
Has Barack Obama ever voted to reduce abortions? Obama never
answered that question, but he hasn’t. He voted against the ban on
partial-birth abortions, a bill that passed Congress on a bipartisan
basis three times before finally becoming law. In Illinois, he voted
to kill a bill that would have stopped Christ Hospital and other
medical facilities from abandoning live infants from unsuccessful
abortions so that they would die of neglect. Obama lied about this,
too, in an interview on CBN with David Brody last night
As the NRLC has discovered, the Illinois bill did have the
“neutrality clause” attached as an amendment to S.1082 in the same
committee session in which Obama later killed the bill, on a party-line
vote. That goes beyond abortion to infanticide, which makes Obama’s
position on the personhood of a fetus even more nebulous. He’s moved
into Peter Singer territory — the most radically pro-abortion candidate
ever to carry a major-party nomination for President.
Unless, of course, voters buy the notion that the issue is above
Obama’s pay grade, and that he just doesn’t know what he’s talking
about. In that case, they’d still be better off supporting the
candidate who understands the pay grade he’s already at and the pay
grade of the job for which he’s campaigning.
Update: I didn’t think about this at the time, but isn’t Barack Obama a Constitutional law scholar? Isn’t a question of personhood supposed to be in that “pay grade”?
Update II: You can watch the unclipped version of the CBN exchange here.