The other debate at Saddleback

We haven’t heard yet from Rev. Jeremiah Wright and Terrorist cum Professor Bill Ayers, but just about everyone else thinks Sen. McCain won Saddleback.

So with that settled, National Review’s Jonah Goldberg looks at another face-off last Saturday at Saddleback.

This one pitted “the intellectual-theologian Obama” against “the political Obama.”

Excerpts from Goldberg - - -

… “Does evil exist?” [Pastor] Warren asked [Senator] Obama. “And if it does, do we ignore it, do we negotiate with it, do we contain it, or do we defeat it?”

Obama the would-be moral philosopher replied, accurately, that evil is everywhere, in Darfur, in our streets, in our own hearts. We cannot “erase evil from the world. That is God’s task. But we can be soldiers in that process, and we can confront (evil) when we see it.” (Imagine if President Bush called himself a soldier of God in the battle against evil.)

When asked what America’s greatest moral failing was, theological Obama said it was our collective failure to “abide by that basic precept in (the Book of) Matthew that whatever you do for the least of my brothers, you do for me.”

For Obama the politician, such scriptural quotations often serve as an all-inclusive writ to impose his religious views on others when it comes to fighting poverty, global warming, racism, etc.

But when the question turns to abortion, political Obama insists on a policy of moral agnosticism and political laissez-faire. Asked directly when life begins as a legal matter, he punted, saying the answer was “above my pay grade.” (emphasis added)

Obama, commendably, told Warren that he wants to reduce the number of abortions. After all, he observed gravely, “we’ve had a president who is opposed to abortions over the last eight years, and abortions have not gone down.”

Unfortunately, Obama wasn’t telling the truth. The abortion rate is the lowest it’s been since 1974, partly because of pro-life policies under Bush, but also thanks to those implemented at the state level since the 1990s.

At Saddleback, Obama offered the ritualistic support for Roe v. Wade expected of all Democratic politicians, “not because I’m pro-abortion,” but because women “wrestle with these things in profound ways.”

This is surely true in many instances. But political Obama won’t explain why “wrestling” with a serious moral question is an adequate substitute for deciding it correctly. People wrestle with all sorts of moral quandaries in “profound ways.” Many slave owners wrestled with whether they should free their slaves, but that did not obviate the need for the Emancipation Proclamation.

Alas, when it comes to abortion, it’s probably silly to expect anything but rote fealty to ideological pieties from a Democrat, just as it’s naive to expect anything but the appropriate pro-life talking points from a Republican.

But for a self-styled champion of nuance, political Obama’s rigidity is spectacular to behold.

In 2003, as chairman of the Illinois Senate Health and Human Services Committee, Obama received a statement from Jill Stanek, a registered nurse at Christ Hospital in Oak Lawn, Ill. She testified that at her Chicago-area hospital, she’d seen a baby accidentally delivered alive during an abortion and then “taken to the soiled-utility room and left alone to die.”

I’m no expert on the Christian Gospel, but something tells me that Matthew might consider these wailing creatures the least of our brothers.

Alas, the abandonment of babies to suffer and die on the modern equivalent of a Spartan cliff did not require confronting evil when Obama saw it. Indeed, Obama turned a blind eye, leading the battle to defeat Illinois’ version of the federal Born-Alive Infants Protection Act, which would have treated babies living, albeit briefly, outside the womb as, well, babies.

He opposed the bill in 2003 (as he had a similar one in 2001), saying it would undermine Roe v. Wade. But even after Roe-neutral language was included — wording good enough that it won support for the federal version of the bill from abortion-rights stalwart Sen. Barbara Boxer — Obama remained unmoved. …

The rest of Goldberg’s column’s here.

Hat tip: BN

So it’s come to the presumptive Democratic presidential nominee opposing the Born-Alive Infants Protection Act which even Sen. Boxer supports.

The next time “the intellectual-theologian Obama” sermonizes I hope he takes as his text from the Book of Mark: “Suffer the little children to come unto Me, and forbid them not: for of such is the kingdom of God"