The University of Notre Dame invited President {cringe} Obama to deliver the commencement speech this year, setting off a firestorm of debate among Catholics around the country. Why? Because, as I pointed out during last year's campaign, Obama is easily the most far-left pro-abortion candidate ever to seek the office of the president, much less gain it.
In a published couple of short essays taking the pro- and con-invite positions, Pepperdine professor Doug Kmiec and orthodoxy champion/author George Weigel each wrote their thoughts on the invitation. I found Kmiec's to be surprisingly shallow considering his status. His main points were that it's not right to bring politics into commencement speeches (ridiculous since the objections are on moral, not explicitly political, grounds), and that Obama was just being "pragmatic," since not everyone agrees with the Catholic positions on such matters (apparently the fact of Notre Dame being a Catholic institution did not weigh on Kmiec's mind).
Weigel's piece was eloquent, as expected, and right to the point. To the question of "what's all the fuss?" Weigel lays it out plainly in a single paragraph:
Since Inauguration Day, Obama has made several judgment calls that render Notre Dame's invitation little short of incomprehensible. The president has put the taxpayers of the United States back into the business of paying for abortions abroad. He has expanded federal funding for embryo-destructive stem-cell research and defended that position in a speech that was a parody of intellectually serious moral reasoning. The Obama administration threatens to reverse federal regulations that protect the conscience rights of Catholic and other pro-life health-care professionals. And the administration has not lifted a finger to keep its congressional and teachers' union allies from snatching tuition vouchers out of the hands of poor inner-city children who want to attend Catholic schools in the nation's capital. How any of this, much less the sum total of it, constitutes a set of decisions Notre Dame believes worth emulating is not, to put it gently, easy to understand.The pieces are short enough to read both. The fact that there's a public controversy at all, frankly, makes me very happy. I recall Notre Dame and several other nominally Catholic universities hosting "The Vagina Monologues," a disgusting one-woman show with sexually explicit monologues and sinful themes, and nary a word was spoken in outcry, except by the Cardinal Newman Society.
Where was everyone besides the Newman Society last month when Georgetown University (another nominally Catholic institution of higher learning) hosted "Sex Week"? One of Georgetown's guests was a porn director speaking on "Relationships Beyond Monogamy." This director had also authored a book entitled, "True Lust: Adventures in Sex, Porn and Perversion." Is this the current state of Catholic universities? If so, is it any surprise Notre Dame would invite Obama, who has already - in under two months in office - taken concrete steps to significantly increase the number of abortions in the world?
The debate is long overdue. The leftists and their disgusting and evil ideals need to be confronted and booted out of America's Catholic colleges. That they've made it this far is remarkable and sad.
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