The Green Mountain Tates

Friday, October 17, 2008

My friends of failed convictions

I'm increasingly dismayed by the friends who've been swept up in Obama's cult of personality to the extent that they've become apologists for his position on abortion. Now, by all accounts, this is an unusually comfortable, enlightened and lofty sort of bandwagon, but I still fault my friends for hopping onto it.
As Princeton professor Robert P. George has cataloged in an astonishing essay for the Witherspoon Institute, no one more radically pro-abortion has ever served in the Senate or been nominated for president. Most of us, in a situation we consider to be ambiguous, would choose to err on the side of life. That is not Senator Obama's impulse. His support for abortion has bled into the area of infanticide (just to be on the unsafe side.)
No one who believes that a baby should be safe in her mother's womb has any business admiring Senator Obama, much less voting for him.
And yet there are those who claim to be pro-life and who do admire Senator Obama, and even defend his position energetically. They claim, with seeming earnestness, that an Obama administration would be indirectly better for the unborn and therefore more “pro-life.” This assertion is unforgivably absurd, like someone in the days before the rise of the Nationalist Socialist Party in Germany claiming that Hitler would be, indirectly, better for the Jews because he'd make the trains run on time. He did make their trains run on time, but just in the one direction.
This doubtless makes some of you wince, this seeming comparison. But I'm comparing the logic in the arguments of the respective supporters, not the political figures themselves. Senator Obama, the urbane committee man, is really nothing like Hitler, who was an active and violent persecutor of a race of people. Hitler was uniquely despicable: one of the few men in history to have personally initiated and implemented a holocaust. Barack Obama is only doing his best to perpetuate one.