Reminiscent of the short lived and largely frivolous effort to prevent Governor Bobby Jindal from speaking at Loyola’s commencement, I believed there was no need for concern. However, this hullabaloo has remained, and the petition against Obama has continued to grow.
The entire resistance to Obama at Notre Dame has been characterized as pro-life Roman Catholics having moral and religious resistance to the pro-choice and stem-cell research-supporting president. This debate has been misrepresented in the public discourse. If this truly is about Catholicism, the president’s antagonists have some explaining to do.
Though this has only been mentioned on the periphery of the media’s coverage, Notre Dame has a tradition of inviting new presidents to speak at commencement that dates back to Eisenhower. Six presidents have spoken at Notre Dame, including Jimmy Carter, Ronald Reagan and George W. Bush. This fact should stand out, as all three of the aforementioned men had some severe deviations from Catholic doctrine where “life” is concerned. Carter was effectively pro-choice. Carter claimed that he detested abortion and that the courts had his hands tied, but he still did not push for a new amendment like the one Reagan campaigned for.
The issue may perhaps lie in Obama’s decision to fund family planning groups. Isn’t that a bit petty? As if saying “I don’t like abortion but, hey, the Supreme Court is being uncooperative, so I’ll play coy with my party (which supported funding) and it’ll make me more or less pro-life” is a sound proposition. Even if the hope is to lower the number of abortions through reduced funding, he did not challenge his party on the actual policy. Does this qualify him as a pro-life ally?
What of Notre Dame’s last presidential speaker: Bush “Jr.”? During his tenure as the governor of Texas, he presided over some 152 executions, more than any governor in the modern United States. Bush could have directly prevented these executions. The last time I checked, the Church has a problem with capital punishment. Pope John Paul II described states which still permit the death penalty as bearing the marks of “the culture of death, and [are] therefore in opposition to the Gospel message.” I don’t remember a single protest, and certainly not on a large scale.
While I cannot speak for every dissenter, it seems that there is a pattern of selectively opposing pro-choice politicians and turning a blind eye to pro-execution ones. This seems more politicized than religious and awfully similar to the platform of the Republican Party. Weird, right?
