Opinion: This Catholic Will Vote for Life and for the Children

Senator Obama's Freedom of Choice Act will remove every limiting restriction on the killing of innocent children in the womb.

CHESAPEAKE, Va. (Catholic Online) - Senator Barack Obama came out swinging Friday. His charged rhetoric was disturbing: "Don't believe for a second this election is over. Don't think for a minute that power concedes anything. It's gonna get nasty, I'm sure, in the next four days...They will throw everything at us like they've been doing, and we're gonna have to work like our future depends on it in this last week. You know what? Because it does, and every single young person here tonight -- I've gotta have every single one of you voting, and you've gotta grab five more, all of you, have gotta vote".

Senator Obama has written two books. One is titled "An audacity of Hope". He certainly does have audacity to say those kinds of words to his followers. He insinuates that opposition to his candidacy is coming from some perceived class of "oppressors" who want to sort of "keep people down". Nonsense! I am tired of the charged inflammatory old style class and race based rhetoric which has characterized the closing moments of this campaign. I have spent my entire life opposing the evil of racism. Like abortion, it is rightly called an intrinsic evil in Catholic Social Teaching. My opposition to his candidacy is based on his failure to hear the cry of poor.

I was intrigued by Senator Obama's candidacy in its early stages. I agreed with his initial opposition to the incursion into Iraq. Because of my commitment to the teaching on economic justice and solidarity offered by Catholic Social Doctrine, I listened with interest to some of his early comments on our economic crisis. I really hope that in my lifetime we will have an African American President to help end the lingering effects of the legacy of racism in this Nation. However, he or she must be correct on the fundamental and foundational human rights issue of our age, the right to life. Without the Right to Life the entire infrastructure of human rights is in jeopardy. I absolutely refuse to support Senator Barack Obama in this election because he fails to hear the cry of an entire segment of the poor, the children in the womb. My opposition has nothing to do with wanting Republicans to "hold on to power". One irony is that abortion kills a disproportionate number of minority children.

Senator Obama is hailed as a sort of "liberator" of oppressed people. Yet his promised liberation excludes an entire class of persons, our smallest neighbors in the first home of the whole human race, their mothers womb. He has pledged to sign the "Freedom of Choice Act" as his first act as President of the United States. That Act will open up the flow of fetal blood by removing every limiting restriction on the killing of innocent children in the womb. It will entrench abortion on demand through all nine months in the Federal Law and make this evil act enforceable by the Police Power of the State. All one has to do is read the legislation to discover that what I claim about FOCA is not hyperbole, it is fact. It is also why so many of our courageous Catholic Bishops, including Justin Cardinal Rigali and Bishop Robert Finn, have made such a strong effort to bring this fact to the attention of voting Catholics. By the way, all those who have accused the Bishops for not speaking out; I hope you consider giving them an apology! The problem is not our Bishops; it is the plain truth that many of the Catholic faithful are simply not following their clear trumpet sound.

I was no fan of Senator John McCain's candidacy during the Presidential Primaries. I was looking for a candidate who had no qualms about stating explicitly that children in the womb are human persons, should be recognized as such, and should be protected by the 14th Amendment to the U.S. Constitution, the Equal Protection clause. I would have preferred a candidate who supports a Human Life Amendment and is not simply in favor of turning this foundational obligation for the lives of millions of human persons back to the States by reversing Roe. However, Senator McCain certainly recognizes that children in the womb are human persons and he affirms that they have a right to life. He supports overturning Roe v Wade. He opposes FOCA. I was intrigued early on by Senator Obama's oratorical gifts. I hoped - and yes I prayed - that he would see the truth concerning this foundational human rights issue of our age. I thought that if he really believed his own rhetoric about being our "brother and sisters keeper" he would come to see the objective truth that the Pro-Life position is really a matter of solidarity with the poor.

Well, sadly, no such thing has happened. His abysmal answers at the Saddleback Forum only uncovered how deeply entrenched he is in the thinking behind the current culture of death which views children as disposable commodities and interprets freedom as a raw power of the strong over the weak and the most vulnerable. All that Catholic Obama supporters such as Doug Kmiec have been able to extract from their chosen candidate is a claim that abortion is a "moral issue". I respond to this kind of inadequate and insincere feigned concern: "Yes Senator, it is the mother of all moral issues and you are on the wrong side of it!"

I do not look forward to the battle in every State when Roe v Wade is finally overturned. However, I would rather engage in that long struggle then be complicit in the horrors which will result with the passage of the insidiously evil "Freedom of Choice Act". I repeat, Senator Obama has promised that he will sign this legislation if he is elected on November 4, 2008. He made this pledge before those who attended a Planned Parenthood fundraiser in July of 2007. He proudly proclaimed that signing FOCA would be his first act as President! If trends prevail in the Congressional races, he will in fact receive this legislation from the newly constituted Congress and nothing could stop him from unleashing the horrible result.

With the passage of FOCA, every restriction on abortion which we have fought for in the last few decades will be removed. The blood of our children will flow even more than it now does. Tax money, extracted from all of us, will be used to advance this war on the womb! Catholic and other orthodox Christian hospitals will be forced to participate in this killing or face the brunt of administrative penalties or possible closure. Even Doctors who have thus far refused to participate in the killing would be pressured to do so if the "procedure" is mandated under the new regime of "health care" that Senator Obama has promised. Abortion is not a medical procedure, it is an execution of children and it threatens the very soul of our Nation.

I was appalled to read what Doug Kmiec said before a crowd of 50 students who gathered on a College campus recently. He was confronted with the fact that Senator Obama supports FOCA. He called his candidate's support of this evil legislation "boneheaded" and insisted that he had told Obama as much. So what! He personally told me that he had done that several months ago. What is absolutely and irrefutably clear is that Senator Obama does not agree with Doug's professed opposition to this lethal legislation. Doug and his colleague, the former Law Dean Nick Cafardi, once proudly Pro-life Catholic lawyers, have not persuaded Obama on this matter. However, they seem to have become so mesmerized by his candidacy that they will stay in this until the bitter end and continue to try to convince other Catholics to act in a manner which violates the moral teaching of the Church.

In the last month, Doug's mistaken arguments that a Catholic with a truly formed moral conscience can support such a candidate, when an alternative candidate who supports the right to life is on the ballot, have been excoriated by many, including many Catholic Bishops. I told him both in writing and in a radio debate that his effort to use Archbishop Chaput's excellent book "Render Unto Caesar" to support his misguided analysis and further his crusade amounted to sophistry. He said I was being uncharitable. Weeks later, Archbishop Chaput called his flawed analysis a "disservice to the Church."

The question concerning Senator Obama's unwavering support of the "Freedom of Choice Act" was asked by a student who attended the University of Detroit, Mercy. Doug did the same kind of "bob and weave" maneuver of verbal avoidance which he had engaged in when I confronted him with the question on a National Public Broadcasting Radio debate. Only he compounded the sophistry. He told the questioning student that the legislation was a "non-starter" because he had been assured by leading Democrats (who also support it) that it would not make it through Congress. Then, to my absolute shock, Doug, the guy who has been telling us all that adding Justices to the US Supreme Court and the Federal Bench will not advance the Pro-Life cause, said that this evil Legislation would not "pass constitutional muster" and would be thrown out by federal courts!

As a fellow constitutional lawyer I have to point out two things. First, such a challenge will require a federal court proceeding. It could end up before the U.S. Supreme Court. Doug's candidate, if elected, will probably stack the Supreme Court and many Federal benches with people of a like mind who refuse to acknowledge what our conscience, the Natural Law and Medical Science confirm, that the children being killed by dismemberment, suction and chemical weapons in all of those wombs are not only human, they are our neighbors. How dare the man who told us all that considering which candidate would make better Supreme Court choices should not matter in this election now continue to try to persuade Catholics that the Abortion Hawk candidate he supports, Senator Obama is really "Pro-Life"!

This Catholic will Vote for Life on Tuesday November 4, 2008! Please, join me in doing so, for life, for the children and for our future as a truly free people.

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