Obama, who has shown he can draw lessons from Bill Clinton’s presidency, can find one on this issue. Picking up on the pro-choice movement’s most popular slogan, Clinton declared during his 1992 campaign that abortion should be “safe, legal and rare.”
Abortions did become rarer during Clinton’s time in office, dropping by 11 percent. But since Clinton made no major public moves on abortion reduction, many pro-lifers who had been inclined his way felt he had ignored the third word in his motto. There’s no reason for Obama to make the same mistake—and no reason for advocates of abortion rights to get in the way of his trying to build a new consensus.
On Election Day, according to the exit polls, more than 60 percent of Obama’s ballots came from voters who described themselves as either “moderate” or “conservative.”
These voters don’t want Obama to be timid on his core economic promises, but they do expect him to govern as the cultural moderate he promised to be. He should not lose his chance to make cultural warfare a quaint relic of the past.
A Greenville, S.C., priest who told parishioners those who voted for President-elect Barack Obama risked placing themselves "outside of the full communion of Christ’s church" is simply enunciating church teaching and has the full support of the Diocese of Charleston, a spokesman said Thursday.If "reducing abortion" through greater access to birth control and more support for poor women will appease that fellow, then we may very well be able to end the culture wars and all live together in peace and harmony. What do you think the odds are of that happening?The provocative letter from the Rev. Jay Scott Newman to members of St. Mary's Catholic Church has sparked controversy and yet another conversation about faith and public policy.
"Voting for a pro-abortion politician when a plausible pro-life alternative exists constitutes material cooperation with intrinsic evil," Newman said in the letter posted on the Greenville church's Web site, www.stmarysgvl.org, "and those Catholics who do so place themselves outside of the full communion of Christ's Church and under the judgment of divine law."
Newman said that those who did not choose the anti-abortion candidate, in this case U.S. Sen. John McCain, "should not receive Holy Communion until and unless they are reconciled to God in the Sacrament of Penance, lest they eat and drink their own condemnation."
Calling Obama "the most radical pro-abortion politician ever to serve in the United States Senate," Newman went on to say Catholics must pray for the newly elected chief executive.
"Let us hope and pray that the responsibilities of the presidency and the grace of God will awaken in the conscience of this extraordinarily gifted man an awareness that the unholy slaughter of children in this nation is the greatest threat to the peace and security of the United States and constitutes a clear and present danger to the common good," Newman said in the letter.