Obamas Pay Grade - Road to the Middle Class

OUR LIBERAL friends do a pretty good job obfuscating the line between law and morality when they oppose “legislating morality.” And they talk a good line about the separation of church and state. As if. As if faith and law and morality can be safely separated into neat little boxes.

So when Pastor Rick Warren questioned Sen. Barack Obama (D-IL) on abortion at his Saddleback Civil Forum he carefully played the liberal game, asking Sen. Obama:

I know this is a very complex issue. 40 million abortions. At what point does a baby get human rights in your view?

Warren is asking where the secular law steps in and says, OK, at this point the right to choose is trumped by the right to life and now the state will protect this person’s life and will sanction anyone who interferes with its right to life.

This is a difficult question for a liberal to answer. I’ve asked it of liberal women in the past, and they really can’t deal with it. That’s because the liberal line on abortion carefully avoids confronting the issue. There aren’t any liberal sound bites available to help them out.

Sen. Obama is a presidential candidate, so he knows how to duck.

Well, I think that whether you are looking at it from a theological perspective or a scientific perspective, answering that question with specificity, you know, is above my pay grade. But let me just speak more generally about the issue of abortion because this is something obviously the country wrestles with.

Pretty neat, eh? He’s not prepared to deal with the issue in the way that Warren frames it, and the only way that a pastor can frame it without falling into the traps that liberals have set up regarding the separation of church and state.

Notice the Ali Shuffle. He is not being asked for a theological perspective or a scientific perspective. He is being asked a political question. Where would you as president come down on this? Where would you draw the line?

Obama’s evasion illustrates why the recent pro-life activism recently has been about drawing the line in law. Born Alive Act? Partial Birth Abortion Act? Is it ok to kill the baby just before it’s born? Just after? We keep asking: where would you draw the line, liberals? And they don’t like it.

In my view there are two issues here. There is the legal line: cross that and you break the law. But the more important one is the moral line. We are going to have abortion, and there will be abortions on the legal side of the line. But such abortion should be safe, legal, and shameful. To coin a phrase.

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Christopher Chantrill blogs at www.roadtothemiddleclass.com. His Road to the Middle Class is forthcoming.

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Faith & Purpose

“When we began first to preach these things, the people appeared as awakened from the sleep of ages—they seemed to see for the first time that they were responsible beings...”
Finke, Stark, The Churching of America, 1776-1990

Mutual Aid

In 1911... at least nine million of the 12 million covered by national insurance were already members of voluntary sick pay schemes. A similar proportion were also eligible for medical care.
Green, Reinventing Civil Society

Education

“We have met with families in which for weeks together, not an article of sustenance but potatoes had been used; yet for every child the hard-earned sum was provided to send them to school.”
E. G. West, Education and the State

Living Under Law

Law being too tenuous to rely upon in [Ulster and the Scottish borderlands], people developed patterns of settling differences by personal fighting and family feuds.
Thomas Sowell, Conquests and Cultures

German Philosophy

The primary thing to keep in mind about German and Russian thought since 1800 is that it takes for granted that the Cartesian, Lockean or Humean scientific and philosophical conception of man and nature... has been shown by indisputable evidence to be inadequate.
F.S.C. Northrop, The Meeting of East and West

Knowledge

Inquiry does not start unless there is a problem... It is the problem and its characteristics revealed by analysis which guides one first to the relevant facts and then, once the relevant facts are known, to the relevant hypotheses.
F.S.C. Northrop, The Logic of the Sciences and the Humanities

Chappies

“But I saw a man yesterday who knows a fellow who had it from a chappie that said that Urquhart had been dipping himself a bit recklessly off the deep end.” —Freddy Arbuthnot
Dorothy L. Sayers, Strong Poison

Democratic Capitalism

I mean three systems in one: a predominantly market economy; a polity respectful of the rights of the individual to life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness; and a system of cultural institutions moved by ideals of liberty and justice for all. In short, three dynamic and converging systems functioning as one: a democratic polity, an economy based on markets and incentives, and a moral-cultural system which is plural and, in the largest sense, liberal.
Michael Novak, The Spirit of Democratic Capitalism

Action

The incentive that impels a man to act is always some uneasiness... But to make a man act [he must have] the expectation that purposeful behavior has the power to remove or at least to alleviate the felt uneasiness.
Ludwig von Mises, Human Action

Churches

[In the] higher Christian churches� they saunter through the liturgy like Mohawks along a string of scaffolding who have long since forgotten their danger. If God were to blast such a service to bits, the congregation would be, I believe, genuinely shocked. But in the low churches you expect it every minute.
Annie Dillard, Holy the Firm

Conversion

“When we received Christ,” Phil added, “all of a sudden we now had a rule book to go by, and when we had problems the preacher was right there to give us the answers.”
James M. Ault, Jr., Spirit and Flesh

Living Law

The recognition and integration of extralegal property rights [in the Homestead Act] was a key element in the United States becoming the most important market economy and producer of capital in the world.
Hernando de Soto, The Mystery of Capital

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