Playing God with human rights
The Democrats have finished their convention and the Republicans are about to start theirs. The "party faithful" remain a-twitter, while the rest of us sift through the "sis-boom-bah" in hopes of understanding who the candidates really are and who would be the better president.
Sen. Barack Obama got me thinking with something he said a couple of weeks ago.
On Aug. 16, in a forum at the Saddleback Church in California, pastor Rick Warren asked Obama and Sen. McCain a series of questions. One was this:
"At what point does a baby get human rights, in your view?"
Obama said "whether you're looking at it from a theological perspective or a scientific perspective, answering that question with specificity ... is above my pay grade."
Obama went on to generally talk about the moral and ethical components of the abortion issue and to reiterate his view that it was important to reduce the number of unwanted pregnancies.
Sen. McCain answered the same question with "at conception."
Look, we can debate abortion till the cows come home. I'll leave that for a better forum. But the way I heard it, the question wasn't about abortion. It was about human rights and at what point ought government afford them to humans.
Is it at a certain age? Or is it after some rite of passage, such as baptism? Should we simply issue civil rights at the DMV upon successfully passing a driver's test? Or how about doing it at citizenship, thus solving our illegal immigration problem at the same time?
Those are silly answers, of course.
All thinking people would at the very least say that society bestows civil rights on a human being at birth. Some would argue that it occurs at conception, hence the debate over abortion and a whole subset of other issues.
But let's focus on what we can all agree upon: Human rights happen, at the very latest, upon birth.
So what kind of horse-apples answer is the glib retort: It's "above my pay grade"?
I'll tell you what kind of answer that is. It is the answer of a person who thinks it is OK to terminate a live birth when it is the result of an attempted abortion. In fact, as an Illinois state senator, Obama supported just such a concept. He now tries to obscure that fact because it is an extreme position that will not play well for him in a presidential race.
But his words betray him.
If Sen. Obama truly believes that establishing a time-certain for human rights is above his pay grade, he would as a government official logically opt to extend those rights at the earliest possible moment -- that is at conception, or at the very latest, at birth.
However, when an abortion results in a live birth, Obama says extending human rights to such an entity is "above his pay grade" ... then he moves to deny those human rights in God's stead.
Last week there began a re-examination of Obama's record on all this. Writing in the Chicago Tribune, Dennis Byrne detailed the background and concluded:
"Obama's response to all this is to sidestep any discussion about when human personhood begins, the key question in the abortion debate. Some say it begins at the moment of conception; others say it begins at birth. ... But by arguing against born-alive legislation because it might in some distant and ambiguous way obstruct abortion, Obama implies that the right to an abortion trumps an infant's right to life, even after he is born.
"Such logic is breathtaking. It says that even after birth, a mother's right to rid herself of the baby supersedes any right that a child, now independent of the mother's body and domain, has to live. Where America stands on this issue truly is a measure of its sense of justice and compassion. On this score, Obama fails."
I wouldn't call it failure. I'd call it playing God. And, ladies and gentlemen, for however you might come down on the abortion issue, that's a bad sign for anyone who seeks the presidency of the greatest and most powerful nation on Earth.
Sherman Frederick (sfrederick@ reviewjournal.com) is publisher of the Review-Journal and president of Stephens Media.
