Reflections on the American Election
November 6, 2008
Somehow, America felt different the other evening. It’s not clear how one knows such things, but one does: the whole country felt different, as though a vast cloud had lifted, or as though an incubus that had sat on the nation’s soul for a generation had suddenly been exorcised. The Great Republic awoke from its long, catatonic sleep, and found itself again a living democracy.
On Tuesday, Barack Hussein Obama was elected the 44th President of the United States. Like many millions of other Americans, I voted for him. I voted for him because I agree with most of the things he stands for, and because he impressed me as the right man for the job of leading this nation at a time of deepening crisis. Anyone who questions Obama’s decency, intelligence, and love of country strikes me as a fraud. Anyone who can fail to be moved at the sight of America’s electing its first black president, after its long, embittered history of race relations — electing him, not because of his skin color, but because he is patently the best the nation has to offer — strikes me as suffering from a peculiar moral blindness.
On the question of abortion, I disagree with Obama. I think that the status of the unborn child as a person has to be more clearly defined by law, and cannot be left solely to the individual preference of the mother. But it has never seemed to me that the abortion issue was either completely unambiguous or that it justified one’s buying into the entire agenda of the Right. It should be remembered that even Hitler supported “family values.”
If there is a single issue that matters most to me, that determines my vote, it is not abortion, or the war, or the economy, but the Constitution. I think that, for much of his administration, George W. Bush did all he could to subvert the Constitution, in violation of his oath to uphold it. He and Dick Cheney regarded the president, not only as the Chief Executive of the law, but as the final arbiter of the law’s meaning. Their attempt to redefine presidential power as unlimited went virtually unchecked until the Democrats took back control of the Congress in 2006. That arrogant pursuit of an ideological, oligarchic agenda constitutes one of the most frightening chapters in America’s history. It left many people, both in this country and in the rest of the world, wondering if America had lost its democratic soul. I did not think that the party that had brought such misery upon us should be rewarded by being returned to power.
Another way of stating the above: Obama is a Christian, but he is not a theocrat. In his book, The Audacity of Hope, he describes himself as both a Christian and a skeptic. What I think that means is that he is a Christian with a strong sense of the validity of secular rationality, and a strong sense of the validity of those secular modes of decision-making that are embodied in democratic procedure. Hope is a Christian, theological virtue; what I think Obama is peculiarly aware of is that it is also the soul of democracy; it is what makes democratic society work, the idea that people can actually effect a change for the better in their own lives and the lives of others, through actively seeking the common good. Nothing destroys democracy like cynicism; for the time being, it seems, the United States is going to be blessed to have, as its president, a man who is not cynical. May God preserve him.
November 6, 2008 at 10:37 am
I did not join in with the majority of Americans who voted. It fills me with great sadness that even the slightest of legal restrictions on the killing of the unborn is likely to be swept away; in fact, the president-elect has promised to do just that. So, I can’t be happy about this. I wish I could. I wish I could join in the infectious good spirits of most of the people where I live, but I can’t.
I listened to the victory speech, and it was quite good. I hope he believes and acts on his own words. Will, for instance, his pledge to listen to opposing voices amount to more than listening? We shall see.
November 6, 2008 at 6:01 pm
I was in the minority on this one as well… In more ways than one.
Catholics and the election were disappointing if not surprising. I hope that when it comes to the actual issue of being pro-life, they show more resolve…
Time will tell.
November 7, 2008 at 9:21 am
And I suspect that the vast majority of the rest of the world is rejoicing with you.
November 7, 2008 at 9:44 am
[...] must admit that I am beginning to be just slightly infected by some of the enthusiasm. When I read Peter Gilbert describing how a vast cloud had lifted I could not help but being reminded of our South African [...]
November 9, 2008 at 1:16 am
Karl,
Obama’s book, The Audacity of Hope, leaves me thinking that the president-elect is not a doctrinaire pro-abortionist but a man whose primary desire, with respect to abortion, is to prevent the debate on the subject from tearing the society apart. His hero is Lincoln, who, it should be remembered, was not so much antislavery as pro-union; similarly, Obama is probably not so much dogmatically “pro-choice” as he is dogmatically communitarian, committed to finding ways in which people who do not agree with each other on all things are able to work together. His main argument, in the book, in favor of his own position supporting Roe v. Wade is that, if abortions are going to be happening anyway, women who resort to them should not endanger their lives by resorting to clothes hangers. One might think that this is like arguing that, if murders are going to happen anyway, one should not endanger the murderers’ lives by forcing them to use unsafe guns. Obama’s reply to this is (apparently) that there is a moral difference of intent between a murderer and a woman who aborts her child; the former clearly intends to kill another human being; the latter, presumably, consoles her conscience by arguing that what she is killing is not yet a human being in the full sense. The effect of Roe v. Wade is that the government takes an official position of agnosticism with respect to the personhood of the fetus; Obama, although he is a Christian, evidently shares that agnosticism.
My own position is the following. Abortion is a grave sin, and the Christian Church, from its earliest days, has condemned it as such. But it would be untrue to say that, from the earliest days of Christianity, there has been a consensus among Christians that the rational, immortal soul is created and infused at the moment of conception, and that therefore the embryo or fetus has, from the moment of conception, the status of personhood. In fact, the question of insufflation or inanimation, of how and when the soul is united to the human body to form a complete human person, perplexed the fathers to no end. It was a question that St. Augustine, for instance, remained undecided on to the end of his life, although this did not prevent him from condemning, like other fathers, the practice of abortion.
A central biblical text for Christian tradition on the abortion issue is Exodus 21:22-23. This text speaks of a situation where two men are fighting, and the pregnant wife of one of them is struck and loses her child. There is an important difference between the Hebrew (Massoretic) and Greek (Septuagint) readings of this text. In the Hebrew version, the text differentiates two possibilities: in one case, the child dies, but the woman receives no other injury; in the other case, both the child dies and the wife sustains injury or death. In the Greek version, there are also two possible cases, but both relate to the child: if the child dies, but has not yet taken on a human form, the man who caused the miscarriage pays damages; if the child does however exhibit human form, then the assailant is guilty of homicide.
The presence of this text in the Septuagint did not prevent some Greek Church fathers from seeing animation of the fetus as occurring at conception anyway. But others concluded from this text that the entry of the rational soul into the fetus occurs at some later point of gestation — generally thought to be 40 days from conception in the case of males and 80 or 90 days in the case of females, in agreement with the teachings of Aristotelian embryology. A version of this latter teaching — mediate, as opposed to immediate animation — became generally accepted in the Latin-speaking Church from about the time of St. Augustine to roughly two or three hundred years ago. Thomas Aquinas was one notable saint who held to this view.
Briefly, my own position is that this mediate view of animation makes sense, at least politically: it might possibly serve as a way out of our unending, self-destructive culture wars. It was at the basis of the old common law teaching, still widely in force in the United States until Roe v. Wade, that prohibited abortion after “quickening” but was less strict about cases at earlier stages of pregnancy.
In 1869, Pope Pius IX revised canon law so that the distinction between “formed” and “unformed,” or “animate” and “inanimate,” no longer entered into consideration in assigning canonical penalties for abortion. That is, he implicitly rejected the mediate view of animation and accepted the view that life, in the sense of full personhood, begins at conception. By rejecting the mediate view and accepting the immediate one, Pope Pius IX may have undercut the common law tradition by taking away its theological rationale.
Apparently, in Jewish law the tendency is to view the fetus as part of the mother until actual birth. This suggests to me that one of the underlying factors in the abortion debate that led to the Roe v. Wade decision in 1973 may have been an unspoken conflict between two essentially religious schools of jurisprudence, a Catholic one (seeing animation as occurring at conception) and a Jewish one (seeing it as occurring at birth), both of them tugging at the old common law teaching, though in different directions. That might help explain the otherwise mysterious decision of the court to treat abortion as a “privacy” issue: the justices of the court may have worried that a decision stating what, in real terms, the fetus actually is would have endangered the no-establishment clause by providing official U.S. support and sanction for either the Jewish or the Catholic religion, over against the other. Faced with two rival ontologies, the court chose skepticism, and let people choose their own reality. The result has been the madness we have seen for the past thirty-five years.
My guess is that Obama, being a practical man, might well be persuaded to modify his position on abortion rights if he saw a politically compelling reason to do so. He almost says as much in his book: he admits that his position on abortion may ultimately be wrong. If he admits this, this suggests that he would be willing to change that position if he were persuaded, by argument, that it is wrong. It cannot be said that Obama has not reflected on the abortion question from the standpoint of a Christian and a man of prayer; his book is proof to the contrary. But it is also true that Obama has reflected on the abortion question from the standpoint of a politician. His business is the art of the possible. He knows that change is not possible until there is a sufficient foundation for change in the popular will. Such a foundation may take time to build. Essentially, the Republican Party has made a deal with Christians; it has said to them: You give us our oligarchy, and we’ll give you your piety. We’ll let you serve God, if you let us serve Mammon. Obama doesn’t like the terms of that deal; he knows that, in the end, the country won’t stomach it.
Perhaps I am wrong about Obama, but my sense is that he is a decent man, and a Christian. He will change his mind on the abortion question when there is a sufficient popular basis in the Democratic Party to enable him to do so. I aim to help provide him that basis.
Peter
November 9, 2008 at 7:41 pm
I pray this is correct. We should all pray for the President-elect. Our nation and world desperately need it – and would have needed it no matter the outcome on election day.
November 10, 2008 at 5:06 am
The Washington Post reports that among the other executive orders of President Bush that are likely to be rescinded after President-elect Obama takes office are those that restrict abortion rights. While I appreciate that politics is the art of the possible, Mr Obama’s seeming willingness at this point to extend abortion rights is troublesome. There is little in his public rhetoric that suggests that his position on abortion is anything other than settled.
In a July 2007 in a speech to the he Planned Parenthood Action Fund (PPAF, for example, Senator Obama said:
“There will always be people, many of goodwill, who do not share my view on the issue of choice. On this fundamental issue, I will not yield and Planned Parenthood will not yield.”
Add to this his stated intent to sign into law “The Freedom of Choice Act,” and I find it hard to believe that Obama is anything other than committed to a pro-choice position.
In Christ,
+Fr Gregory
November 10, 2008 at 2:35 pm
Fr. Gregory,
Just as President Bush’s signing into law of the Partial-Birth Abortion Ban Act in 2003 was one of the few acts he took that I agreed with in his long and, on the whole, disastrous presidency, which still has two months to go, so, if President-elect Obama signs into law the Freedom of Choice Act, I will disagree with him on that, although I will still hold out hopes of his being, on the balance, a good president.
In looking at the text of the Senate version of the Freedom of Choice Act, I find that the chief practical effect of that bill is to modify the Partial-Birth Abortion Ban Act by allowing for late-term abortions in cases where the health of the mother is at stake. (The Partial-Birth Abortion Ban Act already allowed for such abortions in cases where the mother’s life is at stake.) Granted, such a provision is very loosely defined, and abortions “for the sake of the health of the mother” have probably occurred on the flimsiest of pretexts. But at least the bill presents fetal viability as a kind of dividing line, beyond which abortion can, in fact, be restricted. (It defines “viability” as “that stage of pregnancy when, in the best medical judgment of the attending physician based on the particular medical facts of the case before the physician, there is a reasonable likelihood of the sustained survival of the fetus outside of the woman.”) The presence of such language about “viability” implies a philosophical concession of the principle that abortion is not simply a “privacy” issue: the law recognizes that, at some point, even prior to birth, one has to reckon with the fetus as human life that intrinsically ought to be protected.
Peter
November 11, 2008 at 9:38 pm
Greetings and felicitations, Peter and pals.
Didn’t the Roe decision work, in practice, along lines of a “mediate animation” theory of personhood? Perhaps accidentally so, but nevertheless …
That is: Roe’s trimester analysis proceeds from the Court’s notion (which itself proceeded from a wide-ranging study of biological opinion of the day) that no Person exists until the end of the sixth month.
The central problem, an amalgam of ethical, legal and scientific questions, can be simply stated: Is an embryo or a fetus a Person under the Constitution? A Court concluding simply “Yes” would certainly have allowed states to outlaw abortion …
In the event, the Court considered evidence of biology, history and public morality, and concluded that a fetus is not a Person, or not close enough to being a Person, before the point of Viability.
Given the fundamentality of the woman’s right to live a Private life, everything else followed in reasonable enough fashion. First trimester abortions could not be proscribed by law, and those in the second trimester could be regulated only with regard to maternal health. Beyond this — beyond Viability as then conceived — the states were permitted to regulate as they saw fit.
The approach is not in accord with the Christian thinking Peter outlines above — for it makes no attempt to decide when the Soul animates the fetus. But the law produced is one that someone using the Christian approach might also produce (if the point of animation were determined to be 180 days past conception).
I realize that someone who sees the question entirely bounded by a religious doctrine will likely never find a legal approach satisfactory — particularly within the US federal system, where the fifty states are left to write as they see fit whatever law may be written.
But if one accepts as a starting point the Constitutional system as we have it — accepting the federal system, the common law principle of Judicial Review, and the Constitution’s precise concern not for “human life” or “human souls” but rather “persons” — then the crux of the Roe decision, where reasonable minds may yet disagree, is the pragmatic reduction of Personhood to Viability.
I can imagine a Court revisiting Roe and revising not only the assessment of where precisely Viability occurs, but, more basically, the reduction of Personhood to Viability.
The Roe court chewed long and hard on both of these steps, and allowed that scientific changes might someday warrant an adjustment of the point of Viability.
Going further — to break the Person-Viability reduction — would be more traumatic for the law and society. The Court sought and employed that reduction in part because of its remove from religious and similar arguments. That is, there was a flight here to “positive” (materialistic) evidence — characteristic of the US Supreme Court in general, somewhat in contrast to its precedents in the English system.
But even if Viability were adjusted, or the reduction of Personhood to Viability thrown out, there would remain a further legal substratum in Roe that should not be touched. This is the basic notion of Fundamental Rights, upon which a universe of law, and, I would submit, our vision of American society, rests.
The Bill of Rights and the law-making practice of Constitutional adjudication across our centuries have left us with two broad categories of Fundamental Rights: Freedom of Conscience and Freedom of Privacy.
Under the latter are grouped decisions like Griswold v Connecticutt in 1965, and Loving v Virgina of 1967. Griswold said states cannot outlaw contraception. Loving protected marriages like that of Justice Clarence Thomas to his caucasian wife. Roe v Wade proceeds along the same basic lines — that states can interfere with the conduct of private life only by specified ways and means that accord with federal law (statutory and constitutional).
I hope, then, that if a Court someday does revisit Roe, it does so carefully, surgically, acting on Viability.
Playing with Personhood would be unsettling, particularly if one religious doctrine were to somehow gain currency and expression among five of the nine justices.
Playing with Fundamental Rights would lead to legal and perhaps social chaos.
As for Obama, he seems to be talking about withdrawing regulations that Bush Jr promulgated as an end-run around Judicial Review on this issue. I will be happy to see all such rescinded. The Obama administration in so doing would be restoring Constitutional equilibrium. The president is not god. Indeed, Constitutionally speaking, we have no god. That’s America.
November 18, 2008 at 4:36 pm
I have hesitated to reopen this discussion, in part because I recognize that the original article that occasioned it was marked by a display of political passions that, in retrospect, appears foolish. I am well aware that people of good faith had legitimate reasons for voting against Obama. It is certainly possible that, in voting for him, I erred. But I thought that, of the candidates running, he would make the better president, and I still think this. I hope that that confidence will be vindicated by actions that go towards the healing of a sick and divided nation, and that do not further embitter it.
With regard to the abortion issue, let me repeat: My own point of view is that abortion is a grave sin. It is a form of destruction of human life, and it cheapens and coarsens all life where it is allowed. Ideally, I would prefer to see all abortions illegal in this country. But I recognize that, in a constitutional democracy, in which people with very different ideas about life have to find ways of living in peace with one another, a complete ban on abortions, from the moment of conception onward, is not practically feasible.
Bill Ney (the author of the political blog New Combat, and an old friend whom I have known since college) gives, I think, a fairly accurate statement of the aims of the Supreme Court in its Roe v. Wade decision. Probably the only factual claim he makes that I would take issue with is something he says in the last paragraph. Although the Constitution does not mention “God,” the terms “God,” “Creator,” and “Divine Providence” occur in the Declaration of Independence; and I would argue that the theological notion of natural law underlies American constitutionalism in various ways, not least in the idea of “inalienable rights” as something God-given. For myself, I don’t think that the meaning of America can be summed up by saying that, constitutionally speaking, we have no god. Such a statement seems, in fact, to encapsulate all that many Americans fear about the Left: a systematic denial of the place of the religious conscience in the formulation of civil law and public morality.
(In fairness, Bill asked me to delete the paragraph, but I didn’t have the technical know-how to do so.)
November 23, 2008 at 9:07 pm
Peter- I don’t know if you remember me from college. I left a post a while ago in another part of your blog. I’d love to email with you a bit.