Esolen on Obama at Notre Dame

From Anthony Esolen in Touchstone...

I'll leave it to the right people to express their feelings of betrayal -- I mean the Catholics who have spent many years praying in front of abortuaries, passing out literature on abortion to their students in Catholic schools, donating time and goods and money to homes for unwed mothers, and fighting the patient and frustrating political fight one fence-sitting politician at a time.

Instead I'd like to focus on the moral aphasia of our times. I don't know how else to describe what President Obama said, and how it was received by faculty and students at the Obamarama yesterday-- people who one presumes have had at least a passing acquaintance with moral philosophy. The President said -- by way of holding forth what he believes is a compromise between his position and that of every Christian group before the last misbegotten century -- that we should all work together to reduce the number of "unwanted pregnancies." And with a single phrase he showed, to anyone there who was paying attention, that there is no compromise possible between his position and the ancient Christian teaching....

Esolen draws an analogy between the intent of Russian Roulette and its occasional outcome.-- before extending it to the "Sexual Roulette" played by millions, especially when they have access to abortion.

Except in the case of rape, there are no "unintended pregnancies," none. There are plenty of women who do not want to be pregnant, and plenty of men who do not want them to be pregnant, but in all those cases the pregnancies are the results of intentional actions that have pregnancy as their perfectly natural and perfectly predictable consequence. Contraception does not change the nature of the act itself; indeed, it makes the actors more keenly aware that they are doing what makes babies...The "problem" in the case of Sexual Roulette is not that the body fails, but that it succeeds.

The problem is that the children are not wanted, and that is a very different thing. For the question we should immediately ask is not, "How do we dispose of this child we do not want?" but "What is wrong with us that we do not want this child?"...

It is the very principle of the Culture of Death that the "value" of human life depends upon the valuers, and not upon the God-given nature of the human being in question. What compromise with that principle is possible? "Human life is sacred," say the Christians, and "Human life in the womb is to be valued according to the price list provided by the pregnant woman," says the President. There is no middle position between these principles...