Gregory Kane
What were Notre Dame officials thinking?
By: Gregory Kane
May 18, 2009
You mean some folks at a Catholic university would actually object to a “pro-choice” president of the United States giving a commencement speech?
Boy, who would have thunk.
I found out about President Obama’s commencement speech at the University of Notre Dame in South Bend, Ind. the way I get most of my information about his administration: Through an e-mail sent from the White House press office. Obama would deliver commencement addresses, I learned, at Arizona State University, the University of Notre Dame and the U.S. Naval Academy. I get the first one and the last one; the middle one still boggles my mind.
And apparently I’m not alone. According to Washington Post reporter Michael Fletcher, more than 87,000 people have signed an online petition calling for Notre Dame officials to “uninvite” Obama. Last week, Alan Keyes was arrested with other demonstrators protesting Obama’s commencement speech on the grounds of the university. Keyes is the erudite, outspoken conservative Republican who ran against Obama in the 2004 Illinois U.S. Senate race because, well, Lordy, somebody had to. Keyes is also unabashedly anti-abortion.
Boy, who would have thunk.
I found out about President Obama’s commencement speech at the University of Notre Dame in South Bend, Ind. the way I get most of my information about his administration: Through an e-mail sent from the White House press office. Obama would deliver commencement addresses, I learned, at Arizona State University, the University of Notre Dame and the U.S. Naval Academy. I get the first one and the last one; the middle one still boggles my mind.
And apparently I’m not alone. According to Washington Post reporter Michael Fletcher, more than 87,000 people have signed an online petition calling for Notre Dame officials to “uninvite” Obama. Last week, Alan Keyes was arrested with other demonstrators protesting Obama’s commencement speech on the grounds of the university. Keyes is the erudite, outspoken conservative Republican who ran against Obama in the 2004 Illinois U.S. Senate race because, well, Lordy, somebody had to. Keyes is also unabashedly anti-abortion.
That’s compared to Obama, who’s been identified in this column as not only an EOTF (Enemy Of The Fetus) but also America’s Public Enemy Number One Of The Fetus. The man knows he doesn’t belong within a 50-yard radius of any Catholic institution in America.
Notre Dame officials knew that, too, well before they extended their invitation. (In case you’re wondering: yes, I am Catholic, baptized as an infant at Baltimore’s St. Peter Claver Church in January of 1952.)
It’s not just Obama’s almost fanatical devotion to the 1973 Roe v. Wade decision that rankles me and makes me wonder what Notre Dame officials were thinking when they chose to invite this man as a commencement speaker; it’s his tendency to resort to cheap demagoguery on the issue.
It’s not just Obama’s almost fanatical devotion to the 1973 Roe v. Wade decision that rankles me and makes me wonder what Notre Dame officials were thinking when they chose to invite this man as a commencement speaker; it’s his tendency to resort to cheap demagoguery on the issue.
He constantly links the “right” to an abortion to women’s rights. So, if you’re anti-abortion, in Obama’s view, you’re anti-woman, one of those atavistic types who wants to keep women barefoot, pregnant and tethered to hearth and home most of their adult lives.
Obama was at it again when he announced his administration’s funding of embryonic stem cell research, implying those who opposed such research were opposed to science and progress. Americans have, for decades, fallen for this “progressive supporters of science vs. ignorant, backwater yahoos” hokey doke. Obama just gave us the latest version.
In 1960, that hokey doke was a film called “Inherit The Wind,” a fictionalized account of the famous 1925 Scopes Monkey Trial in Tennessee. Spencer Tracy played attorney Henry Drummond, the fictionalized Clarence Darrow, who defended teacher John Scopes for teaching evolution in the classroom. Fredric March played Matthew Harrison Brady, the fictionalized persona of progressive Democrat William Jennings Bryan.
In the film, the Brady character comes off as a narrow-minded religious zealot out to stamp out all scientific progress. The true story was a bit more complex: Bryan had championed the cause of the common man for years. He opposed the teaching of evolution because many evolutionists were diehard racists and eugenicists. (According to Alan Dershowitz, not known as a babbling right-wing lunatic, the textbook Scopes used contained several notoriously racist passages.)
One of those diehard racists and eugenicists of Scopes’ time was Margaret Sanger. Yes, the founder of Planned Parenthood was a eugenicist who, according to author Edwin Black in “War Against The Weak,” “advocated for mass sterilization of so-called defectives (and) mass incarceration of the unfit.”
Obama was at it again when he announced his administration’s funding of embryonic stem cell research, implying those who opposed such research were opposed to science and progress. Americans have, for decades, fallen for this “progressive supporters of science vs. ignorant, backwater yahoos” hokey doke. Obama just gave us the latest version.
In 1960, that hokey doke was a film called “Inherit The Wind,” a fictionalized account of the famous 1925 Scopes Monkey Trial in Tennessee. Spencer Tracy played attorney Henry Drummond, the fictionalized Clarence Darrow, who defended teacher John Scopes for teaching evolution in the classroom. Fredric March played Matthew Harrison Brady, the fictionalized persona of progressive Democrat William Jennings Bryan.
In the film, the Brady character comes off as a narrow-minded religious zealot out to stamp out all scientific progress. The true story was a bit more complex: Bryan had championed the cause of the common man for years. He opposed the teaching of evolution because many evolutionists were diehard racists and eugenicists. (According to Alan Dershowitz, not known as a babbling right-wing lunatic, the textbook Scopes used contained several notoriously racist passages.)
One of those diehard racists and eugenicists of Scopes’ time was Margaret Sanger. Yes, the founder of Planned Parenthood was a eugenicist who, according to author Edwin Black in “War Against The Weak,” “advocated for mass sterilization of so-called defectives (and) mass incarceration of the unfit.”
Sanger also “vigorously opposed charitable efforts to uplift the downtrodden and deprived, and argued extensively that it was better that the cold and hungry be left without help, so that the eugenically superior strains could multiply without competition from ‘the unfit.’
She repeatedly referred to the lower classes and the unfit as ‘human waste’ not worthy of assistance, and proudly quoted the extreme eugenic view that human ‘weeds’ should be exterminated.”
In a July 2007 speech to Planned Parenthood, Obama proudly noted that the organization’s first Margaret Sanger Award was given to Martin Luther King Jr. Maybe Obama and King didn’t know any better.
But officials as the University of Notre Dame sure as heck should have.
Examiner columnist Gregory Kane is a journalist who lives in Baltimore.
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