Pro-life leaders and activists will gather at noon today in Lafayette Park – right across the street from the White House – to denounce Notre Dame’s decision to invite President Barack Obama to speak at the university’s May 17 commencement. Similar protests are being held simultaneously in Dallas, Los Angeles, and Fort Wayne.
The Notre Dame invitation has sparked a surprisingly strong backlash both on the nominally Catholic campus and off, galvanizing opposition to the Obama administration’s aggressive abortion agenda.
In less than three months, Obama has:
- Abandoned the Mexico City policy, which forbade non-profits receiving government funding from supporting abortion efforts in other countries;
- Ordered the Department of Health and Human Services to rescind the “conscience clause” that protects medical personnel who refuse to refer or participate in abortions, or dispense abortion-inducing drugs, from legal retaliation;
- Lifted the Bush administration’s ban on embryonic stem cell research, despite a scientific breakthrough that makes such research unnecessary.
- Nominated Dawn Johnsen, a woman who called mothers “fetal containers” in an amicus brief as head of the White House Office of Legal Counsel.
Last December, one pro-life leader told me that the Obama transition team was warned that there would be a non-violent “civil war” if they tried to impose a radical abortion agenda on Americans, including the so-called Freedom of Choice Act.
Consider today’s Good Friday Protest the first shot.
