Judge Noonan at Notre Dame: Not looking for trouble

By the time Notre Dame “Laetare Remarks” speaker John Noonan finished naming people or groups that will not solve the abortion impasse, declaring it

too serious to be settled by pollsters and pundits; too delicate to be decided by physical force or by banners and slogans, pickets and placards; too basic for settlement to be based on a vote by judges

there was no one left but the president and the Congress.  He had nothing to say about the latter, but he pronounced Obama, sitting a few steps away, the possessor of “great goodness” and “a man of conscience.”

Earlier, he had told of Lincoln advising emancipated slaves to move south of the border, “somewhere in Central America” — a “ridiculous” idea, said ex-slave Frederick Douglass.  But a month or so later, Lincoln issued his Emancipation Proclamation,” providing long after the fact an example for Noonan of changing your mind and doing the right thing.

His comments at the graduation seemed geared to changing Obama’s mind and were anything but the dynamic game-changer envisioned as possible by the National Post writer mentioned in the blog item below. 

In fact, Noonan took pains to distance himself from the refusal of Mary Ann Glendon to receive this year’s Laetare, precisely because the man Noonan apparently hopes to convert would be honored at the same ceremony.

He was careful, punctilious, in fact, about not blaming Glendon, the Harvard prof and former ambassador to the Vatican, calling her “a friend . . . whose absence I regret” and her decision “lonely, courageous, and conscientious.”

[S]he declined the honor she deserved. I respect her decision.

He gave his own rationale for taking her place on the platform (without receiving the award, which he received decades ago):

I am here to confirm that all consciences are not the same; that we can recognize great goodness in our nation’s president without defending all of his multitudinous decisions; and that we can rejoice on this wholly happy occasion.

Words which warmed the cockles of the heart of ND President Rev. John Jenkins, to be sure.  And which demonstrate Glendon’s point, that a commencement ceremony is no place to argue abortion with the President of the U.S. 

Noonan apparently agreed, and settled for the softest of sells, emphasis on conscience, which may not make cowards of us all but probably is the only element in the abortion debate on which agreement can be reached with the most abortion-minded President in 220 years.