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.

Holy Post at National Post (of Canada) analyzes the Obama-Notre Dame business as an opportunity.  U.S. Judge and former Notre Dame law prof John Noonan holds the key, in the view of Brian Lilley.

Fr. Jenkins has been able to withstand pressure to rescind the invitation to the president by saying the dialogue on this issue is in the best Catholic tradition. His ability to hold his job may depend on whether Mr. Noonan is up to the task of challenging a visiting president.

Was he?  Nothing’s been reported yet, and this avid listener was not present, but Montreal-born Lilley, Ottawa Bureau Chief for CFRB 1010, an AM station in Toronto and CJAD 800, an AM station in Montreal, and associate editor of Mercatornet.com (a very interesting site), cites him on abortion.  Once:

His 1970 contribution to a book called The Morality of Abortion lays out the Christian thinking on abortion going back to the apostles, clearly showing that although there have been differences on where life starts at different points of scientific understanding, the prohibition against abortion has been consistent and clear.

Again:

In his 1979 book A Private Choice, Mr. Noonan put forth secular arguments against abortion, ending with this line: “There must be a limit to a liberty so mistaken in its foundations, so far-reaching in its malignant consequences, and so deadly in its exercise, There must be a surpassing of such liberty by love.”

Lilley prognosticates:

If Mr. Noonan was to put those views forward on Saturday [sic], it would be one of the most profound discussions of abortion at the national level that America has seen in years. This could ignite the conversation on this divisive issue in way campaign politics never could.

Well you wouldn’t know it from CNN and Fox News accounts, which named Noonan not once.  CNN, by the way, gave Rev. James Martin, S.J., his opportunity to flack for Obama.  Martin gave several over-the-top statements in support of The One and unreservedly praising his performance. 

Martin Arroyo of EWTN, on the other hand, left the anchor lady fumbling for the text she wanted to rebut him after he demonstrated from the speech the Obama way with words which is at the heart of his appeal.

Martin and the other America Mag Jesuits have fallen head over heels for the president.  I knew that but was in a certain degree of denial.  After this display, I have no doubt of it.

A more or less line-by-line discussion (commentary, correction) of Neil Steinberg’s column today, “What’s behind anti-abortion frenzy?”:

. . . . The abortion issue seems to be heating up in a way beyond the flap of a prominent Catholic school conferring an honorary degree upon a president who supports a woman’s right to end her pregnancy.

End the life of her unwanted unborn.

According to the latest polls, suddenly more Americans call themselves “pro-life” than “pro-choice” — 51 percent vs. 42 percent — a dramatic shift from just last year, when 50 percent were pro-choice and 44 percent pro-life.

Good for him, to bring that out.

What does this mean? Well, I suppose if you are pro-life, it means the nation has had an unexpected moral reassessment. As if waking from a dream, it gazes down and suddenly sees the blood on its hands, and recoils in moral horror.

Sounds about right.

Or, if you are pro-choice, you might dismiss the polls as meaning nothing, a hard rightward swing among Republicans and nothing more.

Arbitrary dismissal, it seems.

You might point out that human rights are not determined by majority vote, thank goodness, and that just as the pro-life movement didn’t fold its tents and go home in 1995, when 56 percent of Americans told pollsters they were pro-choice while 33 percent said they were pro-life, so now the shifting numbers don’t affect bedrock reality [as he sees it: argues nothing] — that this is a decision a woman should be able to make for herself and not one made for her by her husband or her deacon or anybody else.

Make for herself?  No public interest here?

The first question about abortion is whether it is an absolute or not. [No.  What it is comes first.] If you believe abortion is wrong under all circumstances [like any other direct killing of an innocent person], that abortion the day after conception is the same as 250 days in, a crime and a sin and an atrocity, well, you can proceed to the next page because this isn’t something under consideration, for you.

But it’s at the heart of this knotty issue.

No shame there, and I’m not criticizing you, or ridiculing your religion, just saying that we are thinking about the issue here, evaluating it, and if you are only willing to play a game where you are guaranteed to win at the end, then it isn’t quite fair to pretend you’re part of the discussion. “Abortion is murder.” We get it; thanks.

It’s an otiose argument?  How so?

Myself, I consider this a gray region. Abortion isn’t murder — well, not until the last stage of pregnancy, when it is [How did Neil figure that out, besides counting Supreme Court votes?] — but rather a sort of murder, murder lite, and I’m glad that I’ve conducted my life in such a way that I’ve never been party to one.

Where to start with this?  This gray region has to do with direct killing of innocent people, so it’s either-or, take your pick?  But juries need beyond-a-shadow evidence for a guilty verdict.  Not in this case?  Murder lite is like pregnancy lite, which if left to go its course gives us a baby?

That said, I don’t consider a fertilized egg the size of the period at the end of this sentence to be the equivalent of the Gerber baby, and find people who do to be curious, especially for the anger they bring to the debate.

Honestly stated, and typical, even typal.  Neil can’t imagine concern for the fertized egg, and that decides it.  Imagination rules?

If being pro-life meant an across-the-board reverence for life — if pro-life activists were also Human Rights Watch members, also fierce opponents to capital punishment and vigorous battlers of AIDS in Africa, and of course anti-handgun and anti-war — then I could almost understand the compressed rage that pro-lifers often exhibit.

Sure, but that would not affect the argument, whomever it persuaded.

But they aren’t. Nor are they in favor of the contraception that would prevent abortions, a tipoff that this — at its core — is not about preventing violence to the unborn so much as it is about unraveling a modern society where women are able to plan their pregnancies.

If as a group they aren’t anti-executions, etc., some are.  Do these convince Neil?  Moreover, is it wise to focus on the angry ones?  To adapt The Master, the angry we have always with us.

Stealing is bad, and religion speaks against it, but no congregation ever took to the streets to protest theft. There is an intensity — at times a frenzy — behind the abortion debate, which hints that something else is going on, that religion is attacking modern sexually open society at its weakest point, taking a stand that requires them to not only see abortion as a morally significant act, which it is, but to insist that morality cannot shift under any circumstance, and that having an abortion is the same if you’re 14, or 24, or 64.

Wait.  Fr. Pfleger leads marches all the time, protesting murder.  As for intensity, that’s bound to ramp up if it’s murder that pro-lifers have in mind — and they do.  As for sexually open society’s weakest point, yes, and a very weak one indeed.  And no, morality does not shift in cases of murder.  It’s murder no matter the ages involved.

The “abortion is murder” line is just that — a slogan. The people saying it obviously don’t really believe that, in their hearts, because otherwise they’d be even more extreme than they already are. If it’s murder, then why aren’t they talking about, not only banning abortion, but also conducting enormous public trials to prosecute the millions of women who have had one? That doesn’t seem to be on the table.

Well there you are, intense in opposition to abortion because you think it’s murder?  He doesn’t believe that, because if you believed that, you’d be even more intense.  And how much wood would a woodchuck chuck . . . ?  No cry for enormous public trials?  They just don’t have the imagination for that.  Not as big as Neil’s anyhow.

I called this issue the “Hundred Years War” above, after checking to see what year Margaret Sanger went to prison for running a birth control clinic — 1917. Not quite a century, but I’m confident that whatever Barack Obama says Sunday, we’ll still be arguing this at the end of his second term.

Yes, Margaret Sanger, whose argument was eugenicist until she found a better one, freedom from childbirth for women.  Does Neil know that about Sanger?  Does he know what she wrote in 1939 in a letter to a physician ally, Clarence J. Gamble, who used his Proctor & Gamble inheritance money to finance birth control worldwide?

“We do not want word to go out that we want to exterminate the Negro population, and the minister is the man who can straighten out that idea if it ever occurs to any of their more rebellious members.”

She knew how to handle rebellious Negroes.  As for settling the issue, what’s that got to do with it?  Rebellious pro-lifers should shut up about it if the end is not in sight?  Their lives’ end is in sight.  Will they want to meet it having kept their mouths shut?

It helps to connect the abortion debate to the contraception debate because it is a continuum, the way World War II was really the second act of World War I. If you believe that sex is for procreation and nothing else, then a pro-life stance flows naturally. If you believe it’s for procreation, at certain times, but also for fun, then you’re pro-choice. Don’t hate me for bringing the news, but the for-fun element seems to be winning, no matter what last week’s poll numbers say.

I’ll buy the continuity — partly — except that no one says anyone is killed with birth control.  Which is where the government comes in, with its longstanding opposition to killing innocent people.  Another ball game entirely, we might say.

As for birth control, I wrote a book about it, in fact — Bending the Rules: What American Priests Tell American Catholics — in which veteran pastors coast to coast told of letting birth control go, having no parishioners ask about it, but to a man rejected abortion.  Their pastoral concerns were with helping women get over one or helping them adopt out their child or do this or that, never with advising them to get one.  Not the same situation at all.

Cardinal George of Chicago gave a spicy account of his tete-a-tete with Obama last March 18.

“It’s hard to disagree with him because he’ll always tell you he agrees with you,” he [told 200 priests in Louisiana].  “. . . You have to say, again and again, ‘No, Mr. President, we don’t agree (on abortion).’

He told Obama he was concerned about his decision to rescind the Mexico City policy, which meant taxpayer money would go to fund abortion overseas.  He apparently said we were “exporting abortion” by that decision.

“He said we weren’t exporting abortion,” the cardinal said. “I said, ‘Yes we are.’ He would say, ‘I know I have to do certain things here.  . . . . But be patient and you’ll see the pattern will change.’ I said, ‘Mr. President, you’ve given us nothing but the wrong signals on this issue.’ So, we’ll see, but I’m not as hopeful now as I was when he was first elected.”

Why he was hopeful at any time escapes me, but if that was naive of him, the same simplicity, or at least directness, led him to provide a fascinating glimpse at the man who the inimitable Mark Steyn says “has the knack of appearing moderate while acting radical,” calling it, however, “a lethal skill.”

It seems from the cardinal’s account that he was not fooled.

 

Obama will pray privately, as usual for him, says White House spokesman Robert Gibbs.  He will sign his proclamation of the National Day of Prayer but will let it go at that, reverting to how it was before GW Bush.

He did host a Passover Seder for family and friends in April, for a presidential first, but he took a pass on the National Catholic Prayer Breakfast at the Washington Hilton, where 1,300 were expected.  Didn’t ask to come, said a Breakfast spokesman. 

If he had asked and did come to the Catholic breakfast, as GW Bush did, he would not have been allowed to speak, however, as Bush regularly did, because of

a 2004 directive from the U.S. Conference of Catholic Bishops saying that public figures who have taken positions opposing Catholic doctrine should not be publicly honored. [! Except at Notre Dame?]

“We’d host him graciously, but we’d not give him a platform to speak,” [spokesman Joe] Cella said.

All major presidential candidates were invited to attend last year, he added, but none responded.

Catholic Obama-ites were invited this year — Biden and cabinet officers Sebelius, Donovan, Napolitano among them — but none responded, said Cella.

They might have gotten an earful from the keynote speaker, Archbishop Raymond Burke, formerly of St. Louis and now of the Vatican, who has recommended pro-choice Catholics such as Sebelius be denied Communion.

Justice Scalia was scheduled to speak.

Meanwhile, National Day of Prayer ceremonies were to be held Thursday morning in the Cannon House Office Building on Capitol Hill — without Obama.

John T. Noonan to the barricades:

Judge John T. Noonan Jr., the 1984 recipient of the Laetare Medal, has accepted an invitation to deliver an address in the spirit of the award at Notre Dame’s 164th University Commencement Ceremony on May 17.

His speech will be in lieu of awarding the medal this year.

In Contraception, Noonan in 1965 compared centuries-old anti-usury church legislation (opposed to lending with any amount of interest), which was eventually abandoned, with its much-debated anti-birth control prohibition, leaving Catholics with at least a conundrum of major dimensions.

Shrewd, shrewd move by Notre Dame: Noonan on stage with Obama, with considerable chance of focused confrontation, or at least provocative juxtaposition — especially in giving no award this year and calling Noonan’s a Laetare-style speech. 

A speech by one highly praised by this year’s Laetare recipient, who refused it because of Obama’s being honored at the same graduation ceremony.

[T]he quality of his legal scholarship and judicial opinions prompts Harvard Law School Professor Mary Ann Glendon to place Noonan alongside Learned Hand, Benjamin Cardozo, and Oliver Wendell Holmes Jr. as “one of the legal giants of the twentieth century.”

Major hat tip to David Gibson at Dot Commonweal.