Gracie

By: PATRICK J. BUCHANAN 08/13/2008 In the Pennsylvania primary, Barack Obama rolled up more than 90 percent of the African-American vote. Among Catholics, he lost by 40 points. The cool liberal Harvard Law grad was not a good fit for the socially conservative ethnics of Altoona, Aliquippa and Johnstown.


But if Obama had a problem with Catholics then, he has a far higher hurdle to surmount in the fall, with those millions of Catholics who still take their faith and moral code seriously.

For not only is Obama the most pro-abortion member of the Senate, with his straight A-plus report card from the National Abortion Rights Action League and Planned Parenthood. He supports the late-term procedure known as partial-birth abortion, where the baby's skull is stabbed with scissors in the birth canal and the brains are sucked out to end its life swiftly and ease passage of the corpse into the pan. Partial-birth abortion, said the late Sen. Pat Moynihan, a New York Democrat, "comes as close to infanticide as anything I have seen in our judiciary."

Yet, when Congress was voting to ban this terrible form of death for a mature fetus, Michelle Obama was signing fundraising letters pledging that, if elected, her husband would be "tireless" in keeping legal this "legitimate medical procedure."

And her husband did not let the militants down. When the Supreme Court upheld the congressional ban on this barbaric procedure, he denounced the court for denying "equal rights for women."

As David Freddoso reports in his new best-seller, "The Case Against Barack Obama," the Illinois senator goes further than any U.S. senator has dared go in defending what John Paul II called the "culture of death."

Three times in the Illinois legislature, Obama helped block a bill that was designed solely to protect the life of infants already born, and outside the womb, who had miraculously survived the attempt to kill them during an abortion. Three times, Obama voted to let doctors and nurses allow these tiny human beings die of neglect and be tossed out with the medical waste.

How can a man who purports to be a Christian justify this?
If, as its advocates contend, abortion has to remain legal to protect the life and health, mental and physical, of the mother, how is a mother's life or health in the least threatened by a baby no longer inside her - but lying on a table or in a pan fighting for life and breath?

How is it essential for the life or health of a woman that her baby, who somehow survived the horrible ordeal of abortion, be left to die or put to death?

Yet, that is what Obama voted for - three times - in the Illinois Senate.

When a bill almost identical to the one Obama fought in Illinois - the Born Alive Infants Protection Act - came to the floor of the U.S. Senate in 2001, the vote was 98 to 0 in favor.

Even Barbara Boxer, the most pro-abortion member of the Senate before Obama arrived there, spoke out on its behalf. "Who could be more vulnerable than a newborn baby?" she asked. "We join with an 'aye' vote on this. I hope it will, in fact, be unanimous."

Obama says he opposed the Born Alive Infants Protection Act because he feared it might imperil Roe v. Wade.

But if Roe v. Wade did allow infanticide or murder, why would he not want that court decision reviewed and amended?
Is the right to an abortion so sacrosanct to Obama that killing by neglect or snuffing out of the life of tiny babies outside the womb must be protected if necessary to preserve that right?

- Creators Syndicate Inc.

©The Trentonian 2008