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Drink more koolaid…
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Obamabot self-destructing.
Condoleezza Rice spoke at the commencement for Boston College in 2006, where she received an honorary doctorate. And she is pro-choice (IIRC, her statement is that she is mildly pro-choice or something like that).
ETA: I don’t mean that she spoke on the issue of choice at the commencement (I don’t know what she spoke on). I mean I’ve read interviews with her where she says she is mildly pro-choice or similar.
I’m sorry - maybe you missed the part where I said this wasn’t exactly a big deal for me. I was merely expressing a preference.
If this is addressed to me, then maybe you can point out where I said it was a big deal for you. If it’s not addressed to me, no worries.
This is all pretty much baloney. The Church position on the death penalty is that it is only permissable if there is no other way to prevent a person from harming others. In all other circumstances (and that explicitly includes when life imprisonment is an alternative) it damn well IS “absolutely” forbidden, and that includes every single death warrant ever signed by George W. Bush.
This isn’t the first time I’ve seen this specious attempt to draw a distinction, and it’s a load of crap. It’s precisely analogous to saying that killing other people is permissable in self-defense, therefore prohibitions on murder are less absolute than abortion. Who do you think you’re kidding?
And not for nothing, but the Catholic Church was adamantly against the Iraq war too, so why don’t you guys just admit this flap was all purely political and nothing else. Religion had nothing to do with it. If it did, they would have protested Bush. They’re not fooling anybody with this sanctimonious pretense that it’s all about spiritual purity. No it isn’t. It’s about Republicans and Democrats.
The killing of a completely innocent person is “worser” than the killing of a reasoning adult man.
I’d love to think that this openess to have speakers who hold opininos which differ from the majority extends to conservative speakers speaking at liberal universities and that you’ll protest when hecklers shout them down.
Why would anybody on the left expect Obama to turn a commencement speech into a pro-choice rant? I’m as lefty as it gets, and I think that would have been not only a rude, but a politically stupid thing to do. Saying we need to focus on commonalities was exactly the right thing to say in my own radical left, pro-abortion opinion.
As for “demonizing religion,” you’re aware that Barack Obama is religious, are you not? Are you also aware that most political liberals believe in God? The notion that liberalism and religion are mutually exclusive is a giant canard. Atheists are an extreme minority even in the Democratic party, and and people who hate religion are a minority even among atheists.
I honestly don’t think many, if any, lefties were expecting the President to go off on an anti-religion tirade today, nor would the vast majority have been happy about it if he had.
Not according to the Catholic Church, it isn’t.
ETA, the Iraq War killed lots and lots and lots of innocent people. The Church has unequivocaally condemned it. I think some Catholics are very selective about what innocent life they care about.
Everyone got upset when Rick Warren was chosen to speak at his Inauguration. I guess being pro-life is more mainstream than some of Rick Warren’s ideas, but every time Obama gives lip service to religious ideas it seems like people get upset.
What you describe is true. However, I fear that a lot of people still believe the “godless liberal democrats” hype that gets thrown around by Fox News. Hopefully this speech will let those people see that this isn’t the case.
I know no one was expecting the President to go off on an anti-religious rant, but I’m not so sure the lefties would not be happy if he did. I know that the people on these boards would probably start jumping for joy if that happened.
Not really. Most of all because we realize just how STUPID that would be, even if Obama were a dedicated atheist in secret. It’s one thing for some anonymous schlub on a message board to advocate the death of religion through attrition of faith, it’s another thing entirely to expect the president of the United States to make it a public announcement at a Catholic university commencement.
I can play this game too. Obama also had Minister Gene Robinson speak at the inaguration, and the righties got upset. Which obviously means that the righties are anti-religious too!
Well, not until after the 2012 election, anyway.
There’s also a difference between inviting guests and being a guest.
Having said that, I didn’t care about Warren being invited to the inauguration. If he’d taken that opportunity to go off on an anti-abortion or anti-gay rant, it would have pissed me off, but he didn’t.
Ross Douthat put it well: Barack Obama pretends he wants to rise above the culture wars. In reality, he wants to win them for his side.
Let’s try a an analoy: SUPPOSE that A die-hard pro-death penalty President appeared before the ACLU and gave a pleasant-sounding speech in which he said, “Nobody likes the death penalty, and we all think it’s regrettable, but it’s always existed in the United States, and it always will. Instead of fighting against the death penalty, can’t we all agree that it would be better if there were fewer capital crimes being committed in the first place? Let us all join together and pledge to hire millions of new cops, to build hundreds of new prisons, and to crack down on petty crimes. If we did that, there’d be far fewer murders, and there’d be fewer executions.”
Think the ACLU would view that as a compromise?
Well, that’s precisely the extent to which Barack Obama is making any genuine outreach to anti-abortion forces. He thinks saying, “Give up your opposition to abortion, and let’s all start passing out more condoms and jacking up welfare” amounts to a compromise.
It’s not. It’s a friendly demand that his enemies roll over and die.
Works for me.
Good speech. It was a little cobbled together (a lot of recycled anecdotes and chunks from other speeches), but I wasn’t expecting a masterpiece.
The protest over the invitation and the degree is clearly partisan. While disagreement about abortion is absolutely a good faith divide, the singling out of abortion as a kind of religious litmus test is merely a (decreasingly) useful political tactic.
This is a weak analogy because while both sides of the abortion divide support easier adoptions, more information on family planning, etc., not everyone thinks more prisons will reduce crime. And, indeed, one of the main reasons the ACLU thinks the death penalty is bad is not because of the killing, per se, but the racist application of it and other systemic problems. If you rephrased your analogy as acceptance of the death penalty but making legal changes and pouring in resources to make it fairer and less error-prone while funding of education and other resources to prevent crime, then the ACLU would view that as a compromise.
Yes, it is. The Catholic Church never codemned the war in Iraq. The Pope and several bishops clearly expressed their disgust with it and how it was carried out, however, their in no official pronouncement saying that Catholics should not participate directly or indirectly in it; i.e. being a soldier in the Iraq war was not in itself a sin (of course your actiond there can be sins).
I’m sure and they are all terribly wrong, purposely killing innocent pepole, as I said before, is “worser” (it is the worstest) than killing “guilty” people (e.g. self defence) or killing innocents by mistke or oversight. no of them is good, of course.
Obama hasn’t tried to offer anything as a “compromise” on abortion. His position is that we’re never going to agree, but that doesn’t mean we have to demonize each other or refuse to work together on things we DO agree about. He basically said in the speech today, that there’s NEVER going to be any agreement on abortion. He never proposed any compromise.
There is a sense of “compromise” that means something like not agreeing to either parties core terms but finding some other common ground on which to agree. You’re right that this meaning of “compromise” is different from the one in which the parties are done fighting or have settled the core issue.