Obama et Biden s’enfoncent sur la question de l’avortement

En matière d’avortement, il n’y a décidemment rien à attendre d’Obama et de Biden sinon que, pour défendre l’indéfendable, ils sont prêts à toutes les contorsions. Obama botte en touche sur la théologie ; le “catholque” Joe Biden croit aussi intelligent d’avancer, pour la défense de sa thèse, une petite phrase de saint Thomas, que l’avait imaginé la “catholique” Nancy Pelosi en citant une autre petite phrase de saint Augustin ! Entre le Vice Président du “ticket” démocrate et Madame Speaker, les enchères théologiques sont ouvertes. Ils parlent comme des perroquets mais sont sourds : pourtant quarante millions d’enfants avortés aux États-Unis crient. Ils s’en f… Voilà ce qu’on appelle un “ticket gagnant” ! La Catholic League a fait paraître aujourd’hui ce roboratif communiqué :

« On a demandé au sénateur Barack Obama, invité hier [dimanche 7 septembre] dans l’émission This Week sur ABC-TV, de commenter le récent mot d’esprit qu’il a fait en disant qu’il était incapable de dire quand la vie commençait car c’était « au-delà de ses compétences ». Il a qualifié cette réponse de « trop désinvolte », précisant : « Ce que je voulais faire passer c’est que je ne puis présumer être capable de répondre à ce type de questions d’ordre théologique ».
Dans l’émission Meet the Press d’hier, on a aussi interrogé le sénateur Biden sur l’avortement. « Je suis disposé à accepter les enseignements de mon Église » a-t-il déclaré. Biden a insisté sur le fait « qu’en matière de foi », il acceptait la position que « la vie commence à la conception » mais qu’il n’entendait pas imposer sa position religieuse aux autres. Il a également fait référence à saint Thomas d’Aquin en disant que ce grand théologien ne croyait pas que la vie commençait avant les premiers mouvements du fœtus, quarante jours après la conception ».

Bill Donohue, président de la Catholic League réagit à cela aujourd’hui :

Obama et Biden ont embourbé davantage encore le problème de l’avortement en faisant comme si il n’était pas, d’abord et avant tout, un problème de droit humain. La réponse à la question de savoir quand la vie commence a été réglé par la science, et cette réponse est indubitable : la vie commence à la conception. C’est pourquoi des athées, comme Nat Hentoff, sont contre l’avortement : tout simplement parce qu’il tue ! En se défaussant de la question de l’avortement sur la religion, Obama et Biden tentent de transformer un problème d’importance universel en une querelle de paroisse.
Biden ferait mieux de ne pas invoquer l’Aquinate pour venir au secours de ses opinions. Il est vrai que saint Thomas croyait que l’effusion de l’âme ne se produisait qu’au quarantième jour après la conception, mais il n’a pour autant jamais cherché à justifier l’avortement : il savait que c’était une faute grave.
Obama qui se prétend chrétien a fait référence hier à sa « foi musulmane ». On ne sait pourquoi il a dit cela, mais ce qui est indiscutable c’est que le catholicisme et l’islam sont dans le vrai quant à savoir quand la vie commence. Il est temps qu’Obama et Biden considèrent l’avortement pour ce qu’il est : le problème de droit civique fondamental de notre temps ».

Comments

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More Catholic Than the Pope by Joseph Bottum,
Weekly Standard, 09/29/2008, Volume 014, Issue 03




Joe Biden's and Nancy Pelosi's
ill-fated ventures into theological disputation.
Do they think this is a debate they're actually going to win? Do
they imagine the Catholic theologians of America--from Avery Cardinal
Dulles all the way to Sister Sara Butler--are suddenly going to whack
their heads and say, "My God, we never thought of that"? What impulse
makes Catholic politicians try to argue theology with their own church?
There it was, at the end of August, when Nancy Pelosi, the Catholic speaker of the House, went on Meet the Press to explain that abortion is not theologically wrong:
"What I know is,
over the centuries, the doctors of the Church have not been able to
make that definition. And St. Augustine said at three months. .  .  . I
don't think anybody can tell you when life begins, human life begins.
As I say, the Catholic Church for centuries has been discussing this."
And then, two weeks later, Joe Biden, the Catholic vice-presidential candidate, went back on Meet the Press to add:
"There is a debate in our church. .  .  . Back in Summa Theologia, when Thomas Aquinas wrote Summa Theologia,
he said there was no--it didn't occur until quickening, 40 days after
conception. How am I going out and tell you, if you or anyone else that
you must insist upon my view that is based on a matter of faith?"
With their typical patience, the theologians replied that theology
has always taken its facts from the biological sciences when talking
about biological issues--and science these days makes clearer how
gestation works than it did in the fourth century. For that matter,
Augustine explicitly condemned abortion at any stage, as did Thomas
Aquinas, and besides, quickening (the fetal motion that usually occurs
between 90 and 120 days in a pregnancy) is completely different from
the Thomistic account of the development of the intellective soul
around the 40th day, and Speaker Pelosi seems to have confused .  .  .
while Senator Biden may not have fully grasped .  .  .
On and on it went, as stylized as a Kabuki performance--until, with his typical impatience, Denver's archbishop, Charles Chaput, summed up:
"Meet the Press has become a national window on the flawed moral reasoning of some
Catholic public servants."
Fourteen bishops have now issued public
statements on the Pelosi and Biden gaffes.
In part, what these politicians are doing is dredging up the
half-remembered talking points of elections past--the sort of block of
eroded verbiage that the Catholic John Kerry sometimes used during the
2004 presidential campaign, as when, for example, he said his position
on abortion was in line with the liberalism of the (non-existent) Pope
Pius XXIII and the changes wrought by "the Vatican II."
Along the way, however, Kerry established what seems to have become
a new default position for Democratic Catholics--one of those spots to
which the minds of politicians, like overstretched rubber-bands, always
snap back. The default position used to be the one established by Mario
Cuomo, in a famous talk he gave at Notre Dame in 1984, which claimed
that Catholic officials may resist Church teaching by being personally opposed to abortion even though they publicly support it.
Now, however, the position seems to have become the notion that Catholic officials must resist Catholic teaching, since opposition to abortion is inherently
religious --a matter solely of narrow sectarian definition, like not
eating meat on Fridays. The fact that the Catholic Church holds a view
has become the reason that Catholic politicians are required to oppose
it. As Biden told Tom Brokaw on Meet the Press,
"I voted
against telling everyone else in the country that they have to accept
my religiously based view."
Perhaps one shouldn't read too much into those particular comments, for
the babbling brook that is Joe Biden  often overflows its banks.
Campaigning in Missouri, for example, he noted the praise that has come
to Sarah Palin  for her care for her Down syndrome baby, and he demanded
that Republicans be asked,
"If you care about it, why don't you support
stem cell research?"
Leave aside the fact that, even back in the 2004 glory days of
overinflated claims for stem cells, no one seriously claimed they would
soon cure Down syndrome. Leave aside, as well, the fact that the use of
embryonic stem cells is what the pro-life community rejects.
Leave aside, for that matter, the fact that the recent scientific
breakthroughs with reprogrammed cells taken from adults have pushed
much of the issue off the political table. Consider just the fact that
Biden was declaring his own Catholic position on embryonic stem cells
to be uncaring. As the philosopher Francis Beckwith observed of the
incident, this is a man who won't even force his beliefs on himself.
But Joe Biden--like Nancy Pelosi and other Catholic supporters of the
Obama campaign--are caught in a bind that is, in many ways, even
tighter this year than the one that squeezed John Kerry and his
Catholic followers four years ago. Back in 2002, the Vatican office
headed by Joseph Cardinal Ratzinger issued a note about the
participation of Catholics in political life. Declaring that
politicians have "a duty to be morally coherent" --an explicit rejection
of the Cuomoesque attempt to distinguish private from public
positions-- the note insisted that
 
"a well-formed Christian conscience
does not permit one to vote for a political program or an individual
law which contradicts the fundamental contents of faith and morals."
Some American bishops took this to mean that Catholic officials who
support the legality of abortion should not present themselves for
communion or identify themselves as Catholics. Most of the nation's
bishops, however, followed the lead of Washington's cardinal, Theodore
McCarrick, who put together what was widely reported as a compromise in
the summer of 2004. McCarrick's task force rejected
"the denial of
communion from Catholic politicians or Catholic voters,"
while
recommending that bishops give private instruction on the life issues
to the politicians in their dioceses. This is the model apparently
followed by Biden's bishop at the time, Michael Saltarelli, and still
followed by San Francisco's archbishop, George Niederauer, who has
asked Pelosi to meet with him to discuss her comments on Meet the Press.
But things in Catholic circles have changed since 2004. To begin
with, Ratzinger became Pope Benedict XVI, which makes his instructions
a little harder to ignore. Then, in 2005, McCarrick turned 75, the age
at which bishops are required to offer their resignations--an offer the
Vatican promptly accepted. All along the line, the identification of
Catholicism with the rejection of abortion has hardened into something
that Catholic church-goers and the general American public all
recognize.
American politics, too, has undergone a change over the past four years. Here's a curious fact: Not once was the word abortion mentioned from the dais of the Democratic convention in 2004. That
convention seemed, at times, about nothing except embryonic stem cell
research, as speaker after speaker denounced the Luddite Republican
opposition to all things scientific. But the Democrats at the time
clearly did not see the defense of Roe v. Wade as a winning issue.
Then came the Democratic victories in the 2006 midterm elections and
the collapse of public approval ratings for President Bush--followed by
polls early in 2008 that suggested anyone from a blind monkey to Che
Guevara, if he ran as a Democrat, would win the 2008 presidential
election. Conservative positions were so unpopular, the left decided,
that concessions (like the one that forced them to support the
self-declared pro-life Democrat Bob Casey Jr. in the 2008 Pennsylvania
Senate race) no longer needed to be made.
And so the platform adopted at their convention in Denver this year
begins its mention of abortion with the flat sentence:
"The Democratic
Party strongly and unequivocally supports Roe v. Wade and a woman's right to choose a safe and legal abortion, regardless of
ability to pay, and we oppose any and all efforts to weaken or
undermine that right."
For that matter, Senator Barack Obama proclaimed
his party's support for legalized abortion in the extravaganza of his
acceptance speech at the Democratic convention--even though he had been
widely mocked for appearing astonishingly unreflective about the issue,
declaring at the Saddleback Church interviews in August that the
question of when life begins is "above my pay grade."
Not helping him at all was South Carolina's Democratic chairwoman,
Carol Fowler, who swiped at Sarah Palin by saying the Republicans had
nominated a vice-presidential candidate
"whose primary qualification
seems to be that she hasn't had an abortion."
Nonetheless, early this
month, the Obama campaign began running radio ads about the evil that
would follow if the Republicans are elected and "Roe v. Wade is overturned." All along the line, liberal columnists and party
activists have been far more vocal about abortion than they were in
2004.
So what's Joe Biden to do? What, for that matter, is any Catholic
supporter of Obama to do? The ledge on which they are trying to stand
is crumbling beneath their feet. Douglas Kmiec, a former legal counsel
in the Reagan administration, has gotten the most publicity for his
Catholic praise of the Democratic ticket. Indeed, he's made a new
career for himself out of being a Catholic Republican who supports
Obama: pouring out op-eds, delivering speeches, and penning a
just-released book, Can a Catholic Support Him?--Asking the Big Question About Barack Obama.
The title is a tease, as you might expect. "What's wrong," he
writes, "is for Republican partisans to claim" that support for
abortion is Obama's position.
"It's not. Rather, Obama believes there
are alternative ways to promote the 'culture of life,' even given the
law's sanction of abortion."
The trouble, of course, is that Obama has
given little indication he believes anything of the sort, and, in the
months Kmiec spent writing the book, the Democrats have systematically
undermined its premise by explicitly endorsing Roe v. Wade and refusing any concessions that abortion might be even a necessary evil.
In response to it all, Nancy Pelosi and Joe Biden were reduced to
the idiocy of trying to argue theology on the Sunday morning shows, and
Kmiec's claims have dwindled down to a kind of old-fashioned
double-effect argument: The Republicans are so wrong about other
issues, especially the Iraq war and the economy, that Catholics should
vote for the Democratic party and accept the Democrats' support for
legalized abortion as an unintended consequence.
Who's likely to be convinced by such a position? Republicans have
occasionally tacked away from pro-life voters. There's a solid argument
to be made that the fact of Sarah Palin's nomination, together with the
visual presentation of her family at the Republican convention, made as
strong a pro-life argument as it's possible to make. Still, in the
convention's acceptance speeches--an hour and a half of speechmaking
from McCain and Palin--the issue was explicitly mentioned only once,
with the brief phrase "a culture of life" coming in a laundry list late
in McCain's speech. And pro--lifers have been made nervous by McCain's
recent answer to a science group's questionnaire, in which he affirmed
his support for
"federal funding for embryonic stem cell research,"
though he insists on unspecified limits. His campaign has announced
that it is airing radio ads about stem cells. Embryonic? Adult?
Reprogrammed pluripotent cells? The ad doesn't say, but the fact of the
ad is not reassuring.
Still, here is where the doctrine of double effect might actually
have some purchase. Abortion is so grave an evil that some errors from
McCain might be acceptable. Polls over the last few elections
consistently show much weaker Catholic opposition to embryonic stem
cell research than to abortion.
As it happens, those same polls consistently show little that can be
identified as a uniquely Catholic vote, once the presidential election
has narrowed down the choice to the two parties' candidates. The
Democratic primaries did seem to reveal a Catholic identity among some
voters: Hillary Clinton won 70 percent of Catholics in Pennsylvania,
and she beat Obama by 10 percentage points or more among Catholics in
two-thirds of the states where exit polls asked for religious
identification. But those numbers precisely matched her victories among
white voters with lower-middle-class incomes and blue-collar jobs in
the old Rust Belt. For that matter, they mostly came at the end of the
primary cycle, when a backlash against Obama was setting in. Once
Catholic Republicans are added, in the broader setting of a national
campaign, the likelihood is that Catholics will vote much the way the
rest of the nation votes.
And yet, there remains that question of abortion. Things have
tightened over the last few years, the Catholic position is firmer in
the public's mind--firmer in the Catholic mind, for that matter. McCain
was a long way from the pro-lifers' first choice for a Republican
nominee, but the Democrats this election cycle are determined to force
the issue. They've pushed, and they've pushed, and they've pushed,
until Catholics are falling off the cliff. Poor Doug Kmiec and his sad
question, "Can a Catholic Support Him?" As a matter of good conscience,
the answer looks increasingly like no, a Catholic can't support Obama.
And as a matter of political fact--well, that's starting to look like
no, as well, isn't it?

Joseph Bottum, a contributing editor to THE WEEKLY STANDARD, is editor of First Things.











© Copyright 2008, News Corporation, Weekly Standard, All Rights Reserved.

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Joe Biden loses Barack Obama the Catholic vote   By: Gerald Warner at Sep 19, 2008 http://blogs.telegraph.co.uk/gerald_warner/blog/2008/09/19/joe_biden_loses_barack_obama_the_catholic_vote More, as promised, on Senator Joe Biden (why should Sarah Palin get
all the coverage?). Remember, you read it here first: on September 11
this blog reported a mounting backlash from Catholic bishops against
Biden, Barack Obama's "Catholic" pro-abortion running mate. At that
time I estimated eight bishops had come out to denounce Biden; the
total is now 55. Beyond that, Biden is being trashed across every state
of the Union by Catholic newspapers, TV and radio stations, and blogs.
It is a tsunami of rejection. Joe Biden has really put his foot in it with the Catholics The story has now hit the secular media. Last Saturday Time magazine asked: "Does Biden Have a Catholic Problem?" By Wednesday the issue had moved onto the front page of the New York Times. Joe the Jinx has blown it, big time. Biden has only himself to blame:
he started this war, with his notoriously undisciplined mouth. He knew
the dangers. Last August, Archbishop Raymond Burke, former Archbishop
of St Louis and now Prefect of the Apostolic Segnatura in Rome, said
communion should be denied to pro-abortion politicians "until they have
reformed their lives". Archbishop Chaput of Denver had already announced Biden should not
receive communion because of his pro-abortion views. Defiantly, Biden
took communion in his home parish in Delaware in late August. On
September 2 the Bishop of Scranton, Pennsylvania (a crucial swing
state) banned him from communion in his diocese. That is effective
excommunication. Then came the crucial provocation. On NBC's Meet the Press programme on September 7 Biden grossly misrepresented the Catholic
Church's teaching on abortion and audaciously cited St Thomas Aquinas
in his own cause. That did it. House Speaker Nancy Pelosi had already done the same
thing on the same programme, in her instance citing St Augustine. Even
the torpid US bishops could not have false doctrine glibly broadcast by
public figures, misleading their flock. So the counterattack described
here last week began, culminating in a statement from the US Bishops'
Conference. The bishops of Kansas City have also issued a pastoral
letter on the subject. It is open season on Biden. There are 47 million Catholic voters in the United States. One
quarter of all registered voters are Catholics. At every presidential
election in the past 30 years the Catholic vote has gone to the winning
candidate, except for Al Gore in 2000. This year 41 per cent of
Catholics are independents - up from 30 per cent in 2004. Psephologists
claim practising Catholics were the decisive factor in the crucial
swing states in 2004: in Ohio 65 per cent of Catholics voted for Bush,
in Florida 66 per cent. They were drifting away in disillusionment from
the Republicans and split 50-50, until Joe Biden worked his magic. This
is electoral suicide by the Democrats. Full coverage of the US Election 2008

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http://chat.anncoulter.com/phpBB3//viewtopic.php?f=27&t=68336 OBAMA: LUCIFER IS MY HOMEBOY Ann Coulter,  17 September 2008 It's
another election season, so that means it's time for Democrats to start
uttering wild malapropisms about the Bible to pretend they believe in
God! In 2000, we had Al Gore inverting a Christian parable
into something nearly satanic. Defending his nutty ideas about the
Earth during one of the debates, Gore said: "In my faith tradition,
it's written in the book of Matthew, where your heart is, there is your
treasure also." And that, he said, is why we should treasure the
environment. First of all, people who say "faith tradition"
instead of "religion" are always phony-baloney, "Christmas and
Easter"-type believers. Second, Jesus was making almost the
exact opposite point, saying: "Do not store up for yourselves treasures
on Earth," where there are moths, rust and thieves, but in heaven,
because, Jesus said, "where your treasure is, there your heart will be
also." I guess that's the kind of mix-up that can happen when your theological adviser is Naomi Wolf. Then
in 2004, Democratic presidential candidate and future Trivial Pursuit
answer Howard Dean told an interviewer that his favorite part of the
New Testament was the Book of Job. The reporter should have asked him
if that was his favorite book in all three testaments. And now
in 2008, we have Democrats attacking Sarah Palin for being a Christian,
while comparing Obama to Jesus Christ. (And not in the sarcastic way
the rest of us do.) Liberals have indignantly claimed that
Palin thinks the founding fathers wrote the Pledge of Allegiance, which
is Olbmermannic in the sense that (a) if it were true, it's trivial,
and (b) it's not true. Their claim is based on a questionnaire
Palin filled out when she was running for governor of Alaska in 2006,
which asked the candidates if they were "offended by the phrase 'under
God' in the Pledge of Allegiance." Palin answered: "Not on your life.
If it was good enough for the founding fathers, it's good enough for
me, and I'll fight in defense of our Pledge of Allegiance." As
anyone can see, Palin was not suggesting that the founding fathers
"wrote" the Pledge of Allegiance: She said the founding fathers
believed this was a country "under God." Which, um, it is. For
the benefit of MSNBC viewers who aren't watching it as a joke, the
whole point of the Declaration of Independence was to lay out the
founders' breathtaking new argument that rights came not from the king,
but from God or, as the Declaration said, "Nature's God," the
"Creator." That summer, in 1776, Gen. George Washington -- a
charter member of the founding fathers -- rallied his troops, saying:
"The time is now near at hand which must probably determine whether
Americans are to be freemen or slaves. ... The fate of unborn millions
will now depend, under God, on the courage and conduct of the army." So
Washington not only used the phrase "under God," but gave us one of the
earliest known references to the rights of the "unborn." That's right!
George Washington was a "pro-life extremist," just like Sarah Palin. There is no disputing that a nation "under God" was "good enough" for the founding fathers, exactly as Palin said. Meanwhile,
on the House floor last week, Democratic Rep. Steve Cohen of Tennessee
compared Palin to Pontius Pilate -- and Obama to Jesus. Cohen said:
"Barack Obama was a community organizer like Jesus, who our minister
prayed about. Pontius Pilate was a governor." Yes, who can forget the
Biblical account of how Jesus got the homeless Samaritan to register as
a Democrat in exchange for a carton of smokes! Rep. Cohen would be well-advised to stay away from New Testament references. As
anyone familiar with the New Testament can confirm for him, there are
no parables about Jesus passing out cigarettes for votes, lobbying the
Romans for less restrictive workfare rules or filing for grants under
the Community Redevelopment Act. No
time for soul-saving now! First, we lobby Fannie Mae to ease off those
lending standards and demand a windfall profits tax on the
money-changers in the temple. David Freddoso's magnificent new book, The Case Against Barack Obama describes the forefather to "community organizers" like Barack Obama and Hillary Clinton -- the famed Saul Alinsky. Alinsky
is sort of the George Washington of "community organizers." If there
were an America-hater's Mount Rushmore, Saul Alinsky would be on it. He
tried to hire Hillary to work for him right out of Wellesley. A
generation later, those who had trained with Alinsky did hire Obama as
a community organizer. In Freddoso's book, he quotes from the dedication in the first edition of Alinsky's seminal book, "Rules for Radicals," where Alinsky wrote: "Lest
we forget at least an over-the-shoulder acknowledgment to the very
first radical: From all our legends, mythology and history (and who is
to know where mythology leaves off and history begins -- or which is
which), the first radical known to man who rebelled against the
establishment and did it so effectively that he at least won his own
kingdom -- Lucifer." I suppose it could have been worse. He could have dedicated his book to George Soros. Even
liberals eventually figured out that they shouldn't be praising Satan
in public, so the Lucifer-as-inspiration paragraph was cut from later
editions of Alinsky's book. (But on the bright side, MSNBC adopted as
its motto: "Who is to know where mythology leaves off and history
begins -- or which is which.") That's exactly what happens to
most Democratic ideas -- as soon as they are said out loud, normal
people react with revulsion, so Democrats learn to pretend they never
said them:
I was NOT comparing Palin
to a pig! I did not play the race card! I did not say I would meet with
Ahmadinejad without preconditions!
Sarah Palin might be
just the lucky break the Democrats need. As a staunch pro-lifer, Palin
could give Democrats an excuse to steer away from topics they know
nothing about, like the Bible, and onto a subject they know chapter and verse, like abortion.

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http://fr.youtube.com/watch?v=iMwDq73gbm4

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Devastating Obama Abortion ad http://fr.youtube.com/watch?v=iMwDq73gbm4