Monday, May 25, 2009
Tolerant, with one exception
Steve Huff
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A couple weeks ago, whether I went to the store, the airport or the homes of friends, Fox News was on TV. The topic on heavy rotation was President Obama's impending graduation speech at Notre Dame. By Sunday, it was as obvious as the Pallium on the Pope that a lot of Catholics were furious at the choice of Obama, who favors abortion rights, to speak at the country's most prominent Catholic university.
I had to miss the speech, but the before-and-after headlines told me that Obama did not shy from the topic.
"Critics blast Obama's scheduled Notre Dame commencement address" and "Notre Dame's Obama invite outrages some Catholics" gave way to "Obama calls for 'fair-minded' abortion debate" and "Obama confronts abortion debate, urges Notre Dame grads to seek common ground."
The media -- TV, papers, blogs, radio -- cast a gentle shadow across the once vitriolic event and moved on.
Find the transcript of the speech and read it. It's very good. The overriding theme was, of course, tolerance. What better springboard into the topic than abortion?
Obama did not aspire to change anyone's mind. The question, he asked, is: "How does each of us remain firm in our principles, and fight for what we consider right, without demonizing those with just as strongly held convictions on the other side?"
The answer, he argued, is to find common ground. Even on abortion, which seems as binary a topic as there is, he outlined goals that could satisfy both sides: Reduce unintended pregnancy, facilitate adoption, improve health care for women who choose to keep their babies, draft a "sensible conscience clause," and so on.
As inspiring as it was, it largely repeated what I and most abortion- rights supporters already wanted to hear. As tolerant as it seemed toward abortion foes, nothing short of a federal abortion ban will cool that ideological fire.
This is part of the problem in America today. Although Obama, as far as I can tell from opinion polls, has won over all liberals and most independents, he has not touched, and never will, the conservative ideological base. These old, white, Republican males (according to polls and surveys on demographics) will go to their graves hating everything for which Obama stands. They will idolize Rush Limbaugh, Dick Cheney, Karl Rove, Bill O'Reilly and other czars of intolerance until they themselves pass into ideological heaven, where every issue is thrown into stark contrast, where all solutions are obvious and where there are no wishy-washy liberals to muddle things up.
Many in the audience were visibly touched by Obama's speech, but who was swayed? Will any pro-lifer heed the call to sow common ground with any pro-choicer? I'd be stunned if a single person wrote this paper or any other to declare such a transformation.
It's a cynical conclusion, but I've got volumes of e-mail from ultra-conservative critics to support it. No matter how logical, pragmatic, conciliatory or compelling it may be, the argument in favor of abortion is wrong, say evangelicals, for the simple reason that it does not adhere to rigid right-wing Christian biblical ideology.
Here I risk hypocrisy. Is it wrong to be intolerant of intolerance?
The argument has certainly been made, on these pages and others, but I don't buy it. It reeks of an argument I actually encountered in grade school, that the Civil War was fought not over slavery, but over the intolerance of states' rights.
Balderdash. Horse feathers. Sophistry.
The states had no right to choose slavery, just as a minority of zealots have no right to determine reproductive rights for the rest of us. Common ground is fine, but tolerance of intolerance stinks from a mile away.
Regardless, Obama's speech defused a large political grenade. Maybe that's significant. In years to come, anthologists may appreciate the Notre Dame speech as one of a series of gestures from a series of presidents, all elected by increasingly tolerant Americans who moved America toward a more tolerant future.
Huff, who lives in Patrick County and practices family medicine, is a columnist for The Roanoke Times.
