Sunday, May 24, 2009
The loyal opposition makes a return
Elizabeth Strother
Recent columns
- Independent voice is silenced in merger
- TOP takes a hard knock
- Lagging on college access
- Alzheimer's drains minds and finances
From the RoundTable blog
Angst within the U.S. Conference of Catholic Bishops aside, President Obama's commencement speech last Sunday to Notre Dame University's graduating class was an opportunity for anti-abortion activists to rally.
Weeks before the president showed up, a plane began circling repeatedly over the campus, towing a streamer depicting an aborted fetus labeled "10 Week Abortion." Days after Obama's appearance, Operation Rescue founder Randall Terry proclaimed on his stopobamanotredame.com Web site: "Mission (mostly) Accomplished!! Unfortunately, Mr. Obama still spoke, but the whole world heard our message."
Isn't that great?
Not the lurid nature of the Terry-organized protest or, in my view, its message -- but that it occurred without the least defensiveness on the part of its target, the president of the United States. He ought to be able to handle becoming the object of public ire. It comes with the job.
Obama actually seemed invigorated by the controversy generated by an invitation to speak and to receive an honorary law degree from the Catholic university, though his pro-choice views on abortion are completely at odds with Catholic teaching.
This is not a president who seeks to be insulated from dissenting opinions. Far from it. He chose to engage dissenters, not in angry confrontation but by making a respectful appeal for each side to see in the other a core of human decency that might help them find and meet on some common ground.
The extreme fringe of the pro-life movement had promised to turn his appearance into a circus. How refreshing that Obama didn't shy from the challenge, but addressed it head on -- and not with heavy-handed efforts to stage a public show of adulation.
True, at the commencement ceremony, security officers led away, one by one, four men in the stands who yelled anti-abortion messages at the president.
The officers had help from the crowd, who shouted down the hecklers.
But no one interfered with those graduates who silently protested legal abortions by taping a cross and images of baby feet on top of their mortarboards.
Contrast this with the efforts of White House advance planners during the insular presidency of George W. Bush, when wearing T-shirts critical of Bush was enough to get a couple arrested on trespassing charges during a presidential appearance at the West Virginia State Capitol. On the Fourth of July, no less.
That was hardly the scene last weekend, when Obama's respect for free speech was met by an overwhelmingly respectful audience -- and not because its members were prescreened to keep out anyone who might disagree with him.
Though reports indicate only a handful of graduates wore their anti-abortion views on their hats, I expect that is a far cry from the numbers of students at a Catholic university who shared their position. As all pro-lifers in attendance implicitly acknowledged, the invitation to Obama did not imply agreement with him.
The Catholic hierarchy and the church body of believers are free to argue whether, by hosting Obama, Notre Dame violated its most sacred principles or honored them. I am not competent to judge what the faith requires of a Catholic institution.
As an American university, though, Notre Dame was right to encourage its graduates to listen to contrary views -- not to bend to them, but to remain open to people of good will whose perspectives differ from their own.
This is an essential discipline in a free and increasingly diverse society.
Above all, it is an essential discipline in the leader of a free and diverse society.
Notre Dame's president, the Rev. John Jenkins, didn't hint at compromise on abortion, an issue on which the church claims absolute moral authority. Obama conceded the certainty of a continuing divide: "Because no matter how much we may want to fudge it ... the fact is that at some level, the views of the two camps are irreconcilable."
He sought instead to frame the issue in a new light. If each side could approach the other with less self-righteousness and greater humility, they might come to recognize at least a common desire to reduce abortions and be able to support each other in trying to achieve that goal.
I'm doubtful on an issue so deeply seated in core beliefs about human life. Still, the president is right to urge Americans to seek their commonalities, and be loath to divide their fellow citizens into camps of "good guys" and "bad guys" -- where each of us, of course, is with the good guys, no matter where we stand.
We need more civility in our civic life, and there's no better place to start than at the top.
Strother is on The Roanoke Times editorial board.
