Obama's "Pay Grade"

Our liberal friends do a pretty good job obfuscating the line between law and morality when they oppose “legislating morality.” And they talk a good line about the separation of church and state. As if. As if faith and law and morality can be safely separated into neat little boxes.

So when Pastor Rick Warren questioned Sen. Barack Obama (D-IL) on abortion at his Saddleback Civil Forum he carefully played the liberal game, asking Sen. Obama:

I know this is a very complex issue. 40 million abortions. At what point does a baby get human rights in your view?

Warren is asking where the secular law steps in and says, OK, at this point the right to choose is trumped by the right to life and now the state will protect this person’s life and will sanction anyone who interferes with its right to life.

This is a difficult question for a liberal to answer. I’ve asked it of liberal women in the past, and they really can’t deal with it. That’s because the liberal line on abortion carefully avoids confronting the issue. There aren’t any liberal sound bites available to help them out.

Sen. Obama is a presidential candidate, so he knows how to duck.

Well, I think that whether you are looking at
it from a theological perspective or a scientific
perspective, answering that question with specificity,
you know, is above my pay grade. But let me just speak
more generally about the issue of abortion because this
is something obviously the country wrestles with.

Pretty neat, eh? He’s not prepared to deal with the issue in the way that Warren frames it, and the only way that a pastor can frame it without falling into the traps that liberals have set up regarding the separation of church and state.

Notice the Ali Shuffle. He is not being asked for a theological perspective or a scientific perspective. He is being asked a political question. Where would you as president come down on this? Where would you draw the line?

Obama’s evasion illustrates why the recent pro-life activism recently has been about drawing the line in law. Born Alive Act? Partial Birth Abortion Act? Is it ok to kill the baby just before it’s born? Just after? We keep asking: where would you draw the line, liberals? And they don’t like it.

In my view there are two issues here. There is the legal line: cross that and you break the law. But the more important one is the moral line. We are going to have abortion, and there will be abortions on the legal side of the line. But such abortion should be safe, legal, and shameful. To coin a phrase.