As is often the case with issues of morality in the U.S., there appears to be a moment in time when the public collectively centers its attention on issues the media, and other elements of the liberal establishment, would just as soon keep quietly pushed aside.
At this moment in time, the issue of abortion is receiving public attention because of President Obama’s visitation to Notre Dame and the president’s pro-abortion stance versus the Catholic college’s pro-life biblical foundations. Because there are many forces that will actively work to push the public’s attention to almost any other issue than whether babies in the womb have the right to live or should be equated as nothing more than a pound of flesh, the most prudent issues of the Obama Notre Dame abortion controversy must be addressed with speed and accuracy.
The first place many conservatives focus their attention is to the abortion-friendly stance of President Obama, and that the president would go to a Catholic college and create an easily foreseeable firestorm of controversy. This rage is as reasonable as the public’s reaction to Obama’s shocking statements back in the Saddle Back debates, that the topic of safeguarding life in the womb was an “issue above his pay grade.” This same anger is equally valid in the negative public response to Obama’s ironic nomination of Kansas Governor Kathleen Sibelius, Tiller’s (the “baby killer”) ally, to the position of Secretary of Health and Human Services. While there is little doubt that each of these elements of disdain for human life being chiseled into the Obama presidential legacy are of deep concern, I do not believe they are the pivotal issues to be analyzed at this time; nor do I believe that those who would attempt to renew the semantic debates that have long been concluded by those of conscience and faith, pertaining to “pro-abortion” and “pro-choice” advocacy within the killing fields of abortion, are of any value if we are to address the most significant issues of the Obama/Notre Dame controversy.
The most salient topic to be observed on this issue goes far beyond Obama and calls to question the totality of Christian principles within this country. To obsess over the fact that a moral relativist will act like a moral relativist, or that Obama will be Obama, is to lose focus of the main issue. The prudent questions to be addressed should not be a mystery that we need sleuth for with great vigor, rather the questions of importance should be slapping us in the face. We, as a Christian nation, must address why it is considered news when the Gallup poll announces that for the first time since 1995 a majority of respondents call themselves ‘pro-life.’ While being led away in shackles, Dr. Alan Keyes placed the priority of his protest in correct order in that the issue falls first with Notre Dame’s decision to abandon their Christian principles for the glitter of a presidential visit. On a larger scope, Americans should take this unpleasant moment, this jaunt through the killing fields of abortion, to look at the cold fact that we, the American people, are losing our Christian foundations and the proof of that decay is present in an over abundance of evidence from the Notre Dame debacle all the way to the existence of Barack Obama as the president of this country. President Obama should be held accountable for his actions; however, in reality he is but a byproduct of the moral decay of this country, a decay that will soon bring this nation to a mournful day of reckoning.
Dr. Paul A. Ibbetson is a former Chief of Police of Cherryvale, Kansas, and member of the Montgomery County Drug Task Force. Paul received his Bachelor’s and Master’s degree in Criminal Justice at Wichita State University, and his PhD. in sociology at Kansas State University. Paul is the author of several books and is also the radio host of the Kansas Broadcasting Association’s 2008, 2009, 2010, and 2011 award winning, Conscience of Kansas airing across the state.
