Obama and the Catholics

The blogosphere and op/ed pages have been abuzz the past few days discussing Obama and the Catholics, especially after Hilary Clinton took 70% of the Catholic voters in the Pennsylvania Democratic Primary. One of the key issues that has come up again and again has been abortion, on the assumption that abortion is a Catholic issue.

Well. What about Obama and the atheists——the pro-life atheists? Consider the recent Washington Times op/ed (which has gone surprisingly unnoticed in the blogosphere) by Nat Hentoff (who, you’ll remember, wrote for us on the 2008 election here ).

Here’s a taste of the Hentoff column :

My initial inclination to support Sen. Barack Obama’s road to the White House came from his work as a Chicago community organizer and his record in the Illinois legislature. He actually worked to rescue school dropouts from a lifetime dead end as well as provide job training for the unemployed. Later, in the Illinois state Senate, he was able to get a law passed requiring police to electronically record interrogations and confessions in homicide cases. But my view of him changed as I learned his record on abortion.

I am a nonreligious pro-lifer, my only religion being the Constitution. And I am not a single-issue voter, having often supported candidates who are pro-choice because I knew their civil liberties and civil-rights records. For one example, I was a great admirer of the late Sen. Daniel Patrick Moynihan. (New York, where I live, has had no senators of his quality and principles since.) Although Mr. Moynihan was pro-abortion, he strongly opposed partial-birth abortion, which he described as “only minutes away from infanticide,” since the fetus (whom I regard as a human being) was already clearly among us.

I oppose extremists on all sides of issues, having, for instance, argued for hours with and against some so-called pro-lifers who considered part of their mission to commit violence, even homicide, where abortions were performed.

I admire much of Mr. Obama’s record, including what he wrote in “The Audacity of Hope” about the Founders’ “rejection of all forms of absolute authority, whether the king, the theocrat, the general, the oligarch, the dictator, the majority . . . George Washington declined the crown because of this impulse.” But on abortion, Mr. Obama is an extremist. He has opposed the Supreme Court decision that finally upheld the Partial-Birth Abortion Ban Act against that form of infanticide. Most startlingly, for a professed humanist, Mr. Obama in the Illinois Senate also voted against the Born Alive Infant Protection Act. I have reported on several of those cases, when, before the abortion was completed, an alive infant was suddenly in the room. It was disposed of as a horrified nurse who was not necessarily pro-life followed the doctors’ orders to put the baby in a pail or otherwise get rid of the child. (emphasis added)