Dig In

That the man we have just chosen to be our forty-fourth president is to be the most radically pro-abortion chief executive in our nation’s history is not in question, and neither, really, is the fact that he is the most radical person from either side of the political spectrum ever to be elected. I, for one, can live with bad policy; I have for my entire life, those first five months aside. But my fears about the dawning administration go way beyond policy. I am scared because our new president-elect has the will and now the means not only to eliminate obstacles to his extraordinarily radical agenda, but also to eliminate conscientious dissent.

It has often been claimed that this administration will be a bipartisan one, devoted to changing the way we do things in Washington by reaching across the ideological divide. The president-elect himself has occasionally seemed aware that abortion is a difficult moral issue, conceding when Rick Warren asked him when life begins that “that question is above my pay grade” and, in a speech before the Planned Parenthood Action Fund on July 17, 2007, noting that “There will always be people, many of goodwill, who do not share my view on the issue of choice.” To this point, the man at the logo-adorned podium at least seems respectful of my right to disagree with him, to live my own beliefs. But then he continues the speech:

“When the real war is being fought abroad,” says the man we have just elected President of the United States, “they would have us fight culture wars here at home. I am absolutely convinced that culture wars are just so nineties. Their days are growing dark...We are tired of arguing about the same old stuff.”

This comment, perhaps more than any other, shows the true nature of the brand of bipartisanship our executive-to-be plans to exercise. Most people view bipartisan compromise as a struggle of thesis and antithesis, resulting eventually in a new synthesis. Our president-elect, however, channels Hegel not so much as Mussolini, who announced one day that his own powers of self-criticism were so great that there no longer needed to be any opposition parties in Italy. And lo, there were not. In three months, the most powerful man in the world will be a person tired of arguing about the same old stuff. And what that means is this: those abidingly inept people of goodwill are free to go about their bitter lives, but their days of calling the progressive agenda into question are over.

Never let it be said that the outgoing junior senator from Illinois does not back up his lofty rhetoric with concrete policy proposals. In response to a question after the Planned Parenthood speech, he promised to sign the Freedom of Choice Act, which would essentially declare abortion a fundamental right unalienable by anyone, of goodwill or otherwise. According to his answers to something called the “Reproductive Health Reality Check questionnaire,” he has the will—and now the means—to repeal the Hyde amendment, which does nothing to make abortion illegal, but guarantees that people of conscience will not have to pay for other people’s abortions with their federal tax dollars. His campaign’s response to the question “Does Sen. Obama support continuing federal funding for crisis pregnancy centers? Why or why not?” was a single word: “No.” Claiming that crisis pregnancy centers are a threat to legal abortion is a bit like attacking that Alcoholics Anonymous for subversively trying to bring back Prohibition, and yet the man who has promised to fund just about everything just can’t seem to bear the thought of a woman getting talked into bearing her child.

Toward what kind of America will be begin our journey on January 20? One clue might be found in New Mexico, where a photographer named Elaine Huguenin declined to be hired by a same-sex couple to take pictures of their “commitment ceremony.” The couple filed a complaint with the New Mexico Human Rights Division, and they won. Huguenin was assessed $6,600 in damages and barred from ever refusing such a request again. That is, this rather Orwellian extrajudicial body is so tolerant and respectful of diversity that they have compelled Elaine Huguenin to act in a way that contradicts her Christian beliefs.

There is no direct link to our next president here, but when we are speaking of matters judicial and Constitutional, we have to keep in mind the most famous of all the passages from that Planned Parenthood speech: "We need somebody who's got the heart, the empathy, to recognize what it's like to be a young teenage mom. The empathy to understand what it's like to be poor, or African-American, or gay, or disabled, or old. And that's the criteria by which I'm going to be selecting my judges." Eventually, anywhere from two to as many as five justices of the United States Supreme Court will have been nominated by a former constitutional law professor who values empathy over wisdom, courage, restraint, impartiality, experience, knowledge of the law and grammar itself (“criteria” is plural). Indeed, the evaluation of any quality other than empathy in a potential justice is doubtless above our next president’s pay grade, and anyway, the choice between a gay couple’s feelings and Elaine Huguenin’s constitutional rights is an easy one when one is sick of arguing about the same old stuff. A conscience still fighting the culture wars is no conscience at all, says the man who will throw out the first pitch of the next baseball season; until then, I’ll be digging in to that batter’s box.