RUSH: The Saddleback forum, Pastor Rick Warren, and here’s the question: ‘Senator Obama, as a pastor I have to deal with this all the time, all the pain, all the conflicts. I know it’s a very complex issue. Forty million abortions. At what point does a baby get human rights in your view?’
OBAMA: Well (sigh). You know, I — I, eh, er — I think that whether you’re looking at it from a theological perspective or, uh, a scientific perspective, answering that question with specificity, uhhhh, you know, is above my pay grade.
RUSH: Unbelievable.
OBAMA: The fact is — is that, uh, although we’ve had a president who is opposed to abortion over the last eight years, abortions have not gone down.
RUSH: Yes, they have. Abortions have been declining. This is a sad answer. Senator Obama, it is apparent now to me that everything in terms of the presidency, is above your pay grade. If you as a supposedly sensitive liberal Democrat preaching religious tolerance all over the place — if you, as a liberal Democrat, who claims to have a monopoly understanding human rights — if you, Senator, cannot understand, you cannot even answer when a human being is conferred human rights… Even if it’s two years after birth, even if it’s a day after, whatever! If you won’t answer that question, then you are, in my mind, disqualified from talking about human rights ever again anywhere. How in the world, ladies and gentlemen, can somebody genuinely…?
I’ll tell you how somebody can generally answer this question. When he got this question, basically the question was, ‘When does human life begin?’ the first thought in his mind was, ‘I can’t make the NOW people mad? I can’t make the feminists mad. I can’t betray the feminists and I can’t betray the left! Oh, God, how do I answer this?’ Well, uhhhh, I — I, uhhh. Oh, whenever you’re looking at it fray theological, scientific, answering that question specificity… It’s the most easy question in the world to answer with specificity! Your specificity might be wrong and people might disagree with it, but at some point, Senator, a human being has human rights. You just will not admit that a human being is a human being at some point, because doing so is going to anger people on the left who demand a doctrinaire response from you on this. Now, what do we know about Obama’s actual practice?
We know that Barack Obama believes it is proper to kill a baby that has survived an abortion. So, newborn babies don’t get any rights. His socialist friends will be mad because this means that Obama is not for cradle-to-grave government welfare. This could go back and harm him in any number of ways. Obama thinks cradle-to-grave is the sequence of events for children born when the parents don’t take one look at the kid and decide to go a different direction with their lives. You could say, and you wouldn’t be far wrong, that Barack Obama is akin to an executioner. Don’t ask him the ‘why’ questions. He just knows who. He doesn’t care about when or how. He just knows who.
I’ll tell you, he’s going to need one hell of a convention bounce, ’cause this position of his is inhuman. Even if he did not have this history of supporting the killing of babies outside the womb who had survived abortion, this answer is as immature, defensive, and full of fear as any I have heard; to not be able to say with specificity when a human being gets human rights? When does a baby…? A two-year-old is still a baby. A year-old is still a baby, is it not? You could say, with Obama, ‘Well, I think once there’s been a serious maturation of the brain process, and the child is able to respond to various things, then we know he’s human, and then human rights would be conferred.’ Something!
But to say that answering the question with specificity is above his pay grade is one of the biggest cop-outs — and it’s a cop-out owing to the fear he has of angering a bunch of militant, irrelevant, angry women and offending basic liberal doctrinaire belief. So he is a prisoner. He’s a prisoner to liberal dogma. He is not a unifier. He is not anything about change. He is not anything about hope. Do you think a little baby has any hope with Obama around? Here’s McCain’s answer, ladies and gentlemen — and, Mike, I want you to give me two seconds of dead air before you hit the answer because McCain just, bam, again comes out with it. ‘Senator McCain, at what point is a baby entitled to human rights?’
MCCAIN: At the moment of conception. (applause) I have a 25-year pro-life record in the Congress, in the Senate — and as president of the United States I will be a pro-life president, and this presidency will have pro-life policies. (applause) That’s my commitment; that’s my commitment to you.
RUSH: And that’s a core value. One thing about McCain, he has always been pro-life. This was not a hard answer for him. It was not an answer derived are from prior knowledge of the question. It was an answer based on his heartfelt core belief on the sanctity of life. If life doesn’t begin at conception, where can it begin? Where does it begin? The last thing the Democrat Party wants is the revival of this argument. It’s the last thing they want, and it has happened. And it has happened in a way that their candidate can be tarred and feathered and identified accurately as a baby killer — or as one who supports the killing of babies. (Let me soften it a little bit.)
Remember Ronald Reagan? On Friday, March 18, 2005, Peggy Noonan had a column. She said, ‘Ronald Reagan used to say, in the early days of the abortion debate, when people would argue that the fetus may not really be a person, he’d say, ‘Well, if you come across a paper bag in the gutter and it seems something’s in it and you don’t know if it’s alive, you don’t kick it, do you?’ No, you don’t.’ In other words, ‘If you don’t know, then you don’t kill it, do you?’ If you as an individual are conflicted about when a fetus is a human being and has human rights, if you’re not sure, then you don’t kill it, do you? Yeah, in parts of this country, you do, because you see, ladies and gentlemen, abortion has always been a political issue that is highly defining of the left. Now, Ed Morrissey today at Hot Air blog reminds us that Russell Berman reports in the New York Sun today:
‘[T]he Barack Obama campaign has acknowledged that Obama himself lied about the bill he torpedoed in 2003 that would have required medical providers to give normal medical attention to infants born alive during an abortion. The admission comes with a new spin, as the campaign finally admits that the bill Obama defeated in committee was all but identical to the federal law that passed the Senate unanimously in 2002: ‘Indeed, Mr. Obama appeared to misstate his position in the CBN interview on Saturday when he said the federal version he supported ‘was not the bill that was presented at the state level.’
”His campaign yesterday acknowledged that he had voted against an identical bill in the state Senate, and a spokesman, Hari Sevugan, said the senator and other lawmakers had concerns that even as worded, the legislation could have undermined existing Illinois abortion law. Those concerns did not exist for the federal bill, because there is no federal abortion law. In 2005, the campaign noted, a ‘Born Alive’ bill passed the Illinois Legislature after another clause had been added that explicitly stated that the legislation would have no effect on existing state abortion laws.” Everything he wanted in the bill there was. He voted against it. So now Obama ‘acknowledges that the bill he shot down as committee chair had the neutrality clause, but now he voted against it because it would have had some deleterious effect on abortion law.’
Now, that’s just ‘flat out untrue. The neutrality clause Obama now acknowledge existed in the law explicitly stated that the law had no intent on affecting abortions in which the fetus did not survive; that was the entire point of the neutrality clause.’ It was a simple piece of legislation. If the baby survives an abortion — it’s alive and it’s outside the womb — you can’t kill it, and he voted against that three times. There’s no other way to describe it. Now he’s admitting that they lied about it, but he is also now really jumping on his critics for trying to tell the truth about this. Evil does exist. I think it has to be confronted. It has to be confronted squarely.
One of the things I strongly believe is that we are not going to, as individuals, erase evil from the world. That is God’s task. But we can be soldiers in that process, and we can confront it when we see it. Now, is child abuse an evil? Of course it is. Child abuse is an evil, and we confront it, and we take children away from parents who are abusive all day, do we not? Well, if child abuse is evil, as Mr. Morrissey points out here, then infanticide is even more evil. What did Obama do when he saw this evil? Did he confront it as one of God’s soldiers, or did he facilitate it? He facilitated it. He facilitated the evil. The answer now from the Obama campaign is clear: Obama facilitated evil in order to protect abortion on demand, which was never threatened in the bill in the first place. That much, apparently, was not ‘above [his] pay grade.’