What matters

Note, there’s not a question mark after that.

This election has been all about that, for everybody actively involved or watching from the sidelines, but keenly this time around, about what matters (or doesn’t) to them. That would seem to be the case in every election when people vote their values and preferences, right? It’s different this time.

For so many fervent supporters of Sen. Obama, nothing matters but his persona. All the revelations coming out in recent days, the 2001 interview about his view of the Constitution and his philosophy of “redistributive justice”, the associations of his associations (William Ayers dedicating one of his books to RFK’s assassin; former PLO spokesman Rashid Khalidi at a dinner with Obama on tape the Los Angeles Times won’t release; ACORN…), the statement that his policies would bankrupt the coal industry…..just don’t matter. Obama symbolizes change from whatever they don’t like about now, and just don’t care about the details of his life or even his policies.

For fervent advocates of the sanctity and dignity of life for every human being, the details of the two presidential candidates’ principles on life and human rights matter above all else. Because a health care plan or national security policies or economic growth charts matter only to citizens who are living in this country. And the key to that is the word ‘living’.

Barack Obama’s promise to enshrine the Freedom of Choice Act so radicalizes abortion on demand wrought by Roe, it means the rights and benefits Obama is promising the underprivileged are completely denied the entire class of human beings he deems unworthy of privileges at all. His extreme position on this represents, fundamentally, his version of American ideals.

Robert George describes a culture under such a government:

Barack Obama’s America is one in which being human just isn’t enough to warrant care and protection. It is an America where the unborn may legitimately be killed without legal restriction, even by the grisly practice of partial-birth abortion. It is an America where a baby who survives abortion is not even entitled to comfort care as she dies on a stainless steel table or in a soiled linen bin. It is a nation in which some members of the human family are regarded as inferior and others superior in fundamental dignity and rights.

In Obama’s America, public policy would make a mockery of the great constitutional principle of the equal protection of the law. In perhaps the most telling comment made by any candidate in either party in this election year, Senator Obama, when asked by Rick Warren when a baby gets human rights, replied: “that question is above my pay grade.” It was a profoundly disingenuous answer: For even at a state senator’s pay grade, Obama presumed to answer that question with blind certainty. His unspoken answer then, as now, is chilling: human beings have no rights until infancy – and if they are unwanted survivors of attempted abortions, not even then.

Everything else that matters depends on this first.