Dr. Beckwith: Notre Dame is honoring a man committed to keeping...

"a segment of the human population, the unborn, ...  permanently outside the protections of the law." From a piece, "Barack Obama and Notre Dame: Juris Doctor Honoris Causa?", posted today on the First Things site:

So, this is the man on whom the University of Notre Dame wants to bestow an honorary doctorate of laws? But, as we have clearly seen, Obama, in spite of all his personal talents and accomplishments, explicitly and unapologetically rejects the intrinsic dignity of the human person, the proper subject of the natural and canonical laws on which the university’s jurisprudential patrimony rests. It is a jurisprudential patrimony that the university not only claims to believe, it claims both to believe that it is true and that it knows that it is true.

I have no doubt that Notre Dame would never bestow an honorary doctorate in science to an astronomer who vigorously advances the agenda of geocentricity or a chemist who refuses to teach his students the periodic table, or award an honorary doctorate in divinity to a theologian who is an unrepentant apologist for racial apartheid and white supremacy, regardless of what these three individuals may have accomplished or how well their celebrity may be received by the wider culture and its influential institutions.

Why then would the University of Notre Dame bestow an honorary doctorate of laws on someone who for his entire public life has enthusiastically fought for a segment of the human population, the unborn, to remain permanently outside the protections of the law? Not only that, he has also demanded that our legal regime require that his fellow citizens, including Catholics, underwrite the destruction of these prenatal human beings. And not only that, he is right now preparing to remove by executive order protections that were put in place so that pro-life physicians, nurses, medical students, and others in the health care field may not be forced to participate in abortions or be discriminated against for refusing to do so or even harboring such beliefs.

• The Case Against Abortion: An Interview with Dr. Francis Beckwith, author of Defending Life (Ignatius Insight, Dec. 2007)

Comments

[Ed Peters]

My friends disagree with me from time to time on this or that. I disgaree with them from time to time on this or that. But, man, I cannot find ANYBODY whose opinion I trust with anything positive to say about this one. Let's face it, if Notre Dame did not have a football team (you know, Touchdown Jesus, and "Rudy", and all that), would it attract much public interest anymore? What, besides fading football memories and continually cratering Catholic identity, is Notre Dame noticed for anymore? Not terribly much.

Pres. Fr. Jenkins, meanwhile, is a either a disaster, or the perfect man for the job, given what the job basically is now: overseeing a school's evaporating Catholicism.

[Dr John James]

The pro-life movement should at Notre Dame in force of numbers. Respectfully, peacefully, but strongly. Let's turn this meeting into an opportunity to focus the American and world's attention on Obama's abysmal human rights record.

[T. Shaw]

Pop quiz:

List Obama "personal talents and accomplishments" in chronological order.

[Jack]

Community organizer. Taught "constitutional" law for a while.