What Race is Barack Obama? Barack Obama Age? Barack Obama Religion? Barack Obama Pro-Choice? Barack Obama Pro-Life?
These are some of the hot questions folks are typing into search engines according to Yahoo's Buzz log titled President Barack Obama? ever since Barack Obama's Sunday morning "Meet the Press" appearance where Barack hawked his new book, The Audacity of Hope: Thoughts on Reclaiming the American Dream
, not the Dreams from My Father: A Story of Race and Inheritance
that Obama previously discussed on Oprah.Obama said he was open to thinking about a run for the White House in 2008. And that started a barage of questions.
Amazingly, some folks had never even heard of the junior senator from Illinois, nor his career-changing keynote speech at the 2004 Democratic Convention that set the political world ablaze for Barack.
People want to know about Obama's wife and the like.I already know he was born August 4, 1961 (making him 46 as of this update), is biracial (with a Kenyan dad and white mom from Kansas who can trace her ancestry all the way back to Jefferson Davis, the president of the Confederacy) and that his wife Michelle is an amazing lady.
All I wanted to know was:
Is Barack Obama pro-life?
Unfortunately, the Google-butt out there claims Obama's voting record shows he's "100% pro-choice, even including late-term, partial-birth abortions."
Say it ain't so, Barack... Please!! Hurry and say it ain't so!
...but looks like it is, according to excerpts from Barack's memoir.
And according to the October 23, 2006, issue of Time sitting open on my computer desk, all marked with black ball-point underlines, with a Barack Obama cover article and the excerpt from his book quotes Obama as telling a pro-life man that Obama is a Christian.
As far as supporting abortion, Obama said: "I told him I understood his position but had to disagree with it. I explained my belief that few women made the decision to terminate a pregnancy casually...that I feared a ban on abortion would force women to seek unsafe abortions..."
Barack is fair in his struggles over the issue, and I'm glad he gave the man time and heard him out. Barack admits to changing the staunch pro-abortion speak on his website, which he claims was written by his staff, but is still pro-choice. Such a nice word for such a horrific procedure...
Mr. Obama, may I lead you on over to my "We Had Abortions, Too...And Now We're Pro-Life" piece?
Oh man.
Barack is so intelligent, sooo well-read and well-versed in literature.
He's refined, he's an amazing writer. He's quick-witted and funny. He's everything you'd ever want in a president.
Why? Why? Why???!!!!! Must he be pro-choice!
Damn it all to hell, as my people used to say.
Oh well, I just may vote for Barack Obama anyway...though he believes in abortion.
I'm starting to trust that he's a Christian man who's thought thru the issue greatly.
We'll see come Election Day. After I pray and pray and pray...
Tags:
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Comments
This has gotten more Republicans elected in the past 12 years than anything else, yet what exactly have they done about it? What will another 12 years in total control of the gov't do about it?
I wish people didn't abort babies. I wish they didn't inject heroin. I wish they didn't start having sex at 13.
Thing is...they do. They do all three of these. And just saying "you can't do that" doesn't work.
Therefore we have theft to pay for illegal drugs, and jails are full, and the legal system costs us a fortune.
We have 13 year-olds having babies or abortions, many times because people thought it would be a sin to acknowledge that condoms might stop that, so we should be open and honest.
And if we didn't have legal abortions, there's the age old arguement that this would just be yet another reality made profitable to the underground, and therefore much less safe.
Plus there's the bottom line: "Outlawing" it is, according to the constitution, unconstitutional. Even IF Repubs stack the court and get that changed, it will still be available in most states.
So why vote in people who invade other countries, oppose Geneva conventions, take bribes from lobbyists, and over spend our nations tax money, JUST because one believes those people might outlaw abortion?
I just don't see it.
Nobody wants people to have abortions. Nobody runs around and says, yes, I think an abortion would be a lovely thing to have today. For all but the most messed up women (and hello that alone says something) an abortion is a difficult decision, chosen amongst other difficult decisions. Yet the same people that want to eliminate abortions refuse to educate people on how to avoid having babies.
Abstinence only education doesn't work. Yes, people who are taught abstinence only have sex later (around age 19 as opposed to around 16-17 for general population) but when they do finally have sex they have no idea how to avoid pregnancy (and STD's). Isn't even one life saved worth it? Of course it is. Which is why my liberal Catholic high school taught us about birth control, STD's etc, (in health class), while in religion class we learned about waiting till marriage and the Catholic Churches official position on Birth Control (most forms are verboten). Because, guess what, even married women don't want to pop out babies every year, and your spouse may have an STD that you'll have to deal with.
This is, of course, where religious liberals and conservatives don't agree - we don't feel that we have the right to impose our morality on others. If God gives man free will who are we to take it away? The best we can do, and hope to do, is give people all the information and give them the opportunity to make the best possible choices. Yes it would be wonderful if people waited until they were married, or at least in a committed relationship to have sex - but it's not my (or anyone else's) responsibility to make the choice for the world. And I think you'd find that if more people were educated on how to avoid unwanted pregnancies, abortion numbers would drop - drastically. Republicans (and when I say Republicans I mean the politicians) don't really want the numbers to drop though, because it keeps getting them elected.
They talk as though they're the moral authority for the country, and as though believing in Christ makes on right. Why is it then that hotbeds of secular heathenism like Denmark and Norway have lower abortion rates than the US? These are the same countries, btw that decriminalize drug use, and have liberal social policies to reduce the number of very poor people they have. Hmmm could their be a link between poverty and abortions? nah.
As for Ann Coulter...I'm too lazy to get the specific links, but while I hesitate to call her a liar, she makes ish up and manipulates data to support her viewpoint. I have a statistical background and you can often make numbers say the opposite of what they mean.
Lastly, I'm sick, sick, sick of people basing party alliances on a single issue (like abortion). Our "War on drugs" has turned Colombia into a guerrilla state, turned poor peasants all over Latin America, even poorer thanks to our liberal spraying of pesticides on their crops (the marijuana plants however have become resistant to the pesticides), and turned Costa Rica from Eco-paradise into drug runner corridor. Instead of treating it as a public health issue, we've turned it into a moral issue.
Global warming is happening and we've locked ourselves into fuel cell technology that's still at least a decade away (au revoir new orleans) while viable alternative technology (better mass transit, bio diesel, solar in some places, wind in others, geothermal in still other places) exists. Cancer rates are soaring, in part because of chemicals like polyvinyl chloride that our government refuses to ban because they're in the pockets of big business. And don't even get me started on the war which is as much about our insatiable need for oil as it is about "bringing peace and stability to the region".
Yes abortion bugs me, but what bugs me more is that as big as the number of abortions is, the number of kids who die every day from lack of food,sanitation, or who die from easily treatable diseases. It bugs me that the same Walmart pharmacy clerk who refuses to sell me the morning after pill for moral reasons, is perfectly ok working for a company that hires illegal immigrants and locks them into the stores overnight to prevent "theft", which chases out smaller local businesses that often pay more and keep the money in the community (as opposed to funneling it up to some corporate billionaire) and which all but encourages producers to use sweatshop and child labor to give it the low, low, lowest prices, so that we can fill our growing homes and our three car garages with stuff that we never see, never mind actually use.
To me worrying about abortion right now, is like fretting over the living room wallpaper while the house burns down.
There has always been knowledge of abortives. My parents grew up in Haiti and people there have always known what plants a person can take to stop a pregnancy. Furthermore, breastfeeding is an abortive did you know that? Should women not breastfeed because they risk terminating a pregnancy? Also, women who are pregnant with dominant dwarf babies (that is the genes are coming from both babies) will have spontaneous abortions. It's also not so cut and dry an issue where life begins and ends. Those pictures right to lifers like to show of babies the size of a thumbnail are very beautiful - but that baby couldn't survive outside of the womb. That's a possibility at of a life. And, if you value life so much, how can you support a president who killed 34,000 iraqi's in a year, and maimed how many soldiers so that we can drive SUV's?
It seems that people are less intent on saving lives (i.e. reducing the number of abortions) as in controlling sex. I'm not in the business of controlling who a person sleeps with as long as both parties are consenting (and children and animals can't consent).
It's funny that when I say a person's abortion stance is of utmost importance to me, folks say I'm a single-issue voter.
But then when folks singly focus on stopping the horrible war on terror, they never pull out the single-issue dialogue.
I am a Catholic religious brother here in France. I have put off the duty of informing myself about the candidates until now. It's hard to know how to sift through French media. My brothers and sisters from around the world in my house here all ask me about Obama. I took some time from my studies, prayer, and bike-fixing do a search this afternoon. I was afraid to search the web. Already, magazines and papers can be a zoo of misleading persuasion. But my seach fell right away upon your blog, and you raise all the same questions that I hold at heart, especially the questions of personal character and of the value of human life.
Now, I feel informed. Can you write me an update in the coming months?
franthony@catholic.org