Helen Weir
February 25, 2008
Abraham, Martin, and . . . Barack?
By Helen Weir

"Mom, we had a substitute teacher today," my son, a fourth-grader at a Catholic school, mentioned a while back.

"Oh, really, Honey? How did that go?"

"She told us it was a great thing that our country might soon have its first black president — Barack Obama."

Stunned silence.

But then again, I thought, why should I be stunned? We've been bombarded by the pro-Obama "argument from making history" for many months now.

After a moment of mental recuperation, I replied, "She did? Did anyone say anything?"

"Tommy raised his hand. He said, 'Why would that be a great thing? Obama is for abortion!'"

Now that's what I call hope for this country's future.

"Good for Tommy!" I beamed.

"I raised my hand next," my son continued, "and said, 'Alan Keyes could be our first black president, too!'"

At this, I clapped the lad on the back. "Awesome job! And what did your substitute teacher have to say to that?"

He thought for a moment. "I don't think she answered me at all," he frowned.

I imagine not.

If there's one thing the prevailing propaganda can't stand up to, it's a little verifiable information. Most adults don't know as much about the presidential primaries as these two grade school kids do. Worse yet, on the Obama front, people don't really seem to care to know. Mention his opposition to the Born Alive Infants Protection Act (BAIPA), for example, and you will find a veritable force field surrounding this man, like Morbius fending off the monsters from the Id: "You're making it up." "Where'd you see that — on the Internet?" "If a frontrunner had done any such a thing, they'd be reporting it on the news."

You'd think that the good guys of conservative talk radio might take it upon themselves to inform the voting public. Instead, the buzz in that particular subculture is no different from what is being bandied about in general. The only problem with Hillary's rival, it is alleged, is that he is an empty suit — a candidate of smoke and mirrors, with no record to speak of.

In point of fact, Barack Obama has taken advantage of his sound bite of a political career to distinguish himself as the most anti-life figure in the history of the United States. We occasionally hear that Barry is pro-Roe, but technically, he is against it. After all, even Harry Blackmun believed that legal protection should kick in at birth. In Obama, we find a public servant who has taken a stand not only for abortion, but for infanticide itself. Here is someone who doesn't deserve the honor of being upgraded to "non-descript."

Abraham

Not to be overlooked in the attempted historicization of the candidacy of Barack Obama is the providential fact that the true nature of his convictions first came to light in Illinois, a state still styling itself — less credibly every day — as the Land of Lincoln. For the United States to elect her first African American president would surely be a landmark event. For that president to hail (politically speaking) from this particular place would be poetic justice of the most poignant degree — if that president had anything in common with the substance of what Lincoln stood for, that is.

America's foundational acknowledgment is that we are all created equal, and endowed by our Creator with certain unalienable rights. In heinous violation of this Declarationist principle, black people were nevertheless — as we all know and deplore — brought to this country by force, and enslaved. Lincoln was the one who, providentially and courageously, became our nation's well-beloved and iconic defender of the right to liberty.

In our day, the dehumanization and exploitation characteristic of slavery itself center instead on the heinous denial of the even more basic right to life. We live out the legacy of Lincoln when we insist that the Supreme Court is no more justified in denying the status of personhood to the unborn and the otherwise unwanted than it was in denying the same thing to Dred Scott and those sharing his plight. Not everyone recognizes this principle today, however, just as not everyone recognized it in the days that became the backdrop of the Gettysburg Address.

Does Obama "somehow" (to borrow Barry's all-purpose verbal weapon of mass dismissal) represent the fruition of Lincoln's efforts, simply because he is black? The suggestion is nothing less than obscene. What the current Democratic frontrunner stands for is an organic repudiation of everything the abolitionist movement ever tried to achieve, of all that Lincoln finally gave his very life's blood to see secured.

Martin

This elevation of skin color over the content of one's character (which is what the sub was contending, even granting the erroneous contention that Obama has no character) is inimical to the legacy of another landmark American as well — Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. This man, too, gave his life for the great cause of Declarationism, a sacrifice which is not honored sufficiently when his "dream" is substantively eviscerated. In reverse discrimination, in the black supremacist movement, in the appropriation of the term "racism" as a stick with which to beat down all dissent from the liberal consensus, we see the tendency to "compensate for" injustice by extending it.

Barack Obama, obviously, is far from the only one who is guilty of this. Nevertheless, in failing to support BAIPA, he has personally volunteered to become the poster boy for the continuation of the cause of perpetration. Instead of demanding justice for the unborn, the impaired, and the elderly — all groups who are now, as other groups once were, at the mercy of those more powerful than themselves — Barack and company clamor for the "right" to wield the contemporary slaveholder's whip, using or disposing of such lives as one's own economic, personal, or political advantage might momentarily necessitate.

Some might say I have no right to comment on this, not being a black person myself. It's funny how Al Sharpton is never told to hold his tongue about the world of whites. Nor should he be. That would constitute an application of the anti-American notion that there is no such thing as the human race, only splinter groups in a yin-and-yanglike eternal struggle with one another. Still, according to the prevailing wisdom, I stand to apply for minority status on at least two fronts: that of being a Catholic, and that of being a woman.

John

Rounding out the trio commemorated in the haunting old folk song is JFK, who — like Lincoln and King — was cut down by an assassin's bullet. There is no taking anything away from that! Still, in terms of what he finally stood for, John doesn't really extend the "Abraham and Martin" Declarationist line.

I don't recall the portion of the Gettysburg Address in which the president who guided us through the Civil War reassured the suffering public that, although harboring abolitionist sentiments in his own heart, he would never permit them to interfere with his upholding of the law of the land. When was it, again, that Dr. King told his fellow African Americans that — since mere discrimination is way better than slavery — they ought to learn to tolerate, realistically and gratefully, the lesser of two evils? JFK was the first Catholic president, true, and in that sense represented a breakthrough for a group historically (and still) confronted with a high degree of sheer bigotry. But to achieve presidential status at the cost of one's very identity is a Pyrrhic victory at best.

Obama, in this sense, truly deserves to be dubbed the "black knight of the new Camelot" (in the apt turn of phrase of my fellow RA columnist Lisa Fabrizio). There is a double entendre here, inasmuch as a chevalier bedecked in black, in the old stories, inevitably proved to be an anti-knight — a predator upon the weak and defenseless, an incarnate refutation of the ideals of chivalry, a menace to his own community. Margaret Sanger announced many decades ago that the organization she founded (now coyly referred to as "Planned Parenthood") would commit black genocide by recruiting African American "useful idiots" to do the convincing — spreading contraception, abortion, and infanticide throughout their own population. There it is right in front of us, in black and white (if you'll pardon the expression), and yet Obama continues to be hailed as a hero. Would this man's inauguration be an auspicious moment for his own people? Only if they (and all of us) prove willing to break faith not only with the real heroes of their past, but with the future as well.

America's First Woman President?

I find it endlessly instructive that my son's substitute teacher did not try to tell her captive audience of presumably impressionable young people that electing a person of the female persuasion — namely, Mrs. Clinton — would count as the historical breakthrough of our times. The sub was a woman herself. Why not plug gender instead of race?

In the wake of the JFK mentality, America has been floundering in a quagmire of misunderstanding that has by now reached mind-boggling proportions. The genius of this country is that people of all groups can, within the protection of our common assent to the truths of the Declaration, live out their own identities in an environment of mutual respect. Redefined as requiring the renunciation of identity — one's country's as well as one's own — America ceases to make any sense. Our politics as we now see it unfolding is a process of aligning one's self not according to the kaleidoscopic ephemera presented in the media, but according to which definition of America one accepts.

Anti-Declarationism require that our citizens and public servants renounce their own identities, just as they commonly renounce America's. Therefore, a woman who repudiates the nature of femininity by advocating abortion counts as a "woman," politically speaking, while pro-life people belonging just as verifiably to the weaker sex, do not. It is not one's biological identity, but one's anti-Declarationist stand, that is being validated here.

Similarly, liberal African Americans are (in their own and their fellow liberals' estimation) the "real" blacks, while conservatives of the same skin color are discounted. It is not one's actual race, but one's willingness to sell out that race, that counts.

Many of us Americans are immigrants, a couple of generations back, but our standing as such does not seem to validate our support of legal immigration. By legal immigration we mean the continuation of the Declarationist tradition of permitting into our country those whose aspiration it is to become Americans — not just those who want, for reasons more or less justifiable, to participate in our economic system. The forces of anti-Declarationism want to see our ideological borders invaded as rampantly as are the physical ones, permitting people who have no intention of ratifying our common way of life to take advantage of, and ultimately, to destroy it. Declarationists, on the other hand, who support immigration of the traditional kind, and who are basically recent immigrants themselves, are nevertheless disallowed to register their disagreement. We are rubber-stamped "anti-immigration," and that — within the confines of what has been scurrilously engineered into being recognized as our common conversation — is that.

In the "America" whose identity has been renounced, identity itself has become mercurial. Women who aren't women, blacks who aren't black, babies who aren't human, immigrants who are "anti-immigration," — it gets a little confusing sometimes. But if you understand the anti-Declarationist spirit behind it all, you can sort things out. My son's substitute teacher touted Obama over Clinton, I submit, because Barack has been able to position himself as the more liberal, the more anti-Declarationist, of the two. If Hillary's husband was once acknowledged as our first "black" president, maybe her rival, if electorally victorious, could be hailed as the first "woman" in the White House as well.

Holding These Truths

In this scrambling of identities, the GOP itself has not proven immune. How can somebody be called a "Republican," when the things they stand for and the things specified in the party platform have next to nothing in common? Only if we succumb, in essence, to the anti-Declarationist m.o. ourselves.

Our duty as citizens who have benefited from and inherited the American identity is to "hold these truths" in our hearts, and our times, as well. Hold onto them and don't give them up — not in the ballot box, not in what you feel free to speak up about, not in the sanctuary of your own heart and thoughts.

Many people have been media-managed into believing that such "purity" and "idealism" are not only impossible, but ill-advised, in this day and age. It's not true. Do we want to bestow on future generations of American historians (provided that there are any) the unenviable task of explaining how this country made the jarring transition from Abraham and Martin to . . . Barack? Or do we want to act with American integrity, standing with the one courageous Republican whose Declarationism will not permit him to stand down? Now that would be historic.

If you don't know who this candidate might be, ask my fourth-grader some time.

© Helen Weir

 

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Helen Weir

Helen is a freelance writer based in western Wisconsin. (Her works have also appeared under her former name of Helen Valois.) She is a member of the Militia Immaculatae movement of Marian consecration founded by St. Maximilian Kolbe.

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