Michelle channels Margaret--and gets away with it

By Helen Valois

"(My dad) and my mom poured everything they had into me and (my brother) Craig.
It was the greatest gift a child can receive:
never doubting for a single minute that you're loved,
and cherished, and have a place in this world."

— from Michelle Obama's speech at the 2008 Democratic Convention

With these and other remarks delivered Tuesday night in Denver, She Who Must Not Be Criticized pulled off — at least, in the estimation of high profile liberal and conservative commentators alike — an amazing transformation from frothing-at-the-mouth America basher to mild-mannered average Mom. Mainstream media evaluations of Michelle's performance were indistinguishable from the general uncritical fervor with which all things Obama are acclaimed, while Rush cited the "greatest gift" remark only as evidence of her convincingly-evinced and newfound baseball-and-apple-pie aura. O'Reilly noted in his Memo that Michelle was basically expected to "be nice," and that, in the last analysis, "she was."

But, was she?

Only if we let the drama of the Kennedy appearance, the wafting strains of Stevie Wonder songs, and the breathtaking poignancy of having a black man nominated for President of the United States take our attention away from the substance of what Barack's wife was actually saying.

Where Are the Reporters When You Need Them?

Being "loved and cherished" constitutes a wonderful state of affairs for any child, certainly, and is what every one of them truly deserves. But — as the passive voice implies — these conditions can only be bestowed upon a youngster from the outside. They speak not to the intrinsic dignity and worth of the "loved and cherished" human being him or herself, but rather to the attitudes, values, and desires of the surrounding adults. Instead of characterizing being "loved and cherished" as a great gift — which it is — Mrs. Obama has declared it the greatest. Subtly but surely, her use of the superlative degree objectifies children, allowing the prejudices of the powerful to usurp the rights of the weak.

Lest this distinction be dismissed as a senseless splitting of grammatical hairs, let us bear in mind that Michelle's seemingly harmless choice of words might in fact have been harmless, coming from someone who takes respect for the right to life for granted. She and Barack are light years away, however, from fitting this description. Didn't Illinois nurse Jill Stanek, for forty-five long minutes, give the handicapped baby she found in a soiled linen cart what Mrs. Obama calls the "greatest gift a child can receive," while Michelle's own husband, of whose presidential nomination she is reportedly so "proud," used his influence as a state senator to enshrine in law the denial of this gift to all others like that discriminated-against little one? The Obamas' anti-life extremism, then, is the ineluctable backdrop against which every word of hers (not to mention his) must be critically measured.

Where are our intrepid investigative journalists, asking the pro-abortion aspiring First Lady the obvious question: how can being "loved and cherished" be the "greatest gift" a child can receive? Isn't life itself the sine qua non on which being loved and cherished, or neglected and overlooked, or esteemed and emulated, or despised and disparaged, are all finally contingent? No one, after all, can be either loved or cherished unless he or she has first been allowed to live. Why hasn't anyone said to Michelle, "So, according to you, every child should be loved and cherished — or what? Or be granted no 'place in this world,' quite literally?"

Subscribing to Sangerian Orthodoxy

The media personalities so gullibly giving Mrs. Obama a pass on this one really have no excuse for not realizing, or not pointing out, that she is far from the first person to suggest that a child's worth is dependent on the value system of those around him. "Every Child a Wanted Child" has long been the mantra of Planned Parenthood, an organization founded by the birth-controlling Margaret Sanger.

At least, that became PP's mantra after the Nazis showed the world what the separation of the "valued" people from the "not valuable" means in actual practice, and Sanger and her followers had to remove the concept of "eugenics" from the organization's name and rhetoric.

To understand the mentality that lurks in the shadows of Michelle's balloon-festooned Denver appearance, then, let's take a look at the flipside of the "greatest gift" idea, proffered by "abortion rights" pioneer Garrett Hardin. On behalf of the movement of which the Obamas have set themselves on the cutting edge, he answered — quite bluntly, and decades ago — the questions no reporter has yet posed to the new, "family-friendly" Michelle. If being "loved and cherished" is truly the circumstance upon which one's place in this world depends, what should become of those who are not? "The condition of unwantedness," Hardin notoriously and paradigmatically argued,

. . . makes it probable that the child will be poorly cared for, economically, physically, and psychologically . . . Abortion for the children's sake — this is paradoxical but true. And society wants children to be wanted so that they grow up without twists. (If they grow up physically or psychologically twisted, society pays grievously for their unwantedness.) . . .

The unborn lives that are put to an end before the time for recognition as members of the community — which occurs at birth, in our society — by their disappearance contribute in a positive way to the psychological health of the surviving community . . . Only if tiny unwanted beings are removed before society confers on them the status of human beings (and thus right-full members of the human community) can all those who are born into the community be endowed with the psychic strength that comes from knowing for sure that they were wanted. [1]

While Michelle might take exception to the part about welcoming new human beings into the "surviving community" at birth, we need to ask — on behalf of America's AWOL reporters — what her evident agreement with the standard pro-abortion take on unwantedness says about people like, for instance, her own husband Barack, who was abandoned by his father at an early age (see Jerome Corsi's excellent tome Obama Nation on this point.) Is the charismatic Democratic contender, then, half human — or perhaps, in his wife's estimation, half twisted? Should a person whose claim to a place in this world is as tenuous as his is, really be allowed to run for president at all? And, what kind of drain is Barack's continued existence having on the "psychic strength" of the rest of us? Perhaps, in place of a flag pin, he could be made to wear a scarlet "U" for Unwanted on his lapel.

The Dr. King Connection

At another point in her speech Michelle Obama, after mentioning Martin Luther King, Jr., by name, pointed out, "I stand here today at the crosscurrents of that history." Since she is so anxious for the racial aspect to be brought into the discussion, let's oblige her and take a look at it. It was Margaret Sanger, after all, who explained in a 1939 letter to a confrere: "We do not want the word to go out that we want to exterminate the Negro population." To accomplish this task while masking it at the same time, Margaret envisioned recruiting black people "with engaging personalities" [2] to do the propagandizing for her cause.

Michelle styles herself and her husband as the present-day representatives of the movement spearheaded by Dr. King, but they are not. In channeling Margaret Sanger, she sets her family in radical opposition to the basic human equality for which the great civil rights champion stood. Mrs. Obama's place on the stage in Denver was an historic moment, all right — for Planned Parenthood's notoriously racist founder, who succeeded, posthumously, in recruiting, in the Obamas, some black people "with engaging personalities" indeed.

Denying the Declaration

If being "loved and cherished" by those around you is not the "greatest gift a child can receive," what is? The words of the Declaration of Independence delineate American conviction on this point. Because we are all "endowed by our Creator" with "certain unalienable rights" — first off, the right to life — our status as children of God is that gift. Upon recognition of this status, the existence of our nation depends. It is not because our parents love and want us, but because God does, that a "place in this world" should by rights be societally guaranteed to each and every born and unborn human being — even Barack.

Perhaps the precise content of the Declaration of Independence is no longer a component of an ivy-league education. Still, Mrs. Obama might google the subject some time on her own. That she has not done so becomes even more apparent towards the end of her Denver talk where, recalling a prior speech of her husband's, she noted:

He reminded us that we know what our world should look like. We know what fairness and justice and opportunity look like. And he urged us to believe in ourselves — to find the strength within ourselves to strive for the world as it should be. And isn't that the great American story?

No, Michelle, it is not. Our nation was founded upon a belief in God and in His immutable principles, rather than in ourselves and our shifting and suspicious "wants," and "desires," and "aspirations." After all, slaveholders had all those things, too. America's greatness, for which you are now professing a sudden verbal if not ideological appreciation, depends precisely upon her definitive rejection of this type of subjectivity as a sound basis for the social contract.

Still, there is one observation in this last excerpt of Michelle's with which we can all agree. Americans do know what fairness and justice and opportunity look like. And we know they are not in the least reflected in the heart-wrenching scene of a nurse cradling a needlessly dying infant she found cast away on a soiled linen cart, nor in the judgment of a public servant who would not take the necessary steps to prevent such travesties from happening in the future. They are not reflected in the treatment given to helpless infants whose bodies have issued forth from their mothers', while sharp instruments are thrust into the backs of their necks. They are not reflected in the guinea-pig status of embryos used for stem cell research. And they are not reflected in the fate of the millions of unborn children whose lives are flung "legally" away in this country each year since 1973, either.

Least of all do we detect any concern for "fairness and justice and opportunity" in the persons of those politicians who would step forward to assume the mantle of leadership in this country without taking a principled stance against the great anti-life juggernaut of our times, whether they try to do so in Springfield, Illinois, to the sound of Stevie Wonder, and surrounded by red, white, and blue balloons, or not.

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© Helen Valois