Ivan Kenneally @ Postmodern Conservative:
Of course, this compartmentalization of private conscience and law is a caricature of both and depends upon a Straussian dualism that has become the modern conceit. Unfortunately, Obama’s position of moral neutrality is a pretense designed to usher in his own preferred ideological commitments. It might be the case that one of our most pressing problems today is the way our own odd American Straussianism has a tendency to prevent public debate as a matter of principle, or to diminish those debates as politically irrelevant, and to transfer whatever debate is deemed legitimate from the prudence and consent of common citizens to the expertise of bureaucratic elites.
I think there's a lot of projection going on here regarding what Kenneally thinks Obama was intending as contrasted with what he actually said, but more on that in a minute. I'm largely in agreement with what Kenneally is saying here, but I have a few nits to pick.
I think conservative intellectuals frequently make a category mistake in that they conflate the cultural and political, and evaluate statements about a public figure's political positions as if they were identical with his cultural commitments. I welcome Obama's speech as one appropriate and constructive in the political sphere, but I don't know what his real thinking about abortion is outside his role as politician. It would seem he doesn't have a strong position one way or the other as a Christian. To describe this speech as marginalizing principled anti-abortionists or to say that Obama has strong ideological commitments just seems to me to be conservative cant. If anything, Obama seems to be wishy-washy about what abortion really means for prenatal life.
The distinction I want to make here is that one kind of discourse is appropriate for him qua president in the political sphere; another would be appropriate with him as a Christian discussing the issue in our homes or in some other venue in which a discussion of what he believes as a Christian would be appropriate. Obama's Christianity should be irrelevant to the rest of us regarding his role as president. However, as one Christian to another, I'd like to sit him in my living room and privately converse with him about what he believes about the human status of the fetus as distinguished from his political position on the issue. And then we could talk about how that affects his thinking about his political position on the issue regarding the rights of the weakest and most vulnerable.
Be that as it may, I think that you could argue that the venue created a kind of category confusion. In public venues, must the president always talk as president, or are there public venues in the cultural sphere, such as universities, where he can talk as a man and a Christian apart from his political role as president? I saw his speech as one given primarily in his role as a political figure, even though the venue was cultural. I'd argue that it is just not possible for a president, no matter what his cultural/ontological commitments, to talk as anything other than a politician, at least publicly, because the separation between political and cultural that I'm advocating is not broadly accepted.
Maybe someday in the far future the culture will evolve in such a way that our public life in the political sphere and our collective life in the cultural sphere will overlap more than it is possible to do now. But for the foreseeable future, our practical social reality is pluralistic, and in a pluralistic society the primary virtue in the political sphere is tolerance for those whose worldview is grounded in an ontology or cultural matrix that is different. And Obama's speech was an exemplar of this kind of political virtue.
In time what each group in our pluralistic stew brings to the larger globalizing culture will either fall to the wayside or be folded into some new cultural fusion or synthesis in a way that Christendom emerged out of the cultural pluralism of the late Roman Empire. This fusion will be effected as primarily a cultural process which will in the long run have political effects for good or ill. But it's not something that can be engineered or even argued for in the political sphere. So for now cultural commitments (e.g. religious values and beliefs), while they inform our political commitments, need to stay clear of the political sphere.
Back to Kenneally. I'm closer to Kenneally than to Obama when it comes to the politics of abortion rights, but when I read Kenneally's remarks about Obama's speech, I see him missing the main thrust of what Obama was trying to say. I don't think Obama is dismissing anti-abortion rights people as having "merely" religious convictions. I see him saying that in a pluralistic society in which so many people have differing standpoints, the political sphere has to be a place where we cannot argue our case based on our particular ontologies. We have to argue the case on neutral ground, which in modern/postmodern societies is secular ground.
For those who who want to constrain abortion rights that means that whatever the ontological grounding for such a commitment, they have to argue the case in the political sphere using rights language. To say this does not diminish or disrespect the ontological or religious commitments which might inspire such an argument. It's simply to acknowledge that this is what is necessary in a pluralistic society in which people grounded in very different ontologies have to find a common language if any conversation and resolution of differences is to be found.
I agree that the rights language Western secularists use is an unacknowledged appropriation of a Christian contribution to culture. So what? The origin doesn't matter so much as that the rights traditions provides a language, which precisely because of its provenance, creates the common ground for Christians and secularists to converse. And conversations are what we need now, not debates.
I heard Obama's speech at Notre Dame as his attempt to detoxify the political sphere regarding discourse about the abortion issue so that such conversations might take place. The political sphere has become a radioactive wasteland in which no sane and humane idea can survive when it comes to one side talking to the other. His speech is a welcome beginning to clear away the waste to find a clean place for a new start. If the sane and humane people on both sides of the issue, and there are sane and humane people on both sides, were to talk to one another about abortion, we'd probably have a very different framework for abortion rights than the one we have now.
Roe was a tragic mistake, but it's not going away. Or to put it another way, we don't want the kind of justices on the Supreme Court who would make it go away because they would cause worse problems on other issues that in the long run are more important for the health our republic, enfeebled now as it is.
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