Religion & Law

Rob Vischer rightly objects to the pietist-voluntarist rejection of public reason that he finds among some evangelicals. He turns instead to Catholicism for its more frequent union of faith and reason and consequent openness to the non-believing world. I take it that fidelity to Logos as Reason was a main point of Pope Benedict's 2006 Regensburg address.

But another main point of Regensburg was surely to decry the narrowing of reason in the Enlightenment and its post-modern near-obliteration. We ought not to forget this. While we should not retreat into a pietistic ghetto, neither should we fool ourselves into thinking that we live in a fair-minded community of reason. People (like Blackmun in Roe, 1973) who claim not to know whether a child in the womb just before birth is actually (rather than only potentially) a living human being have abandoned fact and logic. Likewise, people who openly support the "brutal", "gruesome", "cruel", and "painful" dismemberment of infants (to use the words of Stevens and Ginsburg in Stenberg, 2000), and mock those who oppose this practice, have abandoned the natural foundations of reason. This, I take it, is why Pope John Paul II spoke so often of the "Culture of Death". We who still seek to live in the "Culture of Life" have not wished this polarization, have not wished to face an enemy at the gates. But he is there all the same. We have no choice but to oppose him.

I do regretfully identify Barack Obama as a leader of the Culture of Death. Please convince me I'm wrong. But first read this desvastating and, as far as i can tell, wholly accurate expose recently posted on NRO:

http://article.nationalreview.com/print/?q=OGM5YzIzYTExNjIyZmExODY0MzQyZDUxNmRmNmU1NmM=