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Religion & Law

: Mirror of Justice

Bush vs. Obama as commencement speaker

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I've received a few responses to my questions about Bush's appropriateness as Notre Dame commencement speaker. One reader comments:

My short answer . . . is that neither Bush (in 2001) nor Obama should have been given honorary law degrees from Notre Dame. That said, I'm no utilitarian, but it seems to me that the death toll from Bush's actions as Governor of Texas (the only metric for a fair comparison to the present situation) and as Commander in Chief of the US military is orders of magnitude less than the millions of embryos who will be created, instrumentalized, and killed with taxpayer funding because of President Obama's actions. And there will be not even the palest appearance of due process for these innocent human beings. And their deaths will be celebrated as a great good. Obama means to promote and maximize their deaths -- that's the whole point of the federal funding. That degree of intention strikes me as worse than Bush's apparently very bad role in administering the death penalty in Texas.

I'm not sure that the "orders of magnitude" argument should be the focus of the inquiry for honoring public officials. If the United States Conference of Catholic Bisops articulates the standard as "defiance of fundamental moral principles," they're not really looking at it through a utilitarian lens, are they? It's about the message the invitation conveys, and the message depends on the speaker's deliberate and continuing denial of a fundamental moral truth. Maybe electing Obama is worse than electing Bush on utilitarian grounds (though I'm not ready to concede that), but it doesn't really make sense to deem it acceptable to honor Bush, but not Obama, based on a quantitative comparison of the harms facilitated by Bush's denial of a fundamental moral truth versus Obama's denial of a fundamental moral truth.

Another reader, Daniel Suhr, writes: