Least of the Brothers?

Watching the Saddleback Forum on Saturday night, I was struck by what Barack Obama described as America's greatest moral failing: our collective failure to “abide by that basic precept in Matthew that whatever you do for the least of my brothers, you do for me.”

My first thought was the Down Syndrome baby who Jill Stanek, the nurse at Christ Hospital in suburban Chicago, cradled in her arms for 45 minutes after he'd survived an abortion. As is now becoming widely known, Obama had an opportunity to support legislation designed to treat such children (so "least" among all humanity that even their parents want them dead) with basic dignity and medical care. Even after impassioned testimony before his committee by Jill Stanek herself, Obama voted to kill the legislation. Twice. Even the version supported by Barbara Boxer at the national level.

Then came a remarkable story today: Turns out that Barack Obama has a long-lost half-brother living in squalor in Kenya. Not a metaphorical brother this time. A real one.

The Italian edition of Vanity Fair said that it had found George Hussein Onyango Obama living in a hut in a ramshackle town of Huruma on the outskirts of Nairobi.

Mr Obama, 26, the youngest of the presidential candidate's half-brothers, spoke for the first time about his life, which could not be more different than that of the Democratic contender.

"No-one knows who I am," he told the magazine, before claiming: "I live here on less than a dollar a month."

But he wasn't entirely lost to the world, and not unknown to everyone: Senator Obama knew he existed, and visited him as recently as two years ago. He even merited a mention in Obama's book:

He has only met his famous older brother twice - once when he was just five and the last time in 2006 when Senator Obama was on a tour of East Africa and visited Nairobi.

The Illinois senator mentions his brother in his autobiography, describing him in just one passing paragraph as a "beautiful boy with a rounded head".

Of their second meeting, George Obama said: "It was very brief, we spoke for just a few minutes. It was like meeting a complete stranger."

Assuming the story is true (and the source is Vanity Fair), the question I'm left with is this: What kind of a man lives in a mansion in Hyde Park and allows his brother to live in squalor half a world away? Did Barack offer to help George? Did George refuse the help, preferring to continue living in a six-foot-by-nine-foot shanty?

I don't know the answers, but I couldn't help thinking of the quiet choice made by a different family, also half a world away from home, when given an opportunity to help the least of those among us.

Strange Sacrament

In case you had any doubts about abortion being a holy sacrament in the church of militant secularism, LifeNews today brings us this story:

Rev. Larry Phillips of Schenectady's Emmanuel-Friedens Church dedicated the ground, according to a report in the Albany Times Union.

He called the abortion facility "sacred and holy ... where women's voices and stories are welcomed, valued and affirmed."

Phillips said the abortion business was "sacred ground where women are treated with dignity, supported in their role as moral decision-makers ... sacred ground where the violent voices of hatred and oppression are quelled."

Note to clergy: When Jesus said (Luke 23:29), "For behold, the days shall come, wherein they will say: Blessed are the barren, and the wombs that have not borne, and the paps that have not given suck," he wasn't saying that would be a good thing.

Possible Impact

A week ago, I posted about the massive new Planned Parenthood clinic preparing to open in Aurora. Our Bishop called for a day of prayer and penance last Friday, which was the subject of my post.

Interestingly, the Chicago Tribune is reporting that legal action is now looking like it may derail the scheduled opening of that clinic. It is supposed to open on Tuesday --- but a hearing is slated for Monday, which may result in a long delay. I wonder how much of this is due to the recent outpouring of prayers and sacrifices across the Joliet diocese:

A letter Wednesday from Aurora said the city would not issue a permanent occupancy permit -- even though the city already issued a temporary occupancy certificate -- until an investigation is completed into how the clinic was approved for construction.

Gemini Office Development LLC applied for the permits, not revealing until recently that Planned Parenthood would operate the clinic.

Aurora officials want to delay the opening while they investigate whether Gemini fully disclosed the purpose of the clinic during the permitting process.


What I found most chilling about the story is this:

Trombley has said 13 appointments already have been scheduled for Tuesday, the planned opening day of the $7.5 million, 22,000-square-foot medical facility at 3051 E. New York St. on Aurora's east side. The clinic, one of the group's largest in the country, will offer reproductive health-care services, including abortions.

Thirteen appointments already. Thirteen babies who have the same date with the same executioner, but who right now are still alive. Let's all redouble our prayers this weekend that the executioner doesn't get the opportunity to open his doors.

Prayer and Penance

Here in the Diocese of Joliet, Bishop J. Peter Sartain has called for a day of prayer and penance in reparation for the massive new abortuary that Planned Parenthood will be opening in Aurora.

The proposed opening of the new clinic is a troubling development. For everyone concerned, abortion is a source of great suffering and sorrow. As Catholics, we hope in the Lord of Life. Made in his image and likeness, we know that human life is sacred. At times like this, it is important to remember that our lives are not our own. Each of us belongs to Christ, and he asks us to serve him in one another and to show particular concern for the most vulnerable among us.

As Catholics, we will stand proudly and consistently “For Life” in our diocese. Rather than collapsing in negativity, we call on all people of good will to respond with positive action. Every step we take must be peaceful.

[snip]

Please join me on Friday, September 7 in a day of prayer and penance for the promotion of a Culture of Life and an end to abortion. Pray in the manner of your choosing – perhaps attend Mass that day, pray the rosary or other favorite prayers, for the intention of an increased respect for the sacredness of life. Choose a simple penance in keeping with your health and daily duties – abstain from meat or sweets that day, or refrain from television or other entertainment. Such simple efforts on our part can be a powerful witness to our neighbors and a sign to our Heavenly Father that we love the life – the lives – he has given us.

As for our family, we will be abstaining from meat today. In addition to attending Mass this morning, I will personally be engaging in some other small food-related penances: no snacks between meals, and drinking supermarket canned coffee rather than the nice whole bean stuff I prefer. Another easy thing is to make many silent acts of atonement. These prayers don't have to be elaborate or even lengthy; my favorite is simply "miserere nobis" ("have mercy on us"). I've been trying to say it many times today, each time imagining that I'm lobbing that prayer toward the abortuary's construction site.

Why do Catholics do this sort of thing? It's a natural application of what St. Paul told the Colossians: "I find joy in the sufferings I endure for you. In my own flesh I fill up what is lacking in the sufferings of Christ for the sake of His Body, the Church" (Col. 1:24). What is lacking in the sufferings of Christ? The continuing, ongoing embrace of those sufferings by his followers --- in reparation for their own sins and the sins of others.

As St Josemaria Escriva put it:
In the Holy Mass we find the perfect opportunity to atone for our sins and the sins of all men, so as to be able to say with Saint Paul that we are completing in our flesh what is lacking in the sufferings of Christ. No one is an isolated individual in this world; no one can consider himself completely free from blame for the evil that is done on earth, which is the result of original sin and the sum total of many Personal sins. Let us love sacrifice; let us seek atonement. How? By uniting ourselves in the Mass to Christ, who is Priest and Victim. He is always the one who bears the tremendous weight of the infidelities of men — your infidelities and mine.

Today, we're seeking out a few extra little sufferings in order to do a little more to make up for the many offenses against human life being perpetrated at that new clinic. I hope you're able to join us in whatever way you can.

Political Socialization

As a political scientist, it's amusing watching the way our children have been acquiring their views about politics and public policy. In the business, we refer to this process as "political socialization." Adults do not always share the political orientation of their parents, but the correlation is generally quite strong; parental party identification is an excellent predictor of a child's party identification. (I still remember a fellow UCLA graduate student sending out a birth announcement to the department; after listing his new baby's name, length, and weight, he closed with "and is reportedly a Democrat.")

We don't appear to be raising any Democrats in this family. Yesterday, my eleven year old and I were driving around running errands. At a stop light, he pointed to the car in front of us and remarked (approvingly), "Look at those bumper stickers, Daddy. 'Rush is Right,' and 'Bush-Cheney.' Those people must be Republicans!"

Then, when we got home, the eight year old greeted us with big news. Just like how Daddy had recently published a research piece about abortion attitudes, she had decided to write her own article about abortion --- complete, like Daddy's, with "numbers." Here is how it reads, in part:

Abortion's a bad thing. 3,9225,6225. Abortion's horable (sic). 6535,23560. ... I'm a Republican and do not support abortion. 3225,82201128.

Speaking of that article I wrote, one of our more remarkable findings is the dramatic pro-life swing among Generation Y over the last 15 years. The WSJ's James Taranto, among others, has speculated that this may be due in part to the "Roe Effect." In other words, those who are pro-choice tend to have more abortions than those who are pro-life, leading to a skewed population today. I've seen other research showing that Republicans tend to have more children than Democrats do. It'll be interesting to track the long term impacts of these fertility differences on the American electorate.

As for us here on the farm in Illinois...we're doing our part.

Percolating

The abortion analysis that a colleague and I published last month has continued to percolate across the internet. NewsMax ran a story about it yesterday, which led to James Taranto of the Wall Street Journal running his own commentary on it today.

Taranto mentions an important possible reason for the dramatic pro-life shifts we observed among young people:

What they don't mention is the demographic consequences of abortion itself--that is, the Roe Effect. It was in 1973 that the Supreme Court, in Roe v. Wade, found a "constitutional" right to abortion, effectively legalizing the practice nationwide. By 1992 the oldest post-Roe babies were only 19. In 2006, by contrast, the entire 18- to 29-year-old cohort had been born after Roe.

If one makes the reasonable assumptions that "pro-life" women have a lower propensity to abort than "pro-choice" ones do, and that parents are a strong influence on their children's moral attitudes, then one would expect the post-Roe cohort to be more "pro-life" than their elders.

This point is something that did not occur to us until after the piece had been published, and it was too late to include, but we agree with his general reasoning about demography. And I would add that, even leaving aside the greater propensity of pro-choice women to have abortions, people who are strongly pro-life simply tend to have significantly more children than those who are strongly pro-choice. Children tend to absorb the cultural values and political orientations of their parents ---and as they enter the electorate, those who have absorbed a pro-choice orientation are finding themselves outnumbered by the children of pro-lifers.

If I have any readers in Charlotte, NC, I'll be interviewed about this research at 3:35 Eastern Time Friday afternoon (tomorrow), on the Danny Fontana show, AM 1220 WDYT.

I'll also be appearing on Lynne Breidenbach's conservative Christian radio program next Tuesday from 7:15 to 7:30 Eastern. She is based in central Florida, but syndicated in a number of other locations.

Turnaround on Abortion

A colleague and I recently put together an analysis of abortion attitude data, a version of which was published today on MercatorNet. The piece quantifies the degree to which the climate surrounding this issue has shifted over the last 15 or so years.

We combined over 30,000 survey interviews from Missouri, spanning 1992-2006, and looked at changes in pro-life/pro-choice self-identification (national Gallup Poll numbers are similar). We find there have been dramatic shifts in the pro-life direction: in 1992, the electorate was 30% pro-life and 43% pro-choice. The two labels reached a rough parity in 1997, and the pro-life label has since grown to a 41% to 30% advantage. In other words, the turnaround has been nearly complete.

Some of the demographic subgroup changes are especially interesting. For example, young women had been the most strongly pro-choice group in 1992; now they are the most strongly pro-life. Other dramatic shifts have occurred among voters who rarely or never attend church services, and those with post-graduate degrees; they had been very pro-choice in 1992, but have abandoned that label in droves.

The most likely cause of the attitude changes, we speculate, is the silencing of confrontational clinic protests---coupled with the ascendancy of partial-birth abortion as the new frame for the issue. The public has clearly changed its mind as to who the "abortion extremists" are.

There have also been implications for the party coalitions. The Democratic coalition is now much more divided on this issue than the Republican coalition is, which may explain why Democrats in most states no longer make such a big deal of their pro-choice stance. The pro-life label no longer carries the stigma it once did, and pro-life candidates should not shrink from identifying themselves as such.

A slightly different version of the article, which includes graphical displays of the trend and subgroup data, is available for download from my consulting website. These graphs didn't really fit MercatorNet's format or style, but please do download this document and take a look at them: they show at a glance just how dramatic the over-time changes have been. They also give much more detail about how the data break out; the MercatorNet version had to truncate some of those details for journalistic purposes.

Guns and Abortion

A couple of weeks ago, I blogged about my frustration at having to wait 72 hours to pick up the handgun I'd just purchased...while any woman in the state can have an abortion immediately upon discovering she is pregnant. And yet which decision---to purchase a handgun or have an abortion---is more life-changing and worthy of taking time for reflection and "cooling off"?

Bruce Thornton makes another excellent contrast between gun regulations and abortion laws:

The worst of these prejudices, however, is the liberal bias against trusting individuals to make decisions about how to manage their own lives. Restrictive gun control laws assume that people are too untrustworthy or incapable or stupid to keep and carry a weapon. Thus laws are written by elite snobs who think they know how to run your life better than you do. Of course, this presumption of the average person’s incompetence is very selective. The same people who think a sane, law-abiding citizen can’t be trusted with carrying a gun will assume that a 15-year-old girl should be allowed to abort her baby. Think about it: the mature person can’t carry a gun because he might kill someone, but the teenaged girl can have an abortion that definitely will kill someone.

BTW, I did pick up my Springfield XD .45 ACP handgun last week, and it is a very sweet firearm. I just wish the State of Illinois trusted me enough to let me carry it in public for personal protection---and the protection of those around me.

Waiting...For What?

I'd been thinking for some time about buying a handgun. A shotgun has been fine until now for both home defense and for taking out predators (and there's nothing like the sound of a pump-action shotgun to send an intruder fleeing). But shotguns are unwieldy, particularly in the middle of the night. When a dog is outside barking intently at something, the 12-gauge is a hassle to get down, load, and maneuver through the doors in a hurry. Besides, have you ever tried carrying a flashlight in one hand and a full-sized shotgun in the other?

Some time back, American Rifleman magazine ran a glowing review of Springfield Armory's new XD series handguns, and I was fascinated. They had high capacity magazines, and looked reliable, well-built, and affordable. Importantly, they also came with built-in accessory rails onto which one could mount, say, a tactical light to illuminate one's target at night. Months passed, and XDs started winning all kinds of awards. I wanted to get a closer look at them, particularly the .45 ACP --- but there was no Springfield Armory dealer anywhere near us.

And then, yesterday, I realized I'd be passing within a mile or two of The Gun Shop in Plainfield. I stopped in, and was immediately impressed with the staff's knowledge and professionalism. I admitted to the salesman that I'd never owned a handgun, but had read about the XD series, and wanted to know more. I explained about our needs for home and varmint defense, and how I wanted an alternative to the shotgun. He could've talked down to me like the ignorant newbie I was, but he did completely the opposite: he smiled and seemed genuinely interested in introducing me to a new kind of firearm. His matter-of-fact explanatory tone immediately put me at ease and made me feel less self-conscious. He had a number of XDs in stock, in a variety of calibers. I gravitated toward the .45 ACP, and he helped me make sure I preferred it to the .40 caliber. He pointed out that the longer barrel made the .45 easier to sight, and he gave tips for holding it securely to minimize kick. He also snapped a tactical light on the rails, and showed me how easy that was to operate. I was sold.

But, of course, I couldn't take delivery. Illinois has a three-day waiting period for handguns. During that time, the State Police do a background check. But with computer technology, the check doesn't take that long; as I understand it, a person could be approved or rejected almost instantly. After all, the waiting period for a rifle or shotgun is only one day. It seems the rationale behind the waiting period is to force a "cooling off period" on any hotheads who might rush out and do something rash with a newly-acquired firearm. This was immortalized by Homer Simpson's "Five DAYS? But I'm angry NOW!"

But in real life, this is preposterous. Particularly in Illinois, a person cannot simply decide on the spur of the moment even to buy ammunition --- let alone a firearm. Even to buy ammo, a person must present a F.O.I.D. (Firearm Owner Identification) card. To get one of those, a person must undergo a rigorous background check with the state police, be photographed, and wait weeks for the card to be sent out. At the gun shop, the salesman wouldn't even let me touch the merchandise until I'd shown him my FOID card (and he did the same with everyone else who came through the door). How many people, do you think, have the foresight to go through the FOID process...but then not buy a firearm until they're (1) as angry as Homer Simpson, or (2) on the verge of committing a crime, or (3) suicidal?

As I tried to figure out when I'd have a large enough block of time to drive back to Plainfield, another thought occurred to me: politically, the same people who imposed the waiting period laws tend to oppose even the slightest regulation or restriction on abortion --- even, notably, 24 hour waiting periods. Most states, including Illinois, have no waiting periods. No state has a waiting period longer than 24 hours. In Illinois, a woman could get a positive pregnancy test in the morning and have an abortion later the same day. But I have to wait three days to pick up my handgun? Regardless of what you believe about women's rights or the legal protections which ought to be accorded to unborn children, ask yourself this: Which is a bigger and more life-changing event? Buying a handgun or having an abortion? Which should require a longer period during which a person should "cool down" and "think it over"? Given the kinds of physical and emotional traumas reported by post-abortive women, and the organizations that have grown up to help them address these traumas, I wonder why this question even needs to be asked.

But I'll still be thinking about it next week, as I watch mile after mile roll by on my way back up to Plainfield.