Italian journalist Massimo Franco, who broke the story about the White House attempts to find a suitable ambassador to the Vatican, said papal advisers told Mr. Obama's aides privately that the candidates failed to meet the Vatican's most basic qualification on the abortion issue.Prof. Kmiec seems like the obvious choice; it would be educational for us all to know if his "pro-life" stand failed to meet the most elementary Vatican muster --particularly since he's said he was open to Vatican correction.
The inability of the Obama administration to tolerate a pro-life appointment even as Vatican ambassador speaks volumes doesn't it? In a provocative article, Honor Killing, American Style, Sam Schulman notes that in spite of the "common ground" posturing, in fact the only item on which Obama will brook no dissent is abortion.
Intellectually, Team Obama is just as inclusive: not just Harvard and Yale but Columbia and Cornell, Chicago South Siders and North Siders; stimulus enthusiasts (Christina Romer and Larry Summers) and stimulus skeptics (Romer and Summers in the 1990s). Strict orthodoxy reigns only on one issue--an issue which need not be on the president's overcrowded agenda at all: abortion. In the Obama administration there can be no dissent from the view that abortion must be unrestricted, paid for, and with no shilly-shallying about parental notification, partial birth abortion, or other such measures that would actually reduce the frequency of abortion.
[snip]
On every issue other than abortion, Obama is content to let a hundred flowers bloom. It's odd because abortion is one of the few areas of national life that neither is in crisis, nor presents any political threat. But even odder, Obama's fundamentalism is athwart the genuine diversity of feeling on abortion among the American public.
I wish others would read that essay and tell me if you agree with it. I have to think some about his contention that abortion orthodoxy is WASP honor killing. I certainly agree, however, with this conclusion:
When Obama defines the new heresy on abortion as strictly as he does, even though his manner is more WASPy than Wahhabi, he unintentionally undermines our ability to believe we can change one another's minds on the subject. This belief--which is quite justified by shifts in opinion since 1973--has made our political life relatively civil, compared to European norms. Obama forgets that the public are not members of his cabinet--we need to disagree with one another. But if we lose our WASP civility, now that will cause a fuss.
