Pecksniffian: unctuously hypocritical
America was inspired the day President Barack Obama spoke at the January 12 memorial honoring the victims of the Arizona madman’s shooting spree. His particularly well-chosen words included, “We recognize our own mortality, and we are reminded that in the fleeting time we have on this Earth, what matters is not wealth, or status, or power, or fame—but rather, how well we have loved—and what small part we have played in making the lives of other people better.”
At the end of this motivational speech the nation was motivated, according to news media, to rethink civility, love and selfless sacrifice.
A few days later we learned that a single abortionist, Dr. Kermit Gosnell, had been charged with eight murders. Gosnell “induced labor, forced the live birth of viable babies in the sixth, seventh, eighth month of pregnancy and then killed those babies by cutting into the back of the neck with scissors and severing their spinal cord.”
This news has not inspired President Obama to rush to Philadelphia to deliver a speech responding to the violent killings, the overdosing of expectant mothers and the squalor within the walls of Gosnell’s “medical facility.” Perhaps this deplorable report never made it to the president’s desk.
What a shame because each of those babies and each of the women whose lives were lost at Gosnell’s hands are no less precious than any of those who died or were wounded in Tucson.
The only difference is that, in the first case, a madman committed murders that the law defines as crimes. In the second case, a madman killed under the cover of law—for abortion is not a crime in America.
But Obama did eventually say something. He issued a statement on the anniversary of the 1973 Supreme Court decisions. In part he said, “Today marks the 38th anniversary of Roe v. Wade, the Supreme Court decision that protects women’s health and reproductive freedom, and affirms a fundamental principle: that government should not intrude on private family matters. I am committed to protecting this constitutional right.”
The stark contrast in the two statements is chilling. If one can visibly see the victim of a cold-blooded crime, Obama says we are called to examine how we have loved and how we have tried to make a difference in the lives of others. But if little children are killed in cold-blood prior to their birth, the president would prefer to characterize the crime as a “constitutional right.”
Wrong, Mr. President! Killing is killing and whether a person resides in the womb or in a city where he wants to go and converse with a politician, his life is of equal value.
Obama, the Harvard Law graduate, knows that freedom divorced from the natural law is nothing more than slavery to the very crime he condemned on the 12th of January but extolled on the 24th.
Obama’s word games are mere hypocrisy—words chosen carefully to play to a specific audience.
Bishop Thomas J. Tobin caught on to this immediately after Obama’s January 12 speech. His Excellency said the Obama speech left him “cold, unimpressed and unmoved.” And he knew exactly why: “The problem, at least for me, is that President Obama’s persistent and willful promotion of abortion renders his compassionate gestures and soaring rhetoric completely disingenuous.”
Further, referring to Obama’s description of the miracle that occurred when Congresswoman Gabrielle Giffords opened her eyes, Bishop Tobin wrote, “It’s truly tragic that our president—for whose safety and well-being we pray all the time and who has demonstrated an impressive ability to inspire other people—is unable to see the deadly consequences of his abortion agenda. Perhaps we need another miracle, to open his eyes, that he might see and understand how wrong abortion is, how sinful it is, how violent it is, and how it’s destroying the life of our nation.”
