All Posts Tagged With: "values"

“The answer — upon even a moment’s reflection — is unequivocally yes.”

So says Douglas Kmiec. He holds the endowed chair in Constitutional Law at Pepperdine University. Prior to that, he was dean and St. Thomas More Professor of Law at Catholic University of America in Washington, DC. He also served as Assistant Attorney General in the Office of Legal Counsel under Presidents Ronald Reagan and George H.W. Bush.

Here’s more from a letter he authored for a ProLife - ProObama website recently created by the Mathew 25 Network.

Barack Obama’s life has been one dedicated in service to the needs of others.

We are all called to build a culture of life - but there’s more to it than just hoping that the next Supreme Court justice somehow deals with Roe v. Wade. A bad economy is threatening to human life. Women facing the moral tragedy of abortion - are facing it, now, today - and they need a supportive community and tangible help, not condemnation.

As Ronald Reagan’s legal counsel and as a dean and professor at Catholic University and Notre Dame, I have worked to put the law on the side of life where it belongs.

But after 35 years, a new approach is needed. Too many unborn lives are being lost as we wait for judges to get it right. Barack Obama’s strengthening of support for prenatal care, health care, maternity leave, and adoption will make the difference. Studies confirm it.

We are but a few weeks away from a new beginning in America.

I am inspired by what Senator Obama calls “the promise of America — the idea that we are responsible for ourselves, but that we also rise or fall as one nation in the fundamental belief that I am my brother’s keeper; I am my sister’s keeper. That’s the promise we need to keep.”

It is because of the hope of this promise, that I have written Can a Catholic Support Him? Asking the Big Question About Barack Obama. While especially aimed at Catholic citizens, the book and the material here are devoted to opening every heart and mind to the prospect of transcending the partisanship on these difficult issues.

That is the change we need right now. And it is within our grasp.

Each year, the Fourth of July is a good time to reflect on the original Independence Day — the day the Declaration of Independence was approved — and what it represented. Not only is it beneficial for Americans to reflect upon the freedoms, values and principles declared on that day, it is also beneficial for our government and those elected, appointed and charged with leading it to remember and take heed of what it said.

We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness.

That to secure these rights, Governments are instituted among Men, deriving their just powers from the consent of the governed, That whenever any Form of Government becomes destructive of these ends, it is the Right of the People to alter or to abolish it, and to institute new Government, laying its foundation on such principles and organizing its powers in such form, as to them shall seem most likely to effect their Safety and Happiness.

Prudence, indeed, will dictate that Governments long established should not be changed for light and transient causes; and accordingly all experience hath shewn, that mankind are more disposed to suffer, while evils are sufferable, than to right themselves by abolishing the forms to which they are accustomed. But when a long train of abuses and usurpations, pursuing invariably the same Object evinces a design to reduce them under absolute Despotism, it is their right, it is their duty, to throw off such Government, and to provide new Guards for their future security.