He then argued there is “very little, if anything” in Obama’s record to show the politician agrees with his pro-life supporters that abortion is a “tragic moral choice.”
“Do Professors Cafardi, Kaveny, and Kmiec imagine that they have a better grasp of Senator Obama's views on the life issues than, say, the National Reproductive Rights Action League (NARAL), or other pro-choice Obama supporters?”
Weigel argued that thousands of crisis pregnancy centers best serve women in crisis pregnancies, centers whose “modest federal funding” Obama wishes to cut.
“How is it ‘pro-life’ to support a presidential candidate who is publicly committed to requiring any federal legislation in support of pregnant women to include promotion of abortion?” Weigel asked rhetorically.
The Obama backers had criticized the denial of Holy Communion to pro-abortion politicians as “using the sacrament as a political tool.” Weigel countered that the practice is a question of “maintaining the integrity of the church's central act of worship” and of helping Catholics form their conscience.
Calling most Catholic politicians “woefully ill-informed” about the logic of Catholic teaching on life issues, he said this “enormous failure” of pastors and bishops is compounded when prominent Catholic intellectuals “fail to make clear” that their preferred pro-abortion rights candidate’s record on such issues is “reprehensible.”
“President McCain would not work to repeal the pro-life legislative advances of the past 35 years; knowledgeable and sober-minded Catholic legal and political observers who have worked on these issues for decades are convinced that an Obama administration and an overwhelmingly Democratic Congress would eviscerate those modest advances within a year,” Weigel argued.
Weigel, a biographer of Pope John Paul II, closed his Newsweek essay with the 1997 remarks Pope John Paul II made when he accepted the credentials of Lindy Boggs, U.S. Ambassador to the Holy See.
The Pope had said:
“The moral history of your country is the story of your people's efforts to widen the circle of inclusion in society, so that all Americans might enjoy the protection of law, participate in the responsibilities of citizenship, and have the opportunity to make a contribution to the common good. Whenever a certain category of people—the unborn or the sick and old—are excluded from that protection, a deadly anarchy subverts the original understanding of justice. The credibility of the United States will depend more and more on its promotion of a genuine culture of life, and on a renewed commitment to building a world in which the weakest and most vulnerable are welcomed and protected.”