Posted on 01/13/2009 1:50:50 PM PST by wagglebee
Washington, DC (LifeNews.com) -- To hear pro-life advocates tell it, attorney and Obama apologist Douglas Kmiec sold out his alleged pro-life, Catholic views for backing the man who could become the most pro-abortion president in history. In a new editorial in Commonweal, Kmiec strikes back at the pro-life people who blasted him.
Kmiec claims the so-called "right-wing Catholic" bloggers were the ones leading the charge -- as if to say that they are out of touch with the pro-life views of the Catholic Church.
Never mind that mainstream pro-life groups of every stripe called Kmiec on the carpet for underplaying Barack Obama's radical pro-abortion views.
In the editorial, Kmiec acknowledges his crimes but continues to peddle a not guilty plea.
"My online tormentors like to claim that their beef with me is my alleged abandonment of the pro-life cause or willful misstatement of church teaching. Neither charge is true," he claims. "I remain unabashedly pro-life and I have never consciously misstated the doctrine of the church."
Kmiec dismisses the legitimacy of questioning his pro-life views in light of his repeated and well-publicized support for the pro-abortion candidate by claiming his detractors merely engaged in ad hominem attacks.
"No, the real problem with the blogospheric reaction to Obama lay in the responses themselves, which all too often mixed the smallest dollop of substance into a big steaming stew of personal contempt," he said.
Kmiec finally returns to the topic of debate and claims pro-life advocates mis-used the issue of the Freedom of Choice Act -- the radical pro-abortion bill Obama said would be his first to sign as president -- to divide the public.
He claims "there is no real legislative interest in FOCA" even though abortion advocates worked overtime in the Clinton administration to pass it.
"The attempt to use FOCA to drive a wedge between the church and the incoming administration is unjustified," Kmiec claims.
Kmiec doesn't defend Obama's comments so much as he employs the typical lawyerly trick of moving the debate away from the issue at hand.
He says focusing on FOCA "allows the right wing to obscure what Obama shares with the church," namely his support for liberal social justice positions Catholics support.
As such, he fears pro-life advocates will undermine the relationship Obama could have with the Vatican -- as if Obama's own abortion advocacy wouldn't cause problems.
"Unless the sore losers of November 4 manage to poison the well, the Holy See and the Obama administration should be working more closely together in service to others than any administration in modern memory," Kmiec contends.
Kmiec smugly predicts the reaction to his column will be more personal attacks.
"Having drawn the blogs' Machiavellian FOCA gambit into the open, I am certain now to be called, yet again, a 'useful idiot' (or worse) in service to the new president," he says.
The objections to Kmiec's supporting Obama will no doubt continue, but whether Kmiec will ever offer a serious response to them short of claiming political of personal destruction is another question.
doug, don’t you realize that you need to go to Confession, and then pray and hope a priest gives you Communion?
URGENT: Novena request for the defeat of FOCA to start Jan.11
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