Why we needed last Sunday

I knew something was amiss last Sunday evening as I tried navigating downtown Indianapolis, only to find police squad cars standing athwart street after street. Having parked, a friend and I made our way toward the commotion near the Westin Hotel where President Obama would arrive shortly, having just delivered the most controversial address of his term so far.

I had followed the Notre Dame controversy, which vaguely reminded me of our own mini-controversy last fall over Union Board’s decision to sponsor John Edwards. But in the end, I thought – and as Obama himself noted – the abortion debate arises between two “irreconcilable” positions. Few have ever ceded ground in the culture wars, and I had never hoped for an exception.

So as I inched deeper into the mob awaiting the president’s arrival in Indianapolis, I wasn’t surprised to find myself among venomous anti-abortion protestors. Several held graphic posters showing mutilated aborted fetuses, while others displayed messages like “Abortion is murder” and “Obama is a babykiller.” A particularly confrontational ringleader launched vitriolic accusations against Obama supporters who stood on the street’s opposite side.

“Shame on you,” he bellowed at one point, “for supporting the holocaust that is abortion.”

I came home that evening and watched the speech, curious to hear the words of one capable of sparking such a furor; curious to learn how a vicious, bloodsucking murderer (their caricature, not mine) might respond to such moral condemnation; curious whether he would plant his feet in intransigence or call for “honest, thoughtful dialogue,” as he did.

And it wasn’t his coolness or reasonableness or the earnest, conciliatory tone he struck that surprised me the most, but the troubling disparity between his response and the violent, incendiary and un-Christian behavior of his conservative Christian opponents who prompted it. If one compared each party in this controversy to the template of Jesus Christ, the patron of lepers and prostitutes and crooked tax collectors, the one who admonished “judge not that ye be not judged,” it was Obama who imitated Christ, not the anti-abortion protestors who march in Christ’s name.

Here I should pause, for I have no intention of generalizing any group in this debate, especially not the pro-life camp, some of whose members I’ve criticized. So often, though, it’s not the thoughtful moderates, but an isolated group of zealots who end up defining the spirit and image of a movement. And soon after this happens, political entertainers on radio and cable TV will magnify the poles of an issue so that, once again, the far ends of the socio-political spectrum overwhelm the middle ground to corrupt the public policy dialogue.

That’s why in the last month, abortion has resurfaced in national papers next to images of virulent activists rather than civil individuals striving to promote a meaningful discussion.   

And that’s why now, more than ever, our policy debates call for serious and informed perspectives that are expressed in fair-minded words. The president’s speech in South Bend suggests that despite the obscenity and hatred permeating our national conversations, “fair-minded words” have not perished altogether.