[img]1|left|||no_popup[/img]President Obama’s next huge embarrassment may be having his invitation to Notre Dame’s commencement rescinded.
Offhand, I would suspect not even the worst American Presidents — think Carter, possibly Nixon — have had engraved invitations flung back into their cherry-red faces.
The irony of the firestorm that is building in campus offices, and among alumni and assorted Catholics across the country, is that the dustup was ignited over what feels like a technical, remote gripe:
Because Mr. Obama, left-wing, non-religious and spiritually tone deaf, has authorized federal funding for embryonic stem cell research and for international family planning groups that provide abortions or tell ladies how to get them.
While positioned on one knee, I could think of 6 better reasons to tell the monstrously power-seizing President Obama that he is not welcome in my house.
Perhaps it is appropriate that the questionably sensitive leadership of a technically Catholic university — speaking of tone deaf — is in trouble with its supporters because of a dense, technical decision by a commencement speaker.
How About a Show of Hands?
Let’s be frank about Notre Dame. In plain talk, Notre Dame is as religiously Catholic of a campus as Georgetown. And Georgetown is so far-left secular that it may tumble into the Atlantic any edition.
The image is good for recruiting purposes, but that is the limit, boys. Your next Pope is not going to come out of South Bend or its football team.
It is not a seat of thumping Catholic theology. You don’t go there to regain your skidding faith any more than Orthodox Jews would send their children to Brandeis University to strengthen their commitment to Judaism. If anything, it would slip into reverse.
This fluttering Notre Dame scenario is rich to watch from the sidelines.
Aren’t these are the American Catholics who boast that they pay the same degree of attention to Pope Benedict as the members of the Culver City Presbyterian Church?
Aren’t these the same American Catholics who bellow loudly that the present Pope, his predecessor, his predecessor and even his predecessor were irrelevant old men out of touch with the re-shaped mores of modern Western society?
I Promise. I Promise. Well, Maybe.
Now I would understand their upset if Mr. Obama had said he was going to generally increase taxes on 95 percent of working Catholics.
Or if the least prepared President of the last 100 years had promised to impose a 90 percent income tax on those Catholics among the 3.5 million Americans whose jobs he will save or for whom he will create jobs in the next 12 months.
Mr. Obama’s pledges are fodder for novelists, not serious people.
But, boys, please.
Isn’t this draining swtch of huffiness over the stem cell matter like ticketing a driver for tooling along at 35.1 miles an hour through a 35 mph zone?
The divide being reported from Notre Dame was predictable:
Seventy percent of alumni correspondents are outraged.
Seventy percent of students are supportive of the invitation.
Golly gee, Murgatroyd, are you stunned? I didn’t think so.
So the grownups are disturbed and the children say hey, man, who cares?
Although the volume of protests was supposed to be rising this afternoon, it remains highly unlikely that Mr. Obama will be disinvited because, as the President himself has said so frequently, would say, he is too important to have that happen to him.
