Rhetorical Expressions

The debate surrounding President Obama’s commencement address at the University of Notre Dame this past weekend was fast and furious.  As I’ve read reports from  The New York Times, USA Today, and George Weigel, it’s clear that the debate will continue.  Should the President, a strong supporter of abortion rights, receive an honorary degree from a Catholic university traditionally opposed to abortion?

These moral and social questions are important — too important to ignore.  They are fundamentally about life and human rights and which can trump the other.

And it’s best to just come out and say it.

In the late 1970′s and early 1980′s, Presidents Carter and Reagan discussed the issue of human life and human rights — and approached it in two different ways.

In a commencement address to the University of Notre Dame in 1977, President Jimmy Carter argued for a “wider architecture of global cooperation” and bluntly stated his reliance on détente and desire to “build a bridge of mutual confidence” between the United States and the Soviet Union.  Carter called for a foreign policy “based on a historical vision of America’s role… derived from a larger view of global change… rooted in our moral values, which never change… reinforced by our material wealth and our military power…[and] designed to serve mankind.”  The Soviets were killing thousands of innocent victims each week.  President Carter believed these actions, while not officially supported by the United States, were a part of global change.  He wanted build a bridge.

On May 17, 1981, just two months after an assassination attempt on his life, President Reagan gave the commencement address at the University of Notre Dame.  He spoke of the United States’ responsibility to ensure that freedom triumphed over communism.  The United States of America possessed a specific purpose in the world, Reagan stated, and this purpose was to advance freedom to all who lived in totalitarian darkness.  He said,

The years ahead are great ones for this country, for the cause of freedom and the spread of civilization.  The West won’t contain communism, it will transcend communism.  It won’t bother to dismiss it or denounce it, it will dismiss it as some bizarre chapter in human history whose last pages are even now being written.

Reagan believed the Soviets on the verge of collapse, and the idea that communism would soon become a “bizarre chapter in human history” seemed quite radical in 1981.  Most academics, media elite, and the general public believed that the Soviet Union would compete with the United States for the rest of American history.  Yet Reagan argued that communism stood as an ideology of the past, and that America’s faith in her strong heritage and in God’s providence would transcend the evils of the totalitarian regime. 

Peter J. Wallison, former counsel to President Ronald Reagan, later wrote that “Reagan showed that there were some things on which he was willing to stake his presidency” and noted that this “separated him from his modern predecessors, who had given the American people the impression that everything could be negotiated.”  Reagan’s courage to speak truth in the face of intense opposition “demonstrated that politics had a moral core, and that government decisions were passed upon something more solid and enduring than the shifting sands of political expediency.”

These “shifting sands of political expediency” are powerful indeed.  And they can shape public policy and public opinion.

The debate will continue on news networks and in newspapers and around dinner tables across the country.  Debate is good.  It causes people to think and reason and express what they believe.

Presidents Carter and Reagan used their Notre Dame commencement addresses to set their foreign policy towards the Soviet Union.  On Saturday, President Obama called for his audience (and the nation) to “find a way to live together as one human family” amidst differences of opinion regarding abortion.

But I’m still a little confused about what his actual, actionable policy is.  He didn’t really come right out and say.