Personal Asides: How Tenderly Careful Leno is About Obama…A Different Unearthly Rationale for Kmiec

Circumspect.

When Jay Leno comes out and grabs a forest of hands he signals there will be a standup monologue of irreverence and fun. And it IS except that Leno is very-very leery of poking fun at Barack Obama. Maybe it’s because of Leno’s black friend with the guitar who sits up front but last night the Lantern Jawed one ridiculed the president, the vice president, John McCain and Joe Biden. Methinks the NBC powers-that-be have signaled it’s not okay to make fun of the first African American nominee of a major political party. If so, that’s racism as well. The idea that a black candidate cannot be given equal treatment because it would look like…ugh…racism.

Unearthly Kmiec.

There are different explanations for Doug Kmiec…and why the erstwhile legal defender of unborn life and Catholic scholar has come out for Barack Obama who is notable among all the pro-aborts for denying born babies from botched abortions the mercy of medical treatment, nutrition and comfort…mandating they die in agony…else women’s right to abortion would be curtailed. It takes a whole lot of chutzpah for a constitutionalist pro-life lawyer to do a 180 like this, earning not just the scorn of his former colleagues but perhaps eternal damnation under the 2000-year teaching of Catholic theology…the teaching that any weaseling or evasion from condemnation of a direct attack on an unborn child is a grave sin… he perverts so ingeniously for political gain arguing that greater expenditures of federal funds to alleviate poverty would lessen abortion—as if it were only remediable by liberal economic nostrums instead of flat-out opposition to the practice of invading human birth to root out life. Kmiec’s specious stand is to pretend abolition of abortion is unattainable, thus federal subsidies to economic well-being is a substitute which is a diabolically evasive stratagem.

The standard explanation for Doug’s defection from traditional Catholic teaching is that he has allowed his own quest for the federal judiciary…specifically the U. S. Supreme Court…to pervert his understanding of natural law. Perhaps so and it is one that I believe is foremost in his thinking, tied with his anger, disappointment and displeasure with the Reagan and Bush administrations for not rewarding him for what he sees as dutiful service. But increasingly there is another explanation. One major cabinet officer who was his superior told me quite candidly that Doug is mad as has a former colleague at a major university…and does a high ranking academic at the university where he is now dean of the law school. To their thinking, no contrivance of opportunism can answer the erratic way Kmiec goes back on his own prior words.

My own explanation is exotic to some but only in view of our culture’s habit of secular conversation….but it exists nonetheless. It is a fact that all the religions of the world including Mahayana Buddhism acknowledge the presence of consummate evil. In Hebrew he is “Satan,” in Greek “daimon” because he is a spiritual being possessed of extraordinary powers, also “diabolos,” because he is a calumniator who accuses those whom he has deceived with false sin, the being whom Augustine said possesses intelligent reasons for what he urges others to do. He is what Christianity has called the devil, a force described in the first and last books of the Bible, Saint John saying that the evil spirit is permitted by God, a spirit that is the embodiment of envy starting with certain angels’ resistance to God, their initial disobedience, their seduction of the first ancestors of man, their assaults on the people of Israel and their continuing opposition to the teaching of Christ, even by the most clever and subtle means.

Aquinas talks of “enchainment,” a form of slavery in which a person held in Satanic shackles becomes the unwitting tool of the powers of darkness. Watching the ingenious circumlocution of Doug’s arguments convinces me this is the logical explanation. Nor do I imagine that secularists will be convinced—only those who believe in Christian theology may.