Notre Shame

I've expressed strong disagreement with Notre Dame's decision to invite the president to speak at Commencement.  I still love Notre Dame and think it's a great institution, and I was willing to acknowledge that reasonable people (who haven't reflected) could hold the view that it is "an honor" to host the president; that "he's just speaking"; and that Notre Dame doesn't thereby "endorse all of his views." And I think ND can recover from this recent flap.

But at the heart of my criticism was ND's decision to award the president with an honoris causa law degree, despite the president's hostility to natural law theory, leading to his disregard for the rights not only of the unborn, but of the recently born (e.g., survivors of botched abortions ).

As Martin Luther King said in his letter from Birmingham jail:

"How can you advocate breaking some laws and obeying others?" The answer lies in the fact that there are two types of laws: just and unjust. I would be the first to advocate obeying just laws. One has not only a legal but a moral responsibility to obey just laws. Conversely, one has a moral responsibility to disobey unjust laws. I would agree with St. Augustine that "an unjust law is no law at all."

The reference to Augustine points to Catholic natural law theory, and goes to the heart of the Catholic position against abortion and infanticide. (And for us Protestants, it should be remembered that Luther quoted Augustine more than any other church father).

It may sound "nutty" to suggest basing law on the law of God, but the alternative to natural law is blind obedience to "man-made" law. As Dostoevsky said, "Without God, all is permitted." 

Granted, since we all see "through a glass darkly" in Paul's words, we don't want to impose some crude theocracy based on our own view of God's law.  But cutting God out of the picture undercuts King's whole foundation.

Purely man-made law, with no appeal to heaven permitted, leads ultimately to the gas chamber. If man feels that all there is is man, then man's law is seen as the best man can do to solve man's problems. Resisting man and his man-made laws eventually gets you labeled as an "enemy of the people." Freedom disappears. How long will it remain legal to express resistance to gay rights, abortion, etc?

Frances Schaeffer wrote at length about this, and Whittaker Chambers wrote eloquently about why a godless state has to destroy its critics.

For those who lived under Hitler, what would have been the basis for resistance to the Nazis' man-made law but an appeal to some higher law? (Bonhoeffer).  Jim Crow? (ML King). The Gulag? (Solzhenitsyn) Cuba? (Valladares, Boitel).

Mary Ann Glendon, Harvard Law Professor and former ambassador to the Vatican, has just turned down ND's award to her of their prestigious Laetare Medal. Her letter is instructive.

http://www.firstthings.com/onthesquare/?p=1395

Of course, Obama does not appear to be in the same order of magnitude as the tyrants listed above. He has, however, shown that the waters that sustain him are not from the Jordan, but as one observer noted (years ago in another context), from the "fiery brook " (Feuerbach translated means "fiery brook").