Sunday, May 17, 2009

More Notre Dame   [Ramesh Ponnuru]

My home-page attempt to think through some of the issues surrounding today's events has drawn a balanced mix of praise, criticism, friendly quibbles, searching questions, and outright abuse. (One correspondent should win some prize for succinctness by combining an attack on my religion and my race in two short sentences.) It occurred to me that a hypothetical case might help clarify a point I tried to make about why it's a mistake to reduce the controversy to a partisan contest over Obama.

Let's say a pro-choice Republican had won his party's nomination last year. Under those circumstances, I would very probably have supported that candidate in the general election and, had he won, I would almost certainly be supporting him against the Democrats on a broad range of policy issues. But I would still oppose any decision by Notre Dame to give that hypothetical president an honor and, if that president were a church-going Catholic, I would think that the bishops should not let him receive communion.

05/17 06:29 PMShare