+1 Obama

I have to give credit to Obama. Yes, it's true, I did vote for him, but I did so with little faith that much would change. And, to give myself some credit, not much has. Probably the only reason I voted for him, as those who have followed from my previous blog will remember, is that he promised to open up a portal that would allow for the transparency of government. He has succeeded in this, however the execution is essentially impossible to navigate due to it's overwhelming and constant flow of information and is therefore pretty much useless to the average person, which is unfortunate. I've stated previously that so long as he created transparency in the government, I would consider his term a success. I should have been more specific. For the time being I will have to remain an active member of newsvine.com in order to keep updated with current presidential proceedings and congressional controversies. That being said, this post was not intended as a complaint. On the contrary, Obama actually impressed me this week.

A few days ago, Obama gave a commencement speech at Notre Dame's graduation ceremony. At the beginning of the speech, which you can find by doing a quick search on Youtube.com, a small group of protesters enter the auditorium screaming, "Stop killing our babies!" at which point the graduating class of 2009 begins chanting "We are ND." to drown out the group.

Obama, in his usual cool, calm demeanor pauses for a moment then addresses the crowd noting,
"We're not going to shy away from things that are uncomfortable sometimes." Thumbs up, Obama.

After watching the video and reading about the arrests, I decided to dig a little bit deeper into what the Catholic community really thought of his speech. In doing this I came across quite a few articles addressing the "controversy" surrounding his choice of discussion topics. There was a slight uproar about the fact that he even had the audacity to promote his pro-choice views at such a fundamentally religious school, but overall people seemed appreciative of the fact that he was willing to open up a dialogue that addressed the topic at all. Doing some further investigation I found that most Catholic news sources, including the Vatican, seemed to be referring to the incident with a similar sense of gracefulness. They recognize that Obama is trying to find a common ground and garner a mutual respect for both sides of this controversial subject. And, given the Catholic community's habit of frowning upon nearly everything, especially abortion, this is a big step forward. For them, to reach out and accept what is essentially a peace offering on the controversial issue of abortion from the President is something that should be certainly be applauded. What's more important, at least in my opinion - being the pro-choice activist that I am, is that President Obama acknowledged the fact that the emphasis needs to be placed on reducing abortion, not condemning it. Lately our local government, in most cases, has been failing to do much to prevent abortions and unintended pregnancies and has been focusing it's attention on adding more and more abortion restrictions to the already exhaustive list. President Obama advocates making "adoption more available," and pushes for providing "care and support for women who do carry their children to term." And man, isn't it about time? How long is our congress going to fight against something before realizing there is so much they could be doing to reduce and prevent it in the first place?

The fact of the matter is that the void between pro-life and pro-choicers is probably never going to be closed, and Obama makes mention of this in his speech. Both sides have their reasons for believing what they do which are deeply ingrained and very personal. The best we can hope for is to reach a compromise between the two by, as Obama suggested, making abortions and unintended pregnancies as rare as possible. While I have my own issues with the "my body, my choice" argument, I do believe that it is necessary to have abortion as an option for those who wish to pursue it. On that note, I also understand that those who need to pursue abortions would be much less likely to do if we could simply implement the preventative measures that many states, including Missouri, still seem to reject or neglect like comprehensive sex-education and easy access to birth control. Even allowing for an environment that nurtures a positive open dialogue centered around responsible and safe expression of our own sexualities would have a huge impact in reducing the number of abortions, unintended pregnancies, STIs, etc.

And in the end, isn't that what we're all trying to do?

+1 Obama