President Obama has declined to go to Gettysburg for the 150th anniversary of the Emancipator's great address. It is altogether fitting and proper that he should do this. The comparisons that would inevitably have been made with Lincoln's elegaic prose would not have been kind.
This president has said that wherever he goes is Obama Country. So, for now, that hallowed ground will be spared. Lincoln spoke to the eternal verities of the laws of nature and of nature's God when he described this nation as one conceived in liberty and dedicated to the proposition that all men are created equal.
Lincoln would later tell listeners in Baltimore, in a less noted speech, that the world stands in need of a good definition of liberty. He compared the differing views of the shepherd's wielding his crook to drive the wolf from the sheep's throat. The sheep thanks the shepherd as his liberator. The wolf thinks himself deprived, his liberty infringed.
The world needs a good definition of created equal. To President Obama and his legions of supporters, created equal means, among other things, the right to marry whomever you love and to dispose of those unborn children whom you do not.
To President Obama, there is no necessary conflict between being created equal and this government-sanctioned, fully funded slaughter of innocents. Redefining marriage against the laws of nature and nature's God is seen as a necessary evolution of an enlightened society.
Obamacare is intended to normalize abortion-on-demand. The president has internalized what NARAL founder Lawrence Lader said: "Abortion is central to everything in life and how we want to live it." That is why Mr. Obama went to Planned Parenthood in 2007 -- a year before he appeared before the famous Greek columns in Denver -- to assure the world's largest trafficker in abortion that he would never depart from their agenda.
If millions of Americans believe he deceived them about keeping their health insurance plans, Planned Parenthood's minions are not among those feeling betrayed. The president told Speaker Boehner he would shut down the government rather than consent to one dollar being cut from Planned Parenthood's appropriations.
President Obama became the first leader to address an abortionists' convention, these shedders of innocent blood. He urged them to keep it up. He assured them of God's blessing.
In the midst of the current political fight over his signature accomplishment, President Obama could ill afford to go to Gettysburg to explain how his philosophy and his actions are consistent with Lincoln's government of the people, by the people, for the people. This is especially so when Obamacare may prove lethal to millions of those very people.
He would not want to answer a question unavoidably raised by Lincoln's 1859 description of America's Founders and their core beliefs. Lincoln said it was their enlightened view that "nothing stamped in the divine image was sent into the world to be trod upon." The question the president would doubtless be asked: "Are not unborn children so stamped?"
