If Presidents have always been routinely invited to speak at Notre Dame, the invitation to Obama is understandable. The biggest issue in this contretemps isn't, as Catholic baiters would like to assert, Obama's speaking at Notre Dame; it's the university's conferral of a "Juris Doctor Honoris Causa" honorary law degree upon him.
It’s a matter of public record that Obama’s legal career is rather puny, not exactly distinguished by "honoris causa" standards. He worked on about 30 cases in four years before he was launched into politics at a Bill Ayers soiree.
Obama rarely has spoken about his time at Columbia and Harvard, and for good reason. He graduated without honors from Columbia with a major in political science. We don’t know his LSAT scores to get into Harvard; he’s never released them. His elevation to editorship (he was named an editor along with about 40 of his classmates at the end of his first year) of the Harvard Law Review is not exactly laden with merit. Before he arrived at Harvard, the qualifying standard had been changed from assignment based on grades to one in which half the editors were chosen through a writing competition. The New York Times reported in 1990 that the process was "meant to help insure [sic] that minority students became editors of The Law Review." Unlike most editors, Obama wrote very little. Indeed, he had credited to his account only one edited, unsigned article in 1990 ... before he was elected President of the Harvard Law Review (an honor that used to go to the student with the highest GPA). Unsurprisingly, the article argued against any limits on abortion. After his election as President of the HLR, he contributed not a single signed word to the HLR or any other law journal. Unlike most presidents of the HLR, Obama did not go on to clerk for a Supreme Court justice.
In short, Obama’s law "career" is checkered, obscure, and exceedingly unprepossessing. No "honoris causa" candidate he.
As President, his legal maneuverings and executive orders have been primarily to loose every possible restraint on abortion, here and abroad.
Obama has already been the most demonstrably pro-abortion President we’ve ever had, all in fewer than 100 days of office. Anyone who follows the radical course he’s taken on abortion is flouting and trampling the "Catholic tradition, which brings specific spiritual and moral values to bear upon daily life and legal judgments" mission statement upon which the Notre Dame Law School, not to mention the Catholic faith, is undergirded.
If abortion acolyte Obama is eligible for an "honoris causa" honorary degree at Catholic Notre Dame, then Yassir Arafat would qualify as Doctor of Humane Letters at Yeshiva University, and Tuskegee University should be making immediate plans to bestow a posthumous honorary degree upon George Wallace.
Thank you for this and the GKC tagline.
Exactly.
Aside from the moral and religious issues—which should, of course, have ruled this invitation out without a second thought—Obama has done virtually NOTHING in the field of law. He has written nothing (except one unsigned article promoting abortion) and he has done nothing.
He spent TEN YEARS as an instructor of Constitutional Law at the University of Illinois, Chicago, without having written a single scholarly article. It is unprecedented that an instructor was kept on for so long with such a dismal record—nothing at all to recommend him except affirmative action and political connections.
There are probably several hundred thousand lawyers out there who have accomplished more, one way or another, toward deserving an honoris causa degree in law than Obama. The nine young lawyers just out of law school recently named as SCOTUS clerks have probably accomplished more already, before leaving law school than Obama has in his whole career.
Nor has he done anything noteworthy in any other field.
My thoughts and your words.
So succinct!
Thank you and God Bless!
Thank you for an outstanding post.